Part 13

Early in 1801 the home at Steventon was broken up. Mr. Austen resigned his living in consequence of failing health, and the family removed to Bath. Mr. Austen died in 1805, and Mrs. Austen and her daughters lived for a time at Southampton. They had no really homelike home, however, between leaving Steventon in 1801 and settling at Chawton, in Hampshire, in 1809; and it is very characteristic of Jane Austen’s home-loving nature that this homeless period was also a period of literary inactivity. She wrote _Sense and Sensibility_, _Northanger Abbey_, and _Pride and Prejudice_ before she left Steventon, though none of them were published till after she came to live at Chawton. Here in her second home she wrote _Mansfield Park_, _Emma_, and _Persuasion_. In consequence of having three novels finished before one was printed, when she once began to publish, her works appeared in rapid succession. _Sense and Sensibility_ was the first to appear, in 1811, and the others followed quickly after one another, for her work was at once appreciated by the public, and the great leaders of the literary world, such as Sir Walter Scott, Southey, and Coleridge, welcomed her with cordial and generous praise. One curious little adventure should be mentioned. In 1803, during her residence at Bath, she had sold the manuscript of _Northanger Abbey_ to a Bath publisher for £10. This good man, on reconsideration, evidently thought he had made a bad bargain, and resolved to lose his ten pounds rather than risk a larger sum in printing and publishing the book. The manuscript therefore lay on his shelves for many years quite forgotten. But the time came when _Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, and _Mansfield Park_ had placed their author in the first rank of English writers, and it occurred to Miss Austen and her family that it might be well to rescue _Northanger Abbey_ from its unappreciative possessor. One of her brothers called on the Bath publisher and negotiated with him the re-purchase of the manuscript, giving for it the same sum which had been paid to the author about ten years earlier. The publisher was delighted to get back his £10, which he had never expected to see again, and Jane Austen’s brother was delighted to get back the manuscript. Both parties to the bargain were fully satisfied; but the poor publisher’s feelings would have been very different if he had known that the neglected manuscript, with which he had so joyfully parted, was by the author of the most successful novels of the day.

There is a quiet vein of fun and humorous observation running through all Miss Austen’s writings. It is as visible in her private letters to her friends as in her works intended for publication. The little turns of expression are not reproduced, but the humour of the one is very similar to that of the other. Thus, for instance, in one of her letters she describes a visit to a young lady at school in London. Jane Austen had left her a raw schoolgirl, and found her, on this visit, developed into a fashionable young lady. “Her hair,” writes Jane to Cassandra, “is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education.” Who can read this without thinking of Fanny Price in _Mansfield Park_, and the inevitable contempt she inspired in her fashionable cousins because she did not know French and had but one sash?

Reference has already been made to the high appreciation of Miss Austen’s genius which has been expressed by the highest literary authorities in her own time and in ours. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal: “I have read again, and for the third time, Miss Austen’s very finely-written novel of _Pride and Prejudice_. That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the descriptive and the sentiment is denied to me.” Lord Macaulay, the great historian, wrote in his diary: “Read Dickens’s _Hard Times_, and another book of Pliny’s _Letters_. Read _Northanger Abbey_, worth all Dickens and Pliny put together. Yet it was the work of a girl. She was certainly not more than twenty-six. Wonderful creature!” Guizot, the French historian, was a great novel reader, and he delighted in English novels, especially those written by women. Referring to the women writers of the beginning of this century, of whom Miss Austen was the chief, he said that their works “form a school which, in the excellence and profusion of its productions, resembles the cloud of dramatic authors of the great Athenian age.” The late Mr. G. H. Lewes said he would rather have written _Pride and Prejudice_ than any of the Waverley novels. George Eliot calls Jane Austen the greatest artist that has ever written, “using the term ‘artist’ to signify the most perfect master over the means to her end.” It is perhaps only fair to state that some good judges do not entertain so high an opinion of her work. Madame de Staël pronounced against her, using the singularly inappropriate word “vulgar,” in condemnation of her work. If there is a writer in the world free from vulgarity in its ordinary sense, it is Jane Austen; it must be supposed that Madame de Staël used the word in its French sense, _i.e._ “commonplace” or “ordinary,” such a meaning of the word as is retained in our English expression “the vulgar tongue.” Charlotte Brontë felt in Miss Austen a deficiency in poetic imagination, in the high tone of sentiment which elevates the prose of everyday life into poetry. She found her “shrewd and observant rather than sagacious and profound.” Miss Austen’s writings were so essentially different from the highly imaginative work of her sister author, that it is not surprising that the younger failed somewhat in appreciation of the elder writer.

Jane Austen’s failing health in 1816 caused much anxiety to her family. It is characteristic of her gentle thoughtfulness for all about her that she never could be induced to use the one sofa with which the family sitting-room was provided. Her mother, who was more than seventy years old, often used the sofa, and Jane would never occupy it, even in her mother’s absence, preferring to contrive for herself a sort of couch formed with two or three chairs. A little niece, puzzled that “Aunt Jane” preferred this arrangement, drew from her the explanation that if she used the sofa in her mother’s absence, Mrs. Austen would probably abstain from using it as much as was good for her. Her last book, _Persuasion_, was finished while she was suffering very much from what proved to be her dying illness. Weak health did not in any way diminish her industry, and she exacted from herself the utmost perfection that she felt she was capable of giving to her work. The last chapters of _Persuasion_ were cancelled and re-written because her first conclusion of the story did not satisfy her. In May 1817 she and her sister removed to Winchester in order that Jane might have skilled medical advice. Here she died on 18th July and was buried opposite Wykeham’s Chantry, in the cathedral. Her sweetness of temper and her gentle gaiety never failed her throughout a long and trying illness. When the end was near, one of those with her asked if there was anything she wanted; her reply was, “_Nothing but death_.”

Footnote 4:

A very interesting memoir of Miss Austen has been written by her nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh. All who love her works should read it, and thereby come to know and love the woman.

XVI

MARIA EDGEWORTH

IT will be impossible, in the short limits of these pages, to give anything like a full account of the long life of Maria Edgeworth. She lived for nearly eighty-three years, from 1st January 1767 to 22d May 1849; and through her own and her father’s friends she was brought into touch with nearly all the leading men and women connected with the stirring political and literary events of that period. What this implies will be best realised if we consider that her lifetime comprised the whole period of the French Revolution, the War of Independence in the United States, the long wars of England with Napoleon, the landing of the French in Ireland (her native country), the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, the Abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions, the passing of the first Reform Bill, the Irish Famine of 1847, and the outbreak of revolutionary socialism on the Continent in 1848. These are some of the most burning of the political events of which she was a witness; the literary and social history of the same period is hardly less remarkable. She lived in the centre of a world made brilliant by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Burns, Keats, Scott, and Jane Austen. She knew Mrs. Fry, Wilberforce, and Sydney Smith, as representing some of the most important of the social movements of her time; among her friends in the scientific world were Ricardo, the political economist, Darwin, the naturalist, whose fame has been overshadowed by that of his grandson, the great Charles Darwin of our own times, Sir Humphry Davy, the Herschels, Mrs. Somerville, and James Mill. She knew Mrs. Siddons, and heard her recite in her own house the part of Queen Katherine in the play of _Henry the Eighth_. She was the intimate friend, and connection by marriage, of “Kitty Pakenham,” the first Duchess of Wellington, wife of “the Great Duke.” She lived to see the old stage coaches supplanted by our modern railways; she was the interested eye-witness of the gradual introduction of the steam-engine into all departments of industry, a change which Sir Walter Scott said he looked on “half proud, half sad, half angry, and half pleased.” She might well feel, as old age approached, that she had “warmed both hands at the fire of life.” No life could have been fuller than hers of every sort of interest and activity. She said in a letter to a friend, written after a dangerous illness: “When I felt it was more than probable that I should not recover, with a pulse above 120, and at the entrance of my seventy-sixth year, I was not alarmed. I felt ready to rise tranquil from the banquet of life, where I had been a happy guest. I confidently relied on the goodness of my Creator” (_Study of Maria Edgeworth_, by Grace A. Oliver, p. 521).

Maria Edgeworth’s family was one of English origin, which had settled in Ireland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Edgeworths intermarried into Irish, Welsh, and English families, but always maintained strong Irish sympathies.

There were many remarkable men and women in the Edgeworth family before the birth of our heroine, but space forbids the mention of more than one, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose name and fame are intimately associated with those of his daughter. Mr. Edgeworth was a most extraordinary man; at one moment one admires him, at another one laughs at him, but one must always be astonished by him. “To put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” would have been a congenial task to him. He made clocks, built bridges, raised spires, invented telegraphs, manufactured balloons, ink, and soap, constructed locks on his bedroom doors of such a complicated nature, that his guests were afraid to shut their doors lest they never should be able to open them again.

When on a journey in France about 1770, he stayed at Lyons, and carried out a plan for diverting the Rhone from its course, thereby saving a large tract of country that had previously been inaccessible; for this service the city of Lyons rewarded him by a grant of land; this property, however, was confiscated a few years later during the Revolution.

