Weston, Emma Watson's for an invalided father, there is a reflection of something to be seen in Jane Austen's own life. But to go farther than such speculations, to try to deduce from her novels a personal history of Jane Austen, is completely
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to misunderstand the type of mind she represents.
The creative mind of the first order is infinitely difficult to understand; Dryden understood it when he said of Shakespeare:
"After God, he has created most"; but there are numberless people who say "Anne Elliot must be Jane Austen" because Jane Austen could never otherwise have understood how Anne Elliot would have felt; and the only thing that deters them from believing that
Shakespeare smothered his wife in a fit of jealousy, was deeply distressed by a second marriage of his mother's, murdered a
distinguished guest in the hope of succeeding him in his office, and was finally turned out of doors by his ungrateful children, is that the stories of Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear were published and widely known before he undertook them.
The highest type of creative genius owes to daily life at once everything and nothing; its implements, its medium, are supplied by observation of the topical existence, but its inspiration lies in the fact that owing to some extraordinary lusus naturae it is in touch with something that encompasses us but that the rest of us do not see; racial memory or basic consciousness, one knows not how to name this vantage ground, and dark as it is to us, there is no doubt that it was equally so to the conscious mind of its possessors. But when they postulated to themselves a human being in a particular situation, something nameless whispered to them all the rest. How else could Shakespeare, three hundred years before anyone had investigated the working of the subconscious mind, have understood that though
Lady Macbeth had urged her husband not to be appalled by blood, which a little water could wash away, yet when her conscious mind was asleep, she was haunted by the nightmare that she would never get the bloodstains off her hands? When Macaulay
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mentioned Shakespeare and Jane Austen in the same breath, he did not suppose it necessary to state the obvious differences of their art and scope; admirers of Jane Austen understand what he meant in making the comparison, and feel that however far apart they stand, the two share the quality, in however differing degrees, of creating character.
It is this most unusual caliber of mind that she possessed which is the inmost secret of her skill and explains, insofar as words can explain, the miracle of her achievement; and an attempt to
understand it, however faintly, provides a strong warning against the folly and the uselessness of attempting to establish definite
connections between the world she lived in and the world of her imagination. Her creation is as much like the world of her experience as one human being is like another, in that they are both
recognizable as belonging to the same species; but two human
beings are not, in any other sense, the same.
One may, however, trace the sort of experience which, germinating in her mind, told her what hope was, and despair, and comfort and joy and every emotion, not as it shows itself in some superhuman form, but as it affects the so-called ordinary man and woman.
In December 1797, a month after the refusal of Messrs. Cadell to read First Impressions, Eliza de Feuillide was brought, not without some latent misgiving that she might be throwing herself away, to marry Henry Austen. Their courtship had been most characteristic of Eliza, and perhaps of the kind exactly calculated to increase the ardor and determination of a man so volatile and light-hearted. The handsome, brilliant, amusing Henry had to be serious, perhaps even distraught, for once in his life, before he could be "immeasurably enlarged into a husband" and Madame de Feuillide permitted herself to dwindle into a wife. To woo
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Eliza was like attempting to hold the wind in a net. Eliza wrote to Phila Walter on the subject: "I do not believe the parties will ever come together; not, however, that they have quarelled; but one of them cannot bring her mind to give up dear Liberty and yet dearer Flirtation. After a few months' stay in the country she sometimes thinks it possible to undertake sober matrimony, but a few weeks'
stay in London convinces her how little the state suits her taste." But in December of 1797 the marriage took place; Eliza announced it in a letter to Warren Hastings, in which she mentioned that Henry was fond of little Hastings de Feuillide, and, she was sure, would make him a good father. She said that the courtship in which she had at last acquiesced had been going on for two years.
Henry at the time of the wedding was a Captain in the Oxfordshire Militia, but he presently turned his attention to a more lucrative profession, and five years afterwards he was established as the partner of a brother officer named Maunde, as a banker and army agent with offices in Albany Street; he and Eliza lived in Upper Berkeley Street, and Mrs. Henry Austen continued, if on a slightly smaller scale, the social existence of the Comtesse de Feuillide. In the month of their marriage she was still writing a reference to Henry as "my cousin," adding, "I have an aversion to the word husband, and never make use of it." But in fact she and Henry were very happy. James had once wanted to marry Eliza, and she had refused him on the ground that he was a clergyman; such was her ostensible reason, but a profound instinct lay behind it. James, deeply
emotional though of a quiet disposition, and of an earnest turn to his whole nature, that sometimes made him awkward and ungracious in his behavior, would never have endured Eliza's manner of life when the first enchantment of her presence had worn
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off; nor would Eliza, quick and cool, have felt equal to the demands of James' grave, romantic nature; but to Henry, who liked society and shone in it, who was naturally cheerful and whose feelings were acute rather than deep, she was ideally suited. There was nothing in him that she could torment him upon, and for being perverse and cross with no reason at all, she herself was too rational, too elegant, with too much savoir vivre.
The only cloud upon the happiness of her second married life was that in 1801 poor little Hastings de Feuillide died of epilepsy.
Warren Hastings had been acquitted at the close of his seven years'
trial, six years before, but he was still a figure of public interest, and the death of his small namesake was recorded in The Gentleman's Magazine.
In the next year Jane began a story of a young girl who, having been brought up in a remote country parsonage, was taken for a season to Bath. This city was well known to Jane, because Mrs. Austen's
sister, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, and her husband, had a house, No. 1
Paragon, near the upper end of the town, and the family from
Steventon frequently stayed with them. Visits to Bath in these circumstances were not the unmixed delight they would otherwise have been to Cassandra and Jane. Jane Leigh Perrot and her husband were devoted to each other, and she was attached to her sister-in-law Austen and her family and meant to be kind to them all; but her manner was not prepossessing, and her temper was rather gloomy and uncertain. Her nieces, accustomed to the affectionate, gracious, unconstrained atmosphere of home, could not be happy with their aunt, though their natural sense of justice gave her credit for meaning to do well by them. Jane Austen suffered fools gladly, but she did find it hard to bear a harsh, uncompromising behavior, however it was supposed to conceal a heart of gold. Nevertheless
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she knew she owed a good deal to Mrs. Leigh Perrot's kindness. As an unmarried girl she could not go to stay at places by herself; she could not get to Bath except as somebody's guest, unless one of her relations wanted to take the waters and brought her with them, and Bath, for anyone to whom it did not spell rheumatism, gout or
gravel, was a terrestrial paradise of gaiety, with plays, concerts and balls far superior to anything a country town could produce; with crescents and a circus of houses more beautiful than anything in London, and without Londo
n's bewildering vastness, noise and dirt; and, above all, ample arrangements for loitering and lounging in public, for the convenience of invalids and the dissipation of everybody else--the Pump Room, the Abbey yard, the colonnaded
shop fronts, the public libraries, some displaying jewelry and toys among the latest novels, and others where people went to skim over the newspapers. That exciting contrast of town and country, lost now when towns straggle out in miles of suburbs which eat up the
intervening greenery, was particularly marked in Bath, where
Lansdowne Hill rises behind the highest crescent, and on the
opposite rim of the cup Beechen Cliff rears its bold masses of foliage, shivering and whispering when one stands beneath them, but sculptured by distance to immobility.
Jane chose a heroine for this novel with a healthy love of pleasure, an enthusiasm for dancing and novels and dearest friends and the society of young men, and with just that degree of naïveté that enhance the bustle and elegance of Bath into something absolutely glamorous. The exquisite naturalness of this story of a girl's holiday owes some of its convincingness at least to the manner in which, by touches so small and yet so sure, Jane Austen calls up around her walks and streets and buildings in so solid a form that when
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one visits those parts of Bath mentioned in Northanger Abbey after one had read the book, the experience strikes one as a confirmation.
Jane had been staying at No. 1 Paragon in the early part of 1798; in the early autumn she paid a visit of greater interest. Edward Austen's adopted father was dead, and Mrs. Knight now made over to Edward the great houses of Godmersham and Chawton. She wished the
property to be administered as well as it had been in her husband's time, and thought it better for the tenants and the neighborhood that Godmersham should be inhabited by Edward and his growing family rather than by the small establishment of a widow. In October Mr.
and Mrs. Austen with Cassandra and Jane paid their first visit to Edward as the master of Godmersham. The house, some eight miles from Canterbury, stands in a beautifully timbered park. The most striking feature of the wide-stretched, white, classical building is the central hall, paved with marble, into which open four great rooms, through lofty arched doorways, flanked by white, fluted columns supporting a pediment over each lintel. The drawing room has
windows down to the floor, which command a view of rising
ground, well wooded.
Edward and Elizabeth had four children at present: Fanny, aged five; Edward, four; George, three; and the baby William. Jane was fond of all the children, though she did not yet know how fond she was to be of Fanny; at the moment her special pet was Georgie, called Dordy by himself and her. So much of Elizabeth's time was taken up in lyingin, and in caring for the children, that Cassandra's presence in the household was most welcome as a companion to Edward and a
help to her mild and beautiful sister-in-law. On the occasion of this visit the party had to leave Cassandra behind them, and when they stopped at Dartford on the journey
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home Jane wrote her a note from the parlor of the "Bull and George." The weather had been pleasant, and she used a happy word to describe it. "We had one heavy shower on leaving Sittingbourne, but afterwards the clouds cleared away and we had a very bright chrystal afternoon." As she wrote, her mother was sitting by the fire, and the Rev. George Austen was reading The Midnight Bell. She said that she should have begun to write the letter before, but she had been detained by discovering that her writing and dressing boxes had been put by mistake into a chaise which was just packing up when their own arrived at the inn, "and were driven away towards Gravesend on their road to the West Indies." But a man on horseback was sent out after them, and "they were got about two or three miles off." She added in a postscript: "I flatter myself that itty Dordy will not forget me at least under a week. Kiss him for me."
The following Saturday she wrote in answer to a long letter from Cassandra. Mrs. Austen had not borne the journey well and had been obliged to send for Mr. Lyford, the apothecary, when they got home.
He prescribed laudanum as a composer, and Jane, in Cassandra's absence, had the dignity of dropping it out. She had bought some flannel--a stuff which, with her mania for elegance, she could not take much interest in. She said: "I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Cassandra's letter had mentioned George, and she said: "My dear itty Dordy's remembrance of me is very pleasing to me--foolishly pleasing
because I know it will be over so soon. My attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manners till a few years have turned him into an ungovernable, ungracious fellow."
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And then she made a remark which to those who do not like Jane Austen is better known than anything in Pride and Prejudice. "Mrs.
Hall of Sherborne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband." She was thinking, not of the dead baby, but of the father's ugliness. The very thoughtlessness of the thing is its excuse, but the sentence is an unfortunate one, and those who, at twenty-three, have never been guilty of an unfeeling remark about a stranger, do quite right to be very severe upon it.
Meantime, James and Mary were expecting a baby. In November
Cassandra was still at Godmersham, and Jane wrote to say that she and her father had been over to see Mary, "who is still plagued with rheumatism, which she would be very glad to get rid of, and still more glad to get rid of her child, of whom she is heartily tired." The high maternal mortality of the time made the birth of the first child a matter of grave anxiety. Jane went on: "I believe I never told you that Mrs. Coulthard and Ann, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in child-bed. We have not regaled Mary with this news."
Happily, before the letter was sent off she was able to add a few lines saying that James had just sent a note to say that Mary had had a fine little boy at eleven the night before, and both were going on very well. Mrs. Austen had sensibly declared that she wished to know nothing about it till it was over, and Jane had managed to keep the news from getting to her although it was known in the house that Mary had been taken ill. Cassandra wrote to Deane at once, and Jane's next letter to her began: "I expected to have heard from you this morning, but no letter is come. I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary's children, if instead of
thanking me for
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the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James." She had been over to Deane, and had a glimpse of the baby; he was asleep, but the nurse told her that "his eyes were large, dark and handsome."
Mary was getting on wonderfully well, but Jane said she "does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself."
Mary was not tidy or elegant, very different from Elizabeth in the luxurious surroundings of Godmersham, who had looked so pretty in her draperies of immaculate white.
Jane had made some drawings for Georgie, which had been sent
under cover to his Aunt Cassandra. She thought that really they would have answered George's purpose as well if they had been less carefully finished, but, she said, "an artist cannot do anything slovenly."
The letters are filled with domestic news. The Rev. George Austen and Edward used the correspondence of the girls to exchange news about their livestock. Jane said: "You must tell Edward that my father gives 25s. a piece to Seward for his last lot of sheep: and in return for this news, my father wishes to receive some of Edward's pigs." The reply was satisfactory. "My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward's pigs and desires he may be told, as
encouragement to his taste for them, that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in his pigs, has had pig-stys of a most elegant
construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises."
As the daughters of the Rectory, they visited the cottagers in Steventon, and with Cassandra away, the whole of this duty
devolved on Jane. "I called yesterday on Betty Londe, who enquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her so very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, from which I will profit. I will send George another picture when
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I write next." She and Cassandra had each a stock of clothes, which they were continually making or collecting to give away; she asked Cassandra on one occasion whether she should give one of the
village women something from Cassandra's store. On Christmas Eve she wrote: "I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins."
Mrs. Austen's health was still unsettled, and earlier in the month Mr.
Lyford had been with her again; he did not seem quite to know what to make of Mrs. Austen's symptoms. Jane said: "He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither."
Mrs. Lefroy had been to see them, and Jane had managed to secure her to herself for some part of the visit. Mrs. Lefroy did not mention Tom, and Jane was too proud to ask after him, but presently Mr.
Austen inquired for him, and then she heard that he had gone back to Ireland, where he had been called to the Bar and meant to practice.
But Mrs. Lefroy did mention someone whom she thought Jane
would hear of without even a momentary agitation; she had with her a letter from a young Mr. Blackall, a Fellow of Emmanuel, who had been staying with her husband, and who had shown a good deal of pleasure in Jane's society. Jane had quite liked Mr. Blackall, but he was, albeit, goodnatured, noisy and self-assertive, and a little too fond of instructing the ladies. That her simple, gay and friendly manner gave him no suspicion of her opinion is seen by the fact that Mr. Blackall would have liked, if his circumstances had allowed it, to have prosecuted his acquaintance with the Austen family, as he said in the letter, "with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest." But, he said, he could at present see no prospect of being able to do so. Mrs. Lefroy
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