Part 9

"Everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public opinion in any point of worldly decorum. He was steady, observant, moderate, candid; never run away with by spirits or by selfishness, which fancied itself strong feeling; and yet, with a sensibility to what was amiable and lovely, and a value for all the felicities of domestic {179} life, which characters of fancied enthusiasm and violent agitation seldom really possess."

Anne, however, was not long in discovering grave defects in this outwardly model person. She saw that while he was

"rational, discreet, polished, he was not open. There never was any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

"Mr. Elliot was too generally agreeable. Various as were the tempers in her father's house, he pleased them all. He endured too well, stood too well with everybody."

Those who accuse Jane Austen of hardness have sometimes relied on her treatment of Mrs. Musgrove's sorrow over her ne'er-do-well son, long after his death, to support this charge. Anne and Wentworth, whose mutual liking was just {180} beginning to bloom again, were "actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him; they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." And then the author stops in her narrative to observe that "Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large, bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain--which taste cannot tolerate--which ridicule will seize."

She thus bluntly expresses what almost every satirist merely implies, but she underrates her own powers. The ordinary writer might or might not {181} be able to describe the grief of "a large, bulky figure" without offence to the ordinary "taste." Genius could assuredly do this thing. Shakespeare, with whom Whately, Macaulay and Tennyson compared Jane Austen, made one of his greatest characters "fat and scant of breath," but when Hamlet says to his friend, "Thou woulds't not think how ill all's here about my heart," we do not find it "ridiculous" that this "too, too solid flesh" should be joined with a mind weighted with such poignant sorrow. In any case, whether she mistrusted her own powers, or wanted Mrs. Musgrove to be slightly ridiculous, which seems more likely, Jane did not here strive to achieve what she pointedly tells us it would be beyond reason to expect.

The character of Emma is described with unusual fulness, but the description is placed in the mouth of George Knightley, her candid admirer, who was perhaps not guiltless of the fault which Fainall attributed to Mirabell, of being "too discerning in the failings of his mistress." Mrs. Weston ("Miss Taylor that was") has said that Emma means to read with Harriet Smith--

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"'Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old,' replies Mr. Knightley. 'I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time, and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing. You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished. You know you could not.'

"'I dare say,' replied Mrs. Weston, smiling, 'that I thought so _then_; but since we have parted, I can never remember Emma's omitting to do anything I wished.'

"'There is hardly any desiring to refresh such a memory as _that_,' said Mr. Knightley, feelingly; and for a moment or two he had done. 'But I,' he soon added, 'who have had no such charm thrown over my senses, must still see, hear, and remember. Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old she had the {183} misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was always quick and assured; Isabella slow and diffident. And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all. In her mother she lost the only person able to cope with her.'"

An unhappy condition of most of Jane's heroines is that they are of necessity ashamed of their nearest relations. Anne Elliot felt this trouble keenly, when at length she and Wentworth decided to take the happiness which she had refused years before--

"Anne, satisfied at a very early period of Lady Russell's meaning to love Captain Wentworth as she ought, had no other alloy to the happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness of having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value. There she felt her own inferiority keenly. The disproportion in their fortune was nothing; it did not give her a moment's regret; but to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will, to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could {184} well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity."

One can readily understand her regret. Her father was a fool, her elder sister Elizabeth a slave of convention, with few rational ideas of her own, and her younger sister a neurotic egotist, who grudged to others the simplest pleasures if she did not feel able or disposed to share them.

Fanny Price was ashamed of the slovenly home at Portsmouth to which Henry Crawford so inopportunely penetrated. Elizabeth Bennet's mother was, of course, more nearly "impossible" even than Lady Catherine had so pointedly suggested, for her defects were far worse than those of obscure birth. This terrible woman, who kept her elder daughters constantly on the rack by her fatuous chatter, who always said the wrong thing, who had no desire for her children's welfare but to marry them to anybody, with money if possible, or without it rather than not at all, made one of her usual quick changes when she heard the surprising news of Elizabeth's engagement to Darcy--

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"She began at length to recover, to fidget about in her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself.

