Jane Austen
Jane Austen
BY W. H. HELM
AUTHOR OF "ASPECTS OF BALZAC," ETC.
TO MY MOTHER
"I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed from that quality in the author. Good-nature produces a disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express themselves with smartness against the errors of men, without bitterness towards their persons."—STEELE, Tatler, No. 242.
NOTE
The author is much indebted to the Hon. C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, and also to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., for permission to make extracts from the Letters of Jane Austen.
CONTENTS
I
DOMINANT QUALITIES
Jane Austen's abiding freshness—Why she has not more readers—Characteristics of her work—Absence of passion—Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë—Jane in her home circle—Her tranquil nature—Her unselfishness—Compared with Dorothy Osborne—Prudent heroines—Thoughtless admiration
II
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD
Literary influences—Jane Austen's defence of novelists—The old essayists—Her favourite authors—Some novels of her time—Criticism of her niece's novel—Sense of her own limitations—Her method—Humour—Familiar names—Some characteristics of style—Suggested emendations—A new "problem" of authorship—A "forbidding" writer—"Commonplace" and "superficial"—Thomas Love Peacock—Sapient suggestions
III
CONTACT WITH LIFE
Origins of characters—Matchmaking—Second marriages—Negative qualities of the novels—Close knowledge of one class—Dislike of "lionizing"—Madame de Staël—The "lower orders"—Tradesmen—Social position—Quality of Jane's letters—Balls and parties
IV
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM
Dr. Whately on Jane Austen—"Moral lessons" of her novels—Charge of "Indelicacy"—Marriage as a profession—A "problem" novel—"The Nostalgia of the Infinite"—The "whitewashing" of Willoughby—Lady Susan condemned by its author—The Watsons—Change in manners—No "heroes"—Woman's love—The Prince Regent—The Quarterly Review
V
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST
What has woman done?—"Nature's Salic law"—Women deficient in satire—Some types in the novels—The female snob—The valetudinarian—The fop—The too agreeable man—"Personal size and mental sorrow"—Knightley's opinion of Emma—Ashamed of relations—Mrs. Bennet—The clergy and their opinions—Worldly life—Absence of dogma—Authors confused with their creations
VI
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL
The novelist and her characters—Her sense of their reality—Accessories rarely described—Her ideas on dress—Her own millinery and gowns—Thin clothes and consumption—Domestic economy—Jane as housekeeper—"A very clever essay"—Mr. Collins at Longbourn—The gipsies at Highbury—Topography of Jane Austen—Hampshire—Lyme Regis—Godmersham—Bath—London
VII
INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE
Jane Austen's genius ignored—Negative and positive instances—The literary orchard—Jane's influence in English literature
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
FRONTISPIECE . . . . . . By Violet Helm.
A LETTER OF JANE AUSTEN'S
Jane Austen's abiding freshness—Why she has not more readers—Characteristics of her work—Absence of passion—Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë—Jane in her home circle—Her tranquil nature—Her unselfishness—Compared with Dorothy Osborne—Prudent heroines—Thoughtless admiration.
The year 1775, which deprived England of her American colonies, was generous to English art and literature. Had it only produced Walter Savage Landor, or even no better worthy than James Smith of the Rejected Addresses, it would not have done badly. But these were its added bounties. Its greater gifts were Turner, Charles Lamb and Jane Austen. Could we be offered the choice of re-possessing the United States, or losing the very memory of these three, which alternative would we choose?
It is difficult to appreciate the lapse of time since Jane Austen was at work. We are now within a few years of the centenary of her death. She had been laid beneath that black slab in Winchester Cathedral before the first railway had been planned, or the first telegraph wire stretched from town to town, or the first steamship steered across the Atlantic. Yet the must of age has not settled on her books. The lavender may lie between their pages, but it is still sweet, and there is many a successful novelist of our own times whose work is already far more out of date than hers.