He raised a corps of volunteer infantry in Ireland, to which Roman Catholics as well as Protestants were admitted, although at that time the sentiment of religious equality was regarded as akin to infidelity and disloyalty. He was born in England, and educated partly here and partly in Ireland; like most of the Edgeworths, he came of a mixed race, his mother being a Welsh woman of considerable literary acquirements and faculties; his first remarkable performance was a runaway marriage, which he contracted at the age of nineteen, with a Miss Elers, a lady of German origin, whom he appears rather to have disliked than otherwise. A runaway marriage with a girl whom he really loved would have been too commonplace a proceeding in those days for this eccentric young gentleman. Speaking of this lady, Mr. Edgeworth wrote: “My wife was prudent, domestic, and affectionate, but she was not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles; and the lamenting of a female, with whom we live, does not render home delightful.” It is not recorded if Mrs. Edgeworth found the lamenting of the male with whom she lived any more delightful, nor indeed is it evident that her husband devoted much of his overflowing energy to lamentation. As he did not find his home delightful, he spent very little time in it, and was not long before he found pleasant society elsewhere.

One can never think of Mr. Edgeworth apart from his extraordinary domestic history. He had four wives, one after another, in rapid succession, and twenty-two children. There were four children, of whom Maria was one, by the first marriage with the “lamenting female.” The eldest of these, born when his father was under twenty, was brought up on the principles advocated by Rousseau, which may perhaps be summarised as never forcing a child to do anything that he does not wish to do. One experiment of this kind appears to have sufficed for the family; the other twenty-one children, or such of them as survived infancy, were treated according to other theories. Indeed, it seems to have been part of Maria’s education that she was to undertake, for a part of every day, some study or occupation that was uncongenial to her. Mr. Edgeworth’s theories of education seem to have been almost as numerous as his family; a story is told in the book already quoted, of the visit of a gentleman to Edgeworthstown House in Ireland; on rejoining the ladies after dinner, the guest was imprudent enough to exclaim on the beauty of the golden hair of one of the younger girls. Mr. Edgeworth instantly took his daughter by the hand, walked across the room, opened a drawer, held her head over it, and with a large pair of scissors cut off all her hair close to her head. “As the golden ringlets fell into the drawer, this extraordinary father said, ‘Charlotte, what do you say?’ She answered, ‘Thank you, father.’ Turning to his guests, he remarked, ‘I will not allow a daughter of mine to be vain.’”

Among the friendships that had a powerful influence on Mr. Edgeworth’s character must be mentioned that with Mr. Day, the author of a book which is still well known, _Sandford and Merton_. Mr. Day was an even more extraordinary man than Mr. Edgeworth. He entirely set at naught all the usual habits of society; we are told that he “seldom combed his raven locks.” He professed to think love had been the greatest curse to mankind, and announced in season and out of season his determination never to marry. It appears that the assistance of a great many ladies was needed to help him for a time to keep his word. He made offers of marriage to Margaret Edgeworth, his friend’s sister, to Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd (who became later the second and third wives of Mr. Edgeworth); and failing to induce any of these ladies to accept him, he adopted two orphan girls from the Foundling with the object of educating one of them to such a pitch of perfection that she should be fit to be his wife. In order to foster the quality of “fortitude in females,” he used to drop hot sealing-wax on their bare arms, and fire off pistols, charged with powder only, at their petticoats. One of the two little girls could never entirely overcome the tendency to make use of some vehement expression of pain or alarm under these circumstances. This Mr. Day considered a fatal disqualification for ever promoting her to be his wife. The other, to whom the romantic name of Sabrina Sydney had been given, was more promising, and at one time it seemed as if the perilous honour of being Mrs. Day would be hers. However, she was saved by her disobedience to his injunctions against wearing a particular kind of sleeve and handkerchief which were then in fashion. Upon this piece of self-will, we are told that “he at once and decidedly gave her up.”

Mr. Day’s proposals to Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, two beautiful sisters with whom he and Mr. Edgeworth were brought much in contact at Lichfield, have been already mentioned. Mr. Day pretended to despise beauty and to condemn love; but Honora’s beauty so far overcame his prejudices that he at least professed love for her. His offer of marriage, however, was more like an ultimatum of war than an expression of affection. He sent her a huge packet, in which he detailed all the conditions he should expect her to fulfil if she married him. One of these was entire seclusion from all society but his own. She replied that she “would not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions: she did not feel that seclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness. And she declined leaving her mode of life for any ‘dark and untried system.’” Mr. Day was deeply wounded, but it was his vanity that suffered rather than his heart; for in three weeks he made a similar overture to Honora’s sister, Elizabeth. Now, however, the tables were turned. Whether the sisters conspired together to punish him is not known; but Elizabeth imposed conditions on her lover before she would consent to receive his attentions; she declared she could never marry a man who could neither fence, dance, nor ride, and had none of the accomplishments of a gentleman. These were the very qualities Mr. Day had chiefly exercised his philosophy in deriding and denouncing. “How could he,” cried Miss Elizabeth, with cruel logic, “with propriety abuse and ridicule talents in which he appeared deficient?” Mr. Day therefore repaired to France with Mr. Edgeworth in order to acquire those polite accomplishments of which it had been the pride of his heart to know nothing. Poor Mr. Day!

How many a month I strove to suit These stubborn fingers to the lute! To-day I venture all I know. She will not hear my music? So! Break the string; fold music’s wing: Suppose Pauline had bade me sing.

When he came back from France, cruel Elizabeth laughed in his face, and said she had liked him best as he was before. Notwithstanding all these unsuccessful attempts, Mr. Day found a wife at length. She was a lady of large fortune, which, of course, he “despised” and appropriated. She conformed to all her husband’s whims, and honestly believed him to be the best and most distinguished of men. “That’s what a man wants in a wife mostly,” as Mrs. Poyser says; “one who’d pretend she didn’t know which end she stood uppermost till her husband told her.” Mr. Day fell a victim at last to one of his numerous theories. He disapproved of the professional method of breaking in colts, and undertook to train one upon an improved plan of his own. The animal plunged violently and threw him; he had concussion of the brain, and died a few minutes after his fall. Poor Mrs. Day was so inconsolable that she took to her bed, and died two years later. She must have been a woman of the type of Milton’s Eve: “Herself, though fairest, unsupported flower.” When her prop was gone, she drooped and died.

During Mr. Edgeworth’s residence at Lyons his first wife, Maria’s mother, died, and in a few months he married the beautiful Honora Sneyd. The social circle at Lichfield, in which Honora had lived before her marriage, contained many distinguished persons, among them Dr. Darwin, and Miss Anna Seward, the poetess. Honora herself had been engaged, or partly engaged, to Major André, the unfortunate officer whose execution as a spy by the Americans, during the War of Independence, caused such deep indignation in England. Her marriage to Mr. Edgeworth in 1773, and her death in 1780, took place before the melancholy end of Major André’s life. The association of Honora’s name with that of Major André is mentioned here as an illustration of the way in which the Edgeworth family were connected, in some form or another, with many of the most interesting events of the times in which they lived. Another such incident is to be found in the fact that the Abbé Edgeworth, a relative who had become a Roman Catholic priest, and had lived many years in France, attended Louis XVI upon the scaffold, and received his last words.

Of the charm and goodness of the beautiful Honora there can be no doubt. She won all hearts. Her little step-daughter, Maria, loved her dearly, and admired her as much as she loved her. She remembered, in after years, standing at her step-mother’s dressing-table and looking up at her with a sudden thought, “How beautiful!” The second Mrs. Edgeworth became, under her husband’s tuition, a very good mechanic; and together they wrote a little book for children, called _Harry and Lucy_. Very few books for children had at that time been written, so that they were very early in a field which has since found so many labourers. Mrs. Honora discerned Maria’s remarkable qualities of mind. When the latter was only twelve years old her step-mother wrote to her expressing the pleasure she felt in being able to treat the young girl “as her equal in every respect but age.” Mr. Edgeworth, too, fully appreciated and studiously cultivated Maria’s gifts, and encouraged her in every way to treat him with openness and familiarity. This conduct was a very great contrast with the extreme stiffness and formality which then prevailed generally between parents and children. It was near this time, but a little later, that the well-known writer, William Godwin, was reproached by his mother with his too great formality in addressing her; he had been accustomed to speak and write to her as “Madam,” and she says in one of her letters to him that “Hon’d Mother” “would be full as agreeable.” Therefore the terms of friendly familiarity and equality between Maria and her parents were the more remarkable. The happiness of Mr. Edgeworth’s second marriage was unclouded, except by the symptoms of consumption in Honora, which warned them that an inevitable parting was at hand. She died in May 1780, when Maria was thirteen years old. By his dead wife’s side, Mr. Edgeworth wrote to Maria impressing upon her all the hopes that he and her step-mother had formed for her future. Very soon after he wrote again and bade her write a short story on the subject of generosity; “It must be taken,” he wrote, “from History or Romance, and must be sent the sennight after you receive this; and I beg that you will take some pains about it.” The story, when finished, was submitted to the judgment of Mr. William Sneyd, Honora’s brother, who said of it, “An excellent story, and extremely well written; but where is the generosity?”—a saying which afterwards became a household word with the Edgeworths.