"'Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would have thought it! And it is really true? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it--nothing at all. I am so pleased--so happy! Such a charming man!--so handsome! so tall--Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologize for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy! A house in town! Everything that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a-year! Oh, Lord! what will become of me? I shall go distracted.'

"This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be doubted; and Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was heard only by herself, soon went away. But before she had been three minutes in her own room, her mother followed her.

"'My dearest child,' she cried, 'I can think of nothing else! Ten thousand a-year, and very likely more! 'Tis as good as a lord! And a special license. You must and shall be married by a special license. But, my dearest love, tell me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of, that I may have it to-morrow.'

"This was a sad omen of what her mother's behaviour to the gentleman himself might be; and {186} Elizabeth found that, though in the certain possession of his warmest affection, and secure of her relations' consent, there was still something to be wished for."

Of Catherine Morland we are told that "her whole family were plain matter-of-fact people, who seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father at the utmost being contented with a pun, and her mother with a proverb." Having given us this little _aperçu_ of Mr. and Mrs. Morland, the author, _more suo_, adds the information: "They were not in the habit, therefore, of telling lies to increase their importance, or of asserting at one moment what they would contradict the next."

If we seek in our memories for scenes of particular excellence we shall recall with renewed pleasure the rehearsals (_Mansfield Park_), the encounters between Elizabeth and Mr. Collins and Elizabeth and Lady Catherine (_Pride and Prejudice_), the second and last proposal of Wentworth to Anne Elliot (_Persuasion_), the picnic at Box Hill and the dance at the "Crown" (_Emma_). In all of these the spontaneity of the narrative, the vitality of the talk and the vividness with which the circumstances are realized with {187} the smallest amount of description show the author's art in its most delightful vein.

It is often in little touches, generally satirical, that Jane Austen reveals the characters of her people. Lady Middleton, whose "reserve was a mere calmness of _manner_ with which _sense_ had nothing to do"; Mary Bennet, whom, when her sisters visited her, "they found, as usual, deep in the study of thorough bass and human nature, and had some new extracts to admire, and some new observations of threadbare morality to listen to"; the gushing Louisa Musgrove, who declared that if she loved a man as Mrs. Croft loved the Admiral, she "would always be with him, nothing should ever separate" them, and that she "would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else"; Mr. Allen, a country gentleman of fortune who "did not care about the garden, and never went into it"; and General Tilney, poring over pamphlets when he ought to be in bed, blinding his eyes "for the good of others" who would never benefit in the least by his exertions; the heartless and humbugging Mrs. Norris, whose plentiful talk about helping her poor, child-burdened sister ended in her {188} "writing the letters" while others sent substantial assistance--these, and many other entertaining people live for us largely from such casual peeps into their natures and sentiments.

Jane Austen rarely describes a man or woman as possessing qualities which are not justified by the evidence she offers. Almost the only notable exceptions are Mrs. Dashwood, of whom we are told that "a man could not very well be in love with either of her daughters, without extending the passion to her," but who does not herself give us any reason to regard her as other than an affectionate, well-meaning, and injudicious person, and Captain Wentworth, who is stated to have been witty, but who usually manages to restrain his wit when we happen to meet him.

The many parsons of the novels are at once too steady and too prosperous to be in accord with either of the types of eighteenth-century clergy most frequently conveyed by the literature of their period. They may not have done much for their parishioners beyond preaching to them once or twice a week, and sending them soup occasionally, but they set them good examples by conducting themselves decently and soberly. Of {189} their "views" we know little. Indeed, few things are more remarkable in these novels, in the light of later fiction, than that almost complete absence of any reference to dogmatic religion to which attention has already been drawn. You may hunt through them all and hardly find two definite statements that, except to see what the vicar's bride was like, any of the characters went to church. We know that the parsons preached, but whether there was any one to hear their sermons we are usually left in doubt. In fact, as Dr. Whately puts it, the author's religion is "not at all obtrusive." His favourable view of Jane Austen's influence may be contrasted with Robert Hall's of Maria Edgeworth's: "In point of tendency I should class her books among the most irreligious I ever read.... She does not attack religion nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it."