This perennial timeliness of atmosphere is no necessity of genius. Fielding and Scott remain a delight for succeeding generations, because they possess the essential quality of humanity, but the life which they offer us is largely remote from our own, foreign to our experience. Jane Austen invites us to enjoy a change of air among people with most of whom we may soon feel at ease, finding nothing in their conversation that will disturb our equanimity. If you are one of Jane Austen's lovers, you come back to her novels for a holiday from the noise and whirl of modern fiction, as you would come from a great city to the countryside or the coast village for rest and restoration.
The failure of her books to attract the mass of novel-readers is due in the first place to a lack of "exciting" qualities. No syndicate that knew its business would offer them for serial purposes; they have no breathless "situations," and their strong appeal is to the calmer feelings and the intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. In one respect only has she anything in common with the popular novelists of our day. Her set of characters is even more limited than theirs. The virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the frivolous coquette, the fascinating libertine, the worldly priest, are to be encountered in her pages, but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adventuress find no places there. What is often overlooked, however, by those who speak of Jane Austen's few characters, is that no two of them have quite the same characteristics of mind. They are differentiated with admirable art. Even so, the types are few, and the smallness of the field which she cultivated has been frequently adduced as a bar to her inclusion among the masters of English fiction. She has the least range of them all. When one thinks of the host of strongly-marked types in Scott, in Dickens, in Thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and incidents which fill the pages of their books, her few squires and parsons and unemployed officers, with their wives and daughters, who live out their days in Georgian parlours and in shrubberies and parks, make a poor enough show in the dramatic and spectacular way.
No particular passion dominates the life of any one of her leading personages. Avarice, which has afforded such notable figures to almost every great novelist, in her world is only represented by meanness; lust and hate are nowhere strongly emphasized, even love is rarely permitted to suggest the possibility of becoming violent. There are no Pecksniffs, Quilps, Père Grandets, nor Lord Steynes; no Lady Kews, Jane Eyres, nor Lisbeth Fischers. Only into the hearts of her younger women does Jane Austen throw the searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by her own feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her heroines still leave a large part of virtuous womankind unrepresented.
Balzac, describing the origins of his play La Marâtre to the manager who produced it, said: "We are not concerned with an appalling melodrama wherein the villain sets light to houses and massacres the inhabitants. No, I imagine a drawing-room comedy where all is calm, tranquil, pleasant. The men play peacefully at the whist-table, by the light of wax candles under little green shades. The women chat and laugh as they do their fancy needlework. Presently they all take tea together. In a word, everything shows the influence of regular habits and harmony. But for all that, beneath this placid surface the passions are at work, the drama progresses until the moment when it bursts out like the flame of a conflagration. That is what I want to show."
The scene described is Jane Austen's—the quiet parlour, the card-players, the women chatting, and working with their coloured silks, the tea-tray, the shaded candles, the general air of ease and tranquillity. We find it at Mansfield Park with the Bertrams, at Hartfield with the Woodhouses, and, in spite of Lydia and her "mamma," at Longbourn with the Bennets. But the dénouement to which Balzac looked for his effect has no attraction for Jane Austen. Catherine Morland, at Northanger Abbey, imagines some such tragedy smouldering into life below the surface of quiet habitude as Balzac discovers in his horrid war of step-daughter and step-mother, and Jane Austen herself laughs with Henry Tilney at this impressionable country maiden whom he mocks while he admires.
Balzac and Jane Austen both strove to depict life, to show the motives and instincts of men and women as the causes of action; in his case of an energetic and passionate type, wherein the primary instincts are freely exercised, in her case, of a simple, orderly kind, which allows but little scope for the display of violence or the elaboration of plots. There are exceptions, of course, which for fear of the precise critic must at least be illustrated. Balzac has his quiet Pierrettes and Rose Cormons, who suffer as patiently and far more poignantly than an Elinor Dashwood or a Fanny Price; Jane Austen has her dissolute Willoughbys and disturbing Henry Crawfords, and also her Maria Rushworths and Mrs. Clays, who throw their bonnets over the windmills with even less regard for their reputations than a Beatrix de Rochefide or a Natalie de Manerville. When a lapse from virtue on the part of any of her characters was, on some rare occasion, necessary to her plan, Jane Austen did not allow any prudish reserve to stand in the way, but it may be said no less unreservedly that she never introduced vice where her story could do quite as well without it, and it is never the central motive of her novels. It is, then, not alone for the narrowness of her field that her title to greatness has often been disputed. Many persons whose literary tastes are marked by understanding and catholicity refuse to acknowledge the genius of so peaceful a novelist. Because of the absence of passion and sentiment in Jane Austen's works, the author of Jane Eyre would not recognize in her the great artist that Scott and Coleridge believed her to be. "The passions," wrote Miss Brontë, "are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition—too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress." The three novelists here brought into momentary association, the creators of Eugénie Grandet, Emma, and Jane Eyre represent three distinctive forces in fiction. Charlotte Brontë, disillusioned with the world, of which she knew very little, and angry at its follies and injustices, sat alone and poured out her feelings in her books; Balzac, hungry for fame, wrote furiously all night by the light of a dip, stimulating his fiery imagination with the strong coffee which was the irresponsible author of many of his most astonishing chapters; Jane Austen, taking her meals and her rest regularly, sat at her little desk in the parlour where her mother and sister were sewing or writing letters, and placidly turned her observations and reflections into manuscript. Her hazel eyes, we may be certain, never rolled in any kind of frenzy, her brown curls were never disturbed by the spasmodic movements of nervous hands. Great artist as she was, she had no greater share of the "artistic temperament" than many a popular novelist who "turns out" two or three serial stories at a time by the simple process of shuffling the situations, changing the scenery, and re-naming the characters. If she had been touched by the strong emotion of a Charlotte Brontë, or the burning imagination of a Balzac, she might have produced work which would have set the world on fire, instead of merely infusing keen happiness into responsive minds and compelling their love and admiration. That is only to say that if she had been somebody else she would not have been herself. It is peace, not war, that she carries to us. Even her irony is not of the sardonic kind, and in her work the "master spell" is so daintily mingled that the bitter ingredients seem to have disappeared in the making.
Respect and admiration and sympathy in a high degree have been given by millions of minds, not always emotional, to many authors, but Jane Austen is loved as few have been. The love is inspired by her works, and she shares it with Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot. Milton, in a line which is as clear in meaning as it is foggy in construction, speaks of Eve as "the fairest of her daughters." Jane Austen is regarded by the generality of her lovers as the most delightful of her own heroines, and not merely as the woman who brought them into existence.
Could we have loved her so much if we had lived with her at Steventon Rectory or at Chawton Cottage? What she was at home I think we know much better from her own letters than from her brother Henry's panegyric, which, in spite of its obvious sincerity of intention, too nearly resembles the memorial inscriptions of his own period to be regarded with quite as much confidence as respect. "Faultless herself," he wrote, "as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive, or forget." "Always" is a word which—as Captain Corcoran discovered of its reverse—can hardly ever be used without considerable reservations. We know, from her own pen, that Jane—we call one unwedded queen "Elizabeth," why should we not call another "Jane"?—did not "always" show so much tenderness for the faults of others, and when we remember the endless variety of human nature we cannot but regard this ascription of "faultlessness" by an affectionate brother as of little more evidential value than Mrs. Dashwood's opinion (in Sense and Sensibility) of the "faultlessness" of Marianne's lovers. It is no disparagement to Henry Austen to say that his little memoir is more convincing as a record of his own character than of his sister's. Their nephew, Mr. Austen Leigh, who wrote the fullest and most admirable account of Jane Austen, was still in his teens when she died. Apart from these sparse reminiscences we know practically nothing about her except from her own novels and letters, but from them we may learn almost as much of the mind of this delightful woman as any loving relation could have told us. It may be possible for an author to write an artificial novel without betraying his own nature to any positive extent, but such novels as Jane Austen's cannot so be produced; it is possible to write letters which, apart from the penmanship, offer no evidences of character; but a pair of devoted sisters, however different their ability or their philosophy of life, could not correspond during twenty years without displaying much of the workings of their minds.
Some of Jane's literary admirers think that she was lively and talkative, others that she was prone to silence in company. Probably both views are correct. It depended on the company. Among those who could appreciate her fun and her wit, her harmless quips and quizzing, she was full of vivacity; among those who raised their eyebrows at her impromptu verses and missed the points of her piquant remarks on persons and incidents she was speedily content, within the bounds of good manners, to observe rather than to join in the comedy of conversation. We need not unreservedly believe her brother's assurance that "she never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression," but we may, from all we know of her, be fairly confident that she had a control over her tongue which few such gifted humourists have possessed. As for her temper, it was said in her family that "Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded."
That her nature was not, in any marked degree, what is commonly called "sympathetic" we may see from many passages in her letters, and her novels afford ample corroboration. There was no avoidable hypocrisy about her. In this at least she is the counterpart of Elizabeth or Anne. "Do not be afraid of my encroaching on your privilege of universal goodwill. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." In a letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra there would have been nothing to surprise us in this passage, which is actually taken from the remarks of Elizabeth Bennet to her sister on the subject of Bingley's long silence after the Netherfield ball.
If Jane Austen did not cry over misfortunes which did not affect her, neither did she pretend to ignore the affectations and weaknesses even of her nearest relations. Can it be supposed, for instance, that she was in the least degree blinded to the shortcomings of a beloved mother of whom she could, on various occasions, write such news as that she "continues hearty, her appetite and nights are very good, but she sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a liver disorder"?
A daughter and sister and friend whose attention was so closely devoted, however unobtrusively, to the study of character in a narrow circle, would in most cases be "a little trying," but when the observer was endowed with a keen sense of the absurd, and an irony which, however weak in caustic, was strong in veracity, it might be supposed that she would be an enfant terrible of that mature kind which in our own days is commoner than the nursery variety. In her case, the supposition would be ill-founded. She was at once too well-bred, and too kind-hearted, to let her special powers of wounding take exercise on gentle hearts. But falsehood of any sort was abhorrent to her, and as a consequence she was inclined, in communing with her sister, to show herself a little intolerant even of those amiable pretences of sorrow for common ailments and small troubles which are so soothing to weak humanity. She rejected, for example, the idea of commiserating with any one on account of a cold or a headache, unless there were feverish symptoms!
Of the "vacant chaff well-meant for grain" of which Tennyson sings so sadly, Jane brought little to market. She would express to Cassandra her sympathy with their acquaintances under great disasters and trivial misfortunes with the same penful of ink. What she wrote to her sister—of her devotion for whom, from earliest childhood, her mother said, "If Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate"—is far more free than what she uttered in the family circle. Few have realized better the value of the unspoken word, or given their relations less opportunity to remind them of the evils of indiscretion.
If she was unemotional and, in the ordinary sense of the word, unsympathetic, she is not to be blamed for this lack of the qualities with one of which she so amply endowed Marianne and with the other Elinor Dashwood. We can no more make ourselves emotional or sympathetic than we can make ourselves fair or dark, or rather, we can only alter our ways as we can alter our complexions, by artifice. The outward show of sympathy which is not felt is one of the commonest of hypocrisies, perhaps inevitable at times from very charity. Happily it is not a necessary part of that ultimate barrier which, even in the truest friendships and the deepest love, makes it as impossible for one human being to see the whole of another's heart as it is impossible to see more than a little of the "other side" of the moon. We cannot help being more or less unfeeling, but we can subdue our selfishness in action. Almost everything that can be learned about Jane Austen strengthens the conviction that she was one of the least selfish of women.
In her last illness the fidelity of her spirit is constantly shown, and her affection becomes more unreserved in its utterance. There is one letter wherein, after speaking of Cassandra, she says, in a phrase curiously suggestive of Thackeray: "As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more."
That she was by nature "meek and lowly," as one of her American adorers declares, I cannot believe, but if she preferred the spacious rooms and well-spread board of her brother's mansion to the common parlour and boiled mutton-and-turnips of her father's rectory, she did not grizzle over her state, nor did she allow her conscious superiority of intelligence to claim distinction in her home. One of the few glimpses (apart from her own writings) that we have of her in her family relations is when, in the closing year of her life, her illness having begun to weaken her body, she was obliged to lie down frequently during the day. There was only one sofa at Chawton Cottage, and although Mrs. Austen, in spite of the many ailments she had formerly complained of, was a tolerably healthy old lady, the stricken daughter made herself a couch by putting several chairs together, and declared that she preferred it to the sofa which her mother commonly occupied. Sofas, we must remember, were at least as rare then as oak-panelled walls are now. It was in those days that Cobbett regretted that the sofa had ever been introduced into his country, and he no doubt, according to his habit, held the Prime Minister responsible for the aid to effeminate indulgence of which his contemporary Cowper sang.
Jane's discontent with the comparative poverty of her surroundings was not translated into ill temper. There are many reasons for believing, and few indeed for doubting, that she tried to do her duty in that state of life to which she was born, and from which she was not destined to emerge into the more varied pleasures and pains of a larger world. What if, among those whom she trusted, she could not resist expressing the lively thoughts suggested to her acute wit by the acts or utterances of her friends. She was the pride of her family, and its sunshine, even if her rays were more akin to the sun as we know him on a fine spring day at home than as we seek him on the Côte d'Azur.
She seems to have been more nearly understood among the clergy and squires, and other members of her family, than most humourists in their immediate circles. The common experience of the genius in childhood and youth, if biographers are to be credited, is for the delicate shoots of his intelligence to be nipped by domestic frosts; but if there had been any freezing in the Austen family, it was more likely to be produced by the chill of Jane's own satirical remarks than by any harm that the convention and narrowness of others could do to a mind so well defended as hers. There are few traces of any such wintry weather having occurred at Steventon or Chawton. Jane was certainly beloved, greatly and deservedly, in her home. She was, no doubt, a little lonely, as genius, one may suppose, must always be, and as those who are blest, or curst, with a strong sense of the absurd must be whether they be geniuses or not. Her sister was her closest friend, but Jane's published letters to Cassandra, read in the light of the novels, suggest a reserve in discussing her inmost thoughts with that devoted spirit which seems hardly compatible with the closest concordance of ideas, in spite of the completest concordance of affection and a high respect on Jane's part for Cassandra's sound sense and critical judgment. Very different is the tone of the letters of that other pretty humourist, Dorothy Osborne, to William Temple. In Dorothy's case there was a perfect confidence in the entire sympathy and comprehension of the recipient. This factor apart, how much there is in common between the two dear women. The one was dead more than eighty years before the other was born, but in all the history of womanhood is there any pair in which the smiling philosophy that is the salt of the mind is more fairly divided? Jane Austen lives still in Elizabeth Bennet and in Emma Woodhouse; Dorothy Osborne only in her sweet self. The one had no passion but her work—and it was a quiet, unconsuming passion. The other had no passion but her love, and it was never able to overmaster her intelligence. "In earnest," she wrote, "I am no more concerned whether people think me handsome or ill-favoured, whether they think I have wit or that I have none, than I am whether they think my name Elizabeth or Dorothy." It was not quite true in her case, nor would it have been in Jane's, but it contains no more exaggeration than is allowed to any woman of sense, and it was as true of the one as of the other.
Love has lately been defined by a ruthless analyzer of feelings as "a specific emotion, exclusive in selection, more or less permanent in duration, and due to a mental fermentation in itself caused by a law of attraction." Jane Austen had never read such an explanation of love as this, yet her views on the most powerful of the mixings of animal and spiritual instincts are usually more placid than would please the fancies of maidens who sleep with bits of wedding-cake beneath their pillows. That passionate love "is woman's whole existence" is not exemplified by Jane's favourite heroines. Emma or Elizabeth did not so regard it, even if Anne Elliot did lose some of her good looks and Catherine Morland her appetite when their hopes of particular bridegrooms seemed likely to be disappointed. Elizabeth would not have worried greatly over Darcy if he had not come back for her, and Emma would have been as happy at Hartfield without a husband as she had always been, so long as Knightley was friendly.