Part 17

Among the last things which Miss Austen did was to flatter the great public--unless, indeed, one considers that she paid it the highest compliment of all--by assuming it was a clever public, and must enjoy being made game of, to its face. A stupid public was not, and has never been, Jane Austen’s public. On such her fine sense and abounding humour, pervaded by the true refinement in which neither the woman nor the gentlewoman is for a moment forgotten, fall absolutely flat. I cannot conceive such a public, which is ordinarily fond of coarse, crude mental stimulants, as appreciating and enjoying Jane Austen, though her consummate art as a story-teller may beguile it into dozing over her pages, or hurrying through them. But there is such a thing as having a good taste cultivated and not perverted, and budding intelligence may be drawn out, not stultified.

To those who are not by mental constitution impelled altogether into the abnormal school of fiction--to those who can read between the lines--reading Jane Austen will always be studying under a wise teacher, and keenly relishing an exquisite treat.

In some respects “Northanger Abbey” is among the author’s masterpieces. It contains two or three of her most finished portraits. Nowhere is her writing more incisive, her epigrams neater, her wit at once drier and more sparkling.

But “Northanger Abbey” has also blemishes which are absent from other works by the same novelist. It lacks unity; it does not grow out of itself in close sequence, like “Emma.” Its different parts are so far inconsistent with each other, for strong realism and airy burlesque do not match quite well together. There are considerable improbabilities in “Northanger Abbey”--above all, there is not a trace of the lurking pathos and pensive charm which blend with and relieve the humour of “Persuasion.”

On the contrary, the almost incessant banter of “Northanger Abbey,” excellent as it is in its way, has a certain hardness in it--perhaps, in this instance, the result of the unripe youth of the author--and possesses a tendency to fatigue and vex the reader who wishes to be serious for a moment--who regards the best of life and art as that which, in one fashion or another, reflects both life and art as serious and earnest.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Written in 1798. “Read Dickens’s ‘Hard Times,’ and another book of ‘Pliny’s Letters;’ read ‘Northanger Abbey,’ worth all Dickens and Pliny together, yet it was the work of a girl.”--_Macaulay._

[19] Jane Austen may have had in her mind Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines; to whom sketching from nature seems to have come by nature--who were all, as a matter of course, accomplished artists.

[20] Weymouth and Ramsgate, among sea-bathing places, seemed to rise most readily before her mind, though she alluded also to Southend and Cromer--not to say described Lyme--which she made her own.

[21] The fashion was a little absurd in its stateliness. Ladies were wont to wear nodding plumes of ostrich feathers, as at the Queen’s drawing-rooms, standing upright on the head, till they added a foot, at least, to the fair amazons’ height.

[22] Let us echo Henry Tilney’s praise of muslin. Will its simple, elegant, once wide reign never return? The prevalence of calico balls is a poor substitute for its sway.

[23] The old-fashioned term “quiz” was freely applied last century. It was originally associated with the first specimen of eye-glass, through which the short-sighted were supposed to quiz their neighbours. I should suppose Jane Austen must have been called a quiz in her day. The accusation was half coveted, half dreaded, according to the temper of the individual who incurred it.

[24] The remonstrance is still needed.

[25] Since these words were written we have had the whole of the “Waverley Novels,” not to mention more modern gains added to our wealth of excellent English works of fiction.

[26] There is this to be said for the sensational horrors which enchanted the girls of the last century, that these horrors, when founded on the model of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, were well principled, and free from inherent moral coarseness and license of tone.

[27] Perhaps the number of jilts in the last century have to do with spontaneous combustion where hearts were concerned.

[28] Some of the beautiful portraits of the last century (one, if I recollect rightly, which represents Mrs. Sheridan and her sister) give an idea how daintily becoming, how perfectly elegant, these muslin costumes could be.

[29] Wood and water always figure largely in Jane Austen’s landscapes.

[30] The _furor_ about the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” in its day, was, indeed, not confined to school-girls. It extended over the whole reading world. It was European, as well as English.

[31] Such was the style of travelling _en grand seigneur_ last century.

[32] What a quaint, pretty picture the young man in his coachman’s great-coat, the girl in her riding-habit and straw bonnet, which she is soon so anxious to protect from the rain, would make, taken as she stepped in or stepped out of Henry’s “curricle!”

[33] Even a good clergyman measured his duties differently last century.

[34] Mrs. Radcliffe, who appears to have been unable to stand a joke on her romances, even from their admirers, and who was much hurt by a laughing reference of Sir Walter Scott’s in “Waverley,” would have looked aghast at this levity.

[35] Revived mediævalism in æsthetics has changed all this, and gone far to banish again the garish light of day from “modern antique” houses.

[36] My impression is that Jane Austen began “Northanger Abbey” with the simple intention of executing, in accordance with an early amusement of hers, a gay parody on romances in general, and on one romance in particular. But her genius proved too much for her; and though she never entirely lost sight of her original design, she departed so far from it, by prolonging the Bath portion of the tale, as to destroy its unity, and make somewhat of a jumble of the whole book. On the other hand, the exercise of her great gifts, in their proper field of real life and character-drawing, has produced for us, instead of a clever burlesque for the amusement of contemporaries, a disjointed work of genius for the edification and enjoyment of succeeding generations.

[37] What a candid admission from a heroine, or from any girl! But to love flowers was not obligatory last century.

[38] Withal, one must be struck by Catherine’s unworldly disinterestedness. She has given her love to a son of the house; but in place of taking the opportunity to ascertain and exult over the Tilneys’ wealth and position, she is occupied with foolish romancing on her own account.

[39] I am able to conjecture, by the help of my own early studies, that Jane Austen is not foreseeing, and casting mockery on some modern sensational novels in this passage. She is simply borrowing from, and holding up to ridicule, a leading incident in the once popular romance of “The Children of the Abbey,” by Elizabeth Helme.

[40] If Jane Austen be right--and she was a great judge of human nature--in the implication that an eager, enthusiastic young reader is impelled to reproduce in personal experience what he or she reads, and if modern sensational novels come to be _lived_ by our young men and women, where shall we look--how shall we answer for the wrong done by our idiotic, noxious, light literature?

[41] A period of time which would now suffice to take a traveller from London to Brussels with ease.

[42] The Morlands were “gentlefolks,” but that did not prevent all the fine stitching required by the family being done as a matter of course by the ladies.

[43] Concerning this gentleman, Jane Austen says, with one of her merry gibes, “I have only to add (aware that the rules of composition forbid the introduction of a character not connected with my fable) that this was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing bills, resulting from a long visit to Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures.”

[44] But “Northanger Abbey” has another moral--a warning against romance run mad.

EMMA.[45]

I.

Emma Woodhouse, whose Christian name supplies the title to the novel in which she figures as heroine, is one of Jane Austen’s lively, warm-hearted girls; but her personality is rendered quite distinct from that of Elizabeth Bennet by a thousand light yet significant touches. Emma’s circumstances alone would have sufficed, with the moulding power which such influences have in reality, and in the hands of a true artist, to shape her--always within certain limits--those of a well-principled, well-educated, essentially feminine girl, who is also a thorough lady, to different ends.

The novel of “Emma” is largely the record of the girl-heroine’s rash blunders and errors; but to me it is instructive and comforting to find the faults, with their impressive enough lessons, not only so girlish, but always within the region, I may say, of an innocent, upright, kindly, well-bred girl, whose many failings lean to virtue’s side. Emma Woodhouse is as incapable of deliberate undutifulness, dishonourable double-dealing, heartless levity, or disgraceful imprudence, and the coarse, evil-minded rubbing shoulders with vice, as I not only earnestly hope, but fervently believe, every God-fearing, virtuous, loving girl in any rank, in any nation, is to this day, however impudently and wickedly she may be travestied in the lower literature of her country.

Emma Woodhouse, at twenty-one years of age, is at the head of her father’s comfortable, well-ordered establishment of Hartfield, in the village of Highbury, sixteen miles from London, where Emma’s elder sister Isabella, who has been married for several years, is settled.

The two sisters are the sole children of Mr. Woodhouse, who has been a widower since Emma was a child. But her dead mother’s place has been well supplied by an excellent governess, chaperon, and family friend. Miss Taylor, who marries and settles unexceptionably, with a worthy husband, in a country house at half a mile’s distance from Hartfield.

Emma is introduced to the reader on the afternoon of Miss Taylor’s wedding-day, left, for the first time in her life, to dine and spend a long evening with her father, a most amiable man, but a confirmed invalid, whose valetudinarian weaknesses and absurdities Jane Austen often makes irresistibly ridiculous--though all the time she treats him with larger-hearted, gentler consideration than is to be found in her manner of dealing with the foibles of the characters in “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Northanger Abbey;” for the very good reason that the authoress, when she wrote “Emma,” was no longer the brilliant, rather hard girl, but the mature merciful, woman. Between the writing of “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma” she had learnt a grand lesson--the acquisition of which, though it cost the labour of a lifetime, would be well worth the time and trouble--that of tolerance: “to make allowance for us all,” which is not the mere result of a facile, careless temper, or a secret fellow-feeling with the offender in his offence, or a low moral standard, but is simply the widened sympathy and deepened comprehension, both of the better Christian and the greater genius. Thus Mr. Woodhouse is respectable and lovable, in spite of his mild egotism and foolish hypochondria; while Miss Bates--one of the gems of the book--is still more winning in her singleness of heart and inexhaustible contentment and charity, along with her shallow simplicity, thorough humdrumness, and boundless garrulity.

While her father is taking his after-dinner nap Emma contemplates, a little ruefully, the prospect of many such _tête-à-tête_ dinners and long evenings. Yet though Jane Austen tells us plainly that the real evils to which Emma is exposed consist of her having too much of her own way, and being slightly inclined to think too well of herself, she is full of tender reverence and care for her father, in deed even more than in word. All through their history she considers his well-being as the first thing, never hesitates to make sacrifices to ensure it, and caters for his entertainment with the anxious, womanly forethought of a much older and wiser person. In the same way, though it is distinctly a disadvantage and stumbling-block to Emma Woodhouse--not only that the Woodhouses are the persons of greatest consequence in their social circle, but that the circle over which Emma reigns, far too entirely for her own good, is composed of the most commonplace narrow elements that can be found in any village or country neighbourhood--and though Emma wearies of it, becomes impatient of it, is guilty of girlish ebullitions of fretting and fuming where her engagements and acquaintances are concerned--still she never once behaves with the absolute insolence, hardly with the superciliousness, of underbred, ungenerous, self-engrossed youth, exulting in its passing advantages, spurning at what it can see of the defects and infirmities of an older, perhaps more incapable, and illiterate generation, while it is blind in its ignorance to indemnifying stores of homely wisdom and experience.

The claims of hospitality are sacred to the girl, and she is always not only a good woman, but a gentlewoman. We are sure that such vulgar, mean words as “old frumps” and “old tabbies” have never soiled Emma Woodhouse’s lips. Once she so far forgets herself as to prove guilty of being noisy and conspicuous at a picnic, and in the course of that indiscretion of publicly taking off and laughing at an old friend; but Emma does not require the sharp rebuke of the hero to be bitterly sorry for the offence, very much ashamed of it, and eagerly desirous to atone for it by all the kindness in her power.

On the evening of Miss Taylor’s wedding-day, Emma is striving to chat cheerfully with her father, who, fond of everybody he is used to, hates to part with any one of them, hates changes of every kind, and matrimony as the cause of change, and keeps speaking of the fortunate bride with uncalled-for compassion. “Poor Miss Taylor! I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!”

“I cannot agree with you, papa;” Emma tries to arrest his lamentations, and to put the step which has been taken in the pleasantest light, by dwelling on the excellence of Mr. Weston’s character and temper (Jane Austen is apt to bring forward temper as of cardinal importance), on Miss Taylor’s natural satisfaction in having a house of her own--for how often they will be going to see her and she will be coming to see them. They must begin, they must go and pay their wedding visit very soon.

“My dear, how am I to get so far?” objects plaintive Mr. Woodhouse. “Randall’s is such a distance, I could not walk half so far.”

“No, papa! nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure.”

“The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to, for such a little way; and where are the poor horses to be, while we are paying our visit?”[46]

“They are to be put into Mr. Weston’s stables, papa. You know we have settled that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night. And as for James, you may be very sure he will always like going to Randalls, because of his daughter’s being housemaid there. I only doubt whether he will ever take us anywhere else. That was your doing, papa. You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her--James is so obliged to you.”

Mr. Woodhouse’s kindness and innocent self-importance are equally gratified by being reminded of this good deed. He is enticed to expatiate on civil, pretty-spoken Hannah, for whom he has procured an advantageous place--not the least of its advantages in Mr. Woodhouse’s eyes being, that when James goes over to see his daughter, he will carry her news of the family at Hartfield.

Emma spares no exertions to encourage the happier train of thought, and by the help of backgammon is sanguine about getting her father tolerably through the evening, when a frequent visitor, another near neighbour, walks in, and renders the backgammon-table unnecessary.

“Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but connected with it as the elder brother of Isabella Woodhouse’s husband.”

Did ever hero enter more unassumingly on the scene? Was ever even the merest walking gentleman more succinctly or prosaically described? And yet George Knightley is a very hero of heroes, far in advance of Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” where the highest manliness and generosity of character are in question.

I shall only pause a moment to remark that Jane Austen, in depriving Mr. Knightley of the bloom of youth, goes in the teeth of contemporary standards of age to which she herself paid deference in “Sense and Sensibility,” when she made Marianne Dashwood regard Colonel Brandon--a contemporary of Mr. Knightley’s--as quite an old man, fitted for flannel vests and rheumatism.

To Mr. Knightley Emma starts an idea which has taken possession of her susceptible imagination, and which has a considerable influence on her later conduct.

“I made the match, you know, four years ago,” she says triumphantly, in allusion to the topic of the day. “To have it take place, and be proved in the right when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for anything.”

Mr. Knightley shakes his head at her. He has known her from infancy, seen her grow up with all that is charming in her, only slightly spoilt. He has more than an old friend’s regard for her, but he is also one of the few persons among her friends who sees her faults, and tells her of them--a process not particularly agreeable to Emma, and still more distasteful to her doting father; so that she has to assert stoutly, as if she liked the censure, “Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know, in a joke, only in a joke. We always say what we like to each other.”

In defiance of Mr. Knightley’s shake of the head--indeed, spurred on by it--Emma insists that she arranged the match from the day Mr. Weston gallantly went and borrowed two umbrellas from Farmer Mitchell’s, and brought them to her and Miss Taylor when it began to drizzle in Broadway Lane. Emma boasts of the success of her scheme, and laughingly announces herself a future match-maker.

She does not go unchallenged by Mr. Knightley.

“I do not know what you mean by ‘success,’” he says, and observes, with brotherly bluntness and irony, that her time has been properly and delicately spent if she has been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about a marriage--a worthy employment for a young lady’s mind. Then he treats her pretensions with smiling scorn, and alleges she made a lucky guess, which is all that can be said.

Emma argues that she promoted Mr. Weston’s visits to Hartfield, and when her father begs in all sincerity that she will make no more matches, craves mischievously to be allowed one exception. “Only one more, papa, only for Mr. Elton. Poor Mr. Elton!--you like Mr. Elton, papa--I must look about for a wife for him. He has been here a whole year, and he has fitted up his house so comfortably that it would be a shame to have him single any longer; and I thought when he was joining their hands to-day, he looked so very much as if he would like to have the same kind office done for him! I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way of doing him service.”

“Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken,” said Mr. Knightley, “but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven and twenty can take care of himself.”

My readers will observe that Emma is as disengaged and disinterested in making matches for her friends as if she were a young matron. She has not a notion of the incumbency of marriage on herself, as even Jane and Elizabeth Bennet felt it, to a certain extent, to be an obligation on them. There is no worldly necessity for it in Emma’s case. She is the independent mistress of Hartfield, at the head of her indulgent father’s establishment, and amply provided for in the future. Jane Austen’s women, as a rule, are not too susceptible. Love and marriage for themselves are not the beginning, middle, and end of their dreams. They are quite willing to grant due prominence to other influences and interests. They would have blushed to have been engrossed by one passion, however lawful--even honourable. It is only because Catherine Morland is very young and simple that she is so entranced by Henry Tilney’s attentions. As it is, had the couple been finally separated, she would have submitted to the inevitable, and been content in time without him. Fanny Price’s devotion to her cousin Edmund is the habit of many years, and is largely made up of gratitude for constant protection and kindness. When Edmund Bertram’s marriage to Mary Crawford appears certain, and when Henry Crawford is wooing Fanny with manly ardour and tender consideration for her difficulties, she is in a fair way--Jane Austen does not conceal it--for transferring her gentle affections from Edmund to Henry. The author’s older women are fine, sensible creatures, capable of being useful and happy in all the relations of life. They can love, with what unselfish fidelity after hope is gone, Anne Elliot shows; but they are always mistresses of themselves, never love-sick--the poor puppets and slaves of passion.

Mr. Weston, Miss Taylor’s husband, has been a widower like Mr. Woodhouse, and his son by the first wife is destined to play a prominent part in the story. Frank Churchill has been early adopted by a wealthy, childless uncle and aunt--his mother’s relations--who give him their name, and are to make him their heir. He has been seldom seen in Highbury, but his praises have gone before him, and it does not diminish his popularity that he writes “a very handsome letter” to his stepmother, though he is not able to pay her a visit.

Within the round of Hartfield visiting--abridged, as it is, by Mr. Woodhouse’s delicate health and invalid habits--are Donwell Abbey,[47] Mr. Knightley’s seat; the vicarage occupied by the young bachelor clergyman, Mr. Elton; the houses in the village which belong respectively to Mr. and Mrs. Perry, the country doctor and his wife; Mrs. Bates, the widow of the late vicar, and her daughter; and Mrs. Goddard, who was the mistress of a school--not a seminary.

Jane Austen gives her view of the education of the period, which was in a transition state, in her definition of a school as distinguished from a seminary--not “an establishment, or anything which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems, and where young ladies, for enormous pay, might be screwed out of health and into vanity--but a real, honest, old-fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” These views were regarded as eminently sensible, moderate, and practical in their day; and no doubt there was, and is, some truth in them. At the same time, the general notion of education is narrow and prejudiced, to be held by so able a woman.