It has frequently been said that the atmosphere of Jane Austen's books is "Church of England," and this is in a sense true. She assumes that the squires of whom she writes are adherents of Church and State, much as a provincial {190} clergyman wrote quite recently in his Parish Magazine: "It is generally taken for granted that Church is the only possible religion for an English gentleman." We meet with no Romish priests or Methodist preachers, not so much as a member of the Society of Friends, but, on the other hand, we meet with no one who talks against faith. It was a period when the Church itself had become apathetic, when pluralists abounded, and when many rectors lived comfortably on their great tithes, far from the parishes which they left to the care of curates who were often worse off than gamekeepers. A young man went into the Church, if there was a good living to be had, just as he went to the Bar if his uncle was a flourishing attorney, or into the navy if his friends had influence with the Board of Admiralty. Many parsons, if they were well-to-do and fond of society, did not even wear any distinctive dress. One meets vicars and curates to-day, in summer-time, wearing green ties and grey tweed suits, and even a bishop has been known to abandon his episcopal uniform when he was away on a holiday. But, to take an instance from the novels, Catherine Morland, who has met Henry {191} Tilney at a dance in Bath, and meets him again at the Pump-room or elsewhere, does not know he is a clergyman until she is told. The Church was merely a profession for most of those who entered it. "Did Henry's income depend solely on his living," says General Tilney, "he would not be well provided for. Perhaps it may seem odd, that with only two younger children, I should think any profession necessary to him; and certainly there are moments when we could all wish him disengaged from every tie of business." The most conscientious clergyman in the Austen Comedy is Edmund Bertram, who really seems to have wished to do his duty, and thereby damaged his chance of marrying Mary Crawford.

The scanty reference to the observances of religion in the novels bears on the worldly life of the age, as we know it from those who were of it and saw it at its centre of activity, London society. Doctor Warner, George Selwyn's chaplain, who attracted large congregations by his eloquent preaching, and who was an avowed sceptic away from church, who toadied the rich and noble, and told stories that delighted the Duke of Queensberry, was no rare type of the {192} clergy of his time, and we may be pretty certain that Jane Austen's Mr. Collins (who was not at all likely to tell an improper story himself) would have found it very difficult to believe that so exalted a personage as "Old Q." was unfit for the society of clergymen.

Jane frankly admitted that she knew too little of literature, philosophy, and science, to allow her adequately to draw the character of a scholarly and serious parson. "The comic side of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy of which I know nothing, or at least occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving." According to her brother and her nephew, Jane was better educated than she here makes out, knowing French, and a good deal of Italian. Whether we believe her or not about her literary and linguistic limitations, we can have small doubt that she knew very little indeed about science and philosophy, in spite of being so much {193} of a philosopher. In those days, when Cuvier was bringing his genius in palæontology to bear on the recovery of lost types, and preparing a way for Darwin, whose own grandfather was bravely aiding in the clearance of paths in hitherto trackless jungles of prejudice and obscurantism, science was scarcely regarded as a decent subject of conversation before ladies in country drawing-rooms, and it never obtrudes itself at Hartfield or at Mansfield Park.

If we may read through every word of Jane's novels without discovering any expression of dogmatic belief, we may equally find no direct evidence, unless in that one story of Elinor and Willoughby, of acceptance of the chilly Deism which had eaten so deeply into the intellects both of laymen and clergy. The unrest, both moral and physical, which had spread from Paris, from Holland, and from Switzerland over the whole of Western Europe at that time, finds little place for its fidgeting in the families to whom we are here introduced. People, with the rare exceptions of a Wickham or a Willoughby, are born, live, and die, in peace with the world and in general harmony with their environments.

