Jane Austen
It is probable that if Miss Cassandra Austen had had her way, we should
have had nothing of Jane Austen’s except her novels. To her elder sister
alone did she write freely; to her alone she confided her hopes and, if
rumour is true, the one great disappointment of her life; but when Miss
Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister’s fame made her
suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars
speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could
gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged too trivial to
be of interest.
Hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a
few letters, and her books. As for the gossip, gossip which has survived
its day is never despicable; with a little rearrangement it suits our
purpose admirably. For example, Jane “is not at all pretty and very
prim, unlike a girl of twelve . . . Jane is whimsical and affected,”
says little Philadelphia Austen of her cousin. Then we have Mrs.
Mitford, who knew the Austens as girls and thought Jane “the prettiest,
silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers”.
Next, there is Miss Mitford’s anonymous friend “who visits her now [and]
says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise,
taciturn piece of ‘single blessedness’ that ever existed, and that,
until _Pride and Prejudice_ showed what a precious gem was hidden in
that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or
firescreen. . . . The case is very different now,” the good lady goes on;
“she is still a poker—but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. . . .
A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is terrific
indeed!” On the other side, of course, there are the Austens, a race
little given to panegyric of themselves, but nevertheless, they say, her
brothers “were very fond and very proud of her. They were attached to
her by her talents, her virtues, and her engaging manners, and each
loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his
own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they yet never expected
to see.” Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by
strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart—these contrasts are by
no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find
ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.
To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a
child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of
an astonishing and unchildish story, Love and Friendship,[9] which,
incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was
written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the
same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is
neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. There are
jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which
went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies
who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.
Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last
hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief
for the loss of Augustius. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware
of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not
faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker
than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and
Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach
between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the
fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and
the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the
schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than
that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common
parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and
not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for
our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen
was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of
the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil,
and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was
only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the
Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom
upon sheer nonsense,—_Love and Friendship_ is all that, but what is
this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and
penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The
girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.
Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps
himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old
Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment
after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is
something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and
women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady
Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent
features of every ball-room. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth
upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her
a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in
the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had
already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over
that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few
illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes
is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage,
but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the
writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the
book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of
anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once
received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely
where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane
Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries.
Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself
in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an
outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have
said, pointing with her stick, end _there_; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and
castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own.
It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of
the first characters in the world,” she called her, “a bewitching
Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only
ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these
words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It
is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontës wrote, not very
much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.
The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most
affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and,
incidentally, the authoress of a novel called _Pride and Prejudice_,
which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many
years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another
story, _The Watsons_, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it,
left it unfinished. Unfinished and unsuccessful, it may throw more light
upon its writer’s genius than the polished masterpiece blazing in
universal fame. Her difficulties are more apparent in it, and the method
she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the
stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one
of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first
version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and
atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what
suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would
have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family
life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and
apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed
what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go
through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar
genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting.
Suddenly, she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to
happen. The Edwards’ are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is
passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves
and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrove retreats to a remote corner with
a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and
active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar
intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of
a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an
assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy
being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is
no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is
moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made
to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how
tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown
herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come
inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much
deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to
supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet
is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows
with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.
Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder,
will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrove make their call at
five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the
knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are
accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred,
vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the
tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment,
half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way
as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been
made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in
this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of
Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature.
Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there
remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of
human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with
extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room
scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is
possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a
link which carries the story this way and that.
But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise,
and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there
are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most
consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular
chapters of _The Watsons_ prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she
had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself
felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which
the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and
straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the
big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an
occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and
adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part
of the ladies to get tired; a little money supported it, a little
consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class
families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left
outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades
nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells
us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a
comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and
fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute
of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is
describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular,
she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of
her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into
decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are
exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous ladies’
ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is
terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is
silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her
fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collins’, her Sir Walter
Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennetts. She encircles them with the lash of a
whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their
silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them
and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when
she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug
and trying to keep him from the flower beds” eternally. A divine justice
is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by
bringing on “apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners
in one week”. Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to
give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is
satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head,
or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her
with such exquisite delight.
Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the
heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite,
pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like
that—the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this
very moment some Lady Bertram finds it almost too trying to keep Pug
from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny, a little
late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just that,
consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of
pettiness, no hint of spite, rouses us from our contemplation. Delight
strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.
That elusive quality is indeed often made up of very different parts,
which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane
Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool,
her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and
sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while
she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an
impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring
heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows
up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among
the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary
Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets
her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten
thousand a year with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again
she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and
at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings
flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From
such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even which are not only
as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In _The
Watsons_ she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why
an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of
meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection.
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull
young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as
they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from
triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of
meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their
lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep,
trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this
drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides
again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
What more natural then, with this insight into their profundity, than
that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day
to day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No
“suggestions to alter her style of writing” from the Prince Regent or
Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or
intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country house staircase as she
saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads
against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an
incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child
who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to
form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but
for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what
material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with
by a writer, whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions
that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice
could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example,
she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels.
She could not throw herself wholeheartedly into a romantic moment. She
had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its
beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a
beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we
read the few formal phrases about “the brilliancy of an unclouded night
and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods” the night is at once as
“solemn, and soothing, and lovely” as she tells us, quite simply, that
it was.
The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished
novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink
markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the
age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still
subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s
career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted
with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she
would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider
whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were
marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she
not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning,
in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of
discovery?
Let us take _Persuasion_, the last completed novel, and look by its
light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a
peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in _Persuasion_. The dullness is
that which so often marks the transition stage between two different
periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with
the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an
asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be
amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss
Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so
freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not
altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done
this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do
something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in
_Persuasion_, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and
insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning
to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic
than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of
Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned
romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural
beginning”. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of
nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the
spring. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal
months in the country”. She marks “the tawny leaves and withered
hedges”. “One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in
it”, she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature
that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She
is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a
woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and
unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to
comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and
more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the
scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy
which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had
loved, but the æsthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so.
Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to
be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed
herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready.
Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame
had grown very slowly. “I doubt”, wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it
would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal
obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all
that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined
out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled,
and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to
feast upon at leisure.
And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane
Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion,
or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of
publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity.
But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been
shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less
(this is already perceptible in _Persuasion_) to dialogue and more to
reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous
little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes’ chatter, all that we
need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that
shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and
psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now
perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a
method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for
conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only
what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from
her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her
satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent
and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of
Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist
among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died “just as she was
beginning to feel confidence in her own success”.
[Footnote 9: _Love and Friendship_, Chatto and Windus.]