The death of Elizabeth Austen had far-reaching consequences in her own family. It meant, for one thing, the end of Fanny's childhood, and that before she was sixteen she was the mistress of
Godmersham, responsible for her father's comfort, and for that of her brothers and sisters, of whom the youngest was a few weeks old. It also affected Edward with a desire to have his sisters, the aunts of his children, somewhat nearer to him. They had been thinking of a
remove from Southampton. The Frank Austens now had a baby,
Mary Jane, born in 1808; in 1809 they were to have another, Francis.
Charles also was married. In 1807 he had married Frances Palmer, the daughter of the Governor General of Bermuda, and their
daughter, Cassy, was born in 1808; Cassandra and Jane were the only unattached members of the family. An independent
establishment for them with their mother and Martha Lloyd was
desirable, and Edward wanted it to be near him. He offered his mother a choice of two small houses, one near the grounds of
Godmersham, the other at Chawton, opposite the Great House.
There were many reasons for their preferring the latter. Jane called their branch of the family "the Hampshire-born Austens," and it was an attractive proposal that they should be once more settled near to Steventon and Deane. Godmersham was lovely in itself, but to Jane at least the neighborhood outside it was not so pleasing as that of Alton and Basingstoke. She did not like Canterbury. And there was
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another consideration; so large a family as the Austens and their connections made up provided in itself a society, and a most
agreeable one, outside which its members scarcely needed to go for variety and amusement. They all felt that it was so, but family tradition says that Jane was the most keenly alive to it, and thought the tendency should be strenuously withstood. However deep one's private attachments might be, however much one felt that the truest pleasure could only be found at home, any feelings which caused one to appear abstracted, or inattentive to the claims of society as a whole, seemed wrong to her. There was a moral reason for the view-
-that of doing one's duty by one's neighbor; their was also a social reason--no normal person could lead a full and happy life confined to one circle, however pleasing and attractive its members might be; but there was yet another reason, though perhaps unconsciously felt-
-such a preoccupation with the affairs of one's own family was against the interests of vitality, and counter to the artist's instinct for self-preservation. Had she and Cassandra been established at the gates of Godmersham, they would have been out of their own house much oftener than they were in it; their whole lives would have been absorbed, a willing, eager sacrifice to the interests, cares and pleasures of somebody else. Whereas at Chawton, not removed and yet detached, they stood upon their own feet, the center of their individual sphere, and radiated their influence instead of being drawn into another orbit. When one considers that Pride and Prejudice was rewritten, and Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion actually composed in that cottage built upon the side of the village street, one realizes something of its significance as a home, and may believe that, however unknown to herself, Jane Austen's mind was actively working in its own best interests when she gave her
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voice in the family discussion as to which of Edward's offers they should accept.
She longed to go to Chawton, as soon as it was decided that they should. Cassandra was at Godmersham in December 1808, and
Jane's letters were frequently interspersed with talk of what they should do in their new home. They would certainly have a piano, as good a one as could be got for thirty guineas, and Jane promised herself to practice country dances, to be able to provide amusement for the nephews and nieces. Their change of home was already being discussed by their connections. The present Rector of Chawton, Mr.
Papillon, was a bachelor, and old Mrs. Knight thought it would be a good thing for Jane to marry him. Jane said: "I am very much obliged to Mrs. Knight for such a proof of the interest she takes in me, and she may depend upon it that I will marry Mr. Papillon, whatever may be his reluctance or my own."
At Godmersham, the ten-year-old William, who had been kept
indoors with a cold, had found great comfort in his cross-stitch; he was now working a footstool for Chawton. Jane said: "We shall never have the heart to put our feet on it. I believe I must work a muslin cover in satin stitch to