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Admirable as Jane Austen's pictures of country life in house and garden are, they are not to be accepted as literal transcripts. She was, before all else, an artist, and the more an artist is devoted to finicking reproduction of exact details the further is he removed from art. Almost every author, if he writes with sincerity, must draw his own moral portrait in his best work. In a literal sense there is no reason to suppose that novelists often give us studies of themselves in any degree comparable with the self-portraits of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Madame Vigée le Brun or the moderns in the Uffizi Gallery. Sometimes, of course, as in _Villette_ and _Delphine_, an author reports episodes in his life almost as they happened, and it is certain, save in the rarest cases, that something of an author's mental processes is reproduced in all his creatures, "bad" as well as "good," though he is more likely to show his own temperament and experience in a prominent and sympathetic character than in any other. Very few writers follow the example of Milton, of whom Coleridge declared "his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost all his Eve, are all John Milton." The common mistake, a mistake so obvious that {195} we may wonder at its continuance, is such a close identification of the author with any one of his creations. Thus, because "Vivian Grey is Disraeli himself," Disraeli is to be credited with the strange experiences of that uneasy hero among foreign politicians and card-sharpers; and because "Jane Eyre is Charlotte Brontë," Charlotte Brontë must at least have wished to unite herself with a wild man whose wife had gone mad. There were no doubt readers of Goethe's _Faust_ who, ignoring the legend, thought the author had bargained with Mephisto and, it "goes without saying" (Marianne Dashwood is not within hearing), that "Hamlet is Shakespeare." Such arbitrary reasoning may account for the general confusion of Frankenstein with the creature that he made.

Among the widest traps, indeed, for those who love to see a _roman à clef_ in every novel, is this identification of the author with one or other of his characters. Some people have convinced themselves that Cassandra and Jane Austen were the originals of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Such an idea could only be held by those who had not seen Jane's letters. Marianne, {196} sentimental, romantic, disagreeable in a quite serious way, and usually inattentive "to the forms of general civility," could not be Jane, and as certainly not Cassandra as we know her, and while Elinor, the patient, long-suffering girl, might in some ways represent either of the Austen sisters, she is very far from being a portrait.

Yet if neither Elinor Dashwood nor Marianne is to be described as a likeness of Jane, the elder sister in her philosophical submission to what she believed to be the loss of her lover, and the younger in her literary tastes and her impatience with people who talk without thinking may fairly be regarded as in part reflecting the author's personality. None of her heroines _is_ Jane, but there is much of her also in Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, and a good deal in Anne Elliot, though she admitted that Anne was too nearly perfect to be altogether after her heart. The simple little souls of Fanny Price and Catherine Morland, so dependent on the direct assistance of others in the formation of their feelings, are in very small degree expressions of the author's temperament. We may, I think, regard Emma Woodhouse as the nearest approach to a {197} portrait of the artist who painted her, but "nearest" is a relative superlative. Many people do not care for Emma. A strong expression of recent disapproval was quoted a few pages back. Jane Austen anticipated objections. "I am going," she said, when she was beginning the book, "to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

Whether or not we may see in Emma a good deal of Jane herself, we may fairly be certain that none of her characters is an intentional copy of any one in the circle of her friends and acquaintances. She herself declared her opinion, which tallies with all that we know of her, that the introduction of living people as actors in a work of imagination is a breach of good manners, and that, propriety apart, she was too proud of her characters to admit that they were "only Mrs. A. or Colonel B." How far she made use of individuals in the composition of such strongly-marked figures as Mrs. Elton, Mr. Collins and Sir Walter Elliot, we cannot, of course, know. The point, for what it is worth, could have been better elucidated if Miss Austen's circle had been less far removed from the world wherein the {198} Wraxalls, the Gronows and the Grevilles listen and watch. We know that, whatever the degree of similitude, Disraeli's Rigby offers a recognizable likeness to Croker, Dickens's Boythorn to Landor, Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston to Braxfield. Accepting Jane Austen's denial of the deliberate introduction of real persons in her novels, we cannot tell how many of her Hampshire acquaintances served intellectually for her pictures of country society as the maidens of Crotona served physically for the picture of Helen by Zeuxis. We may be certain that, all unconsciously, they gave her of their best, each according to his means.

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VI

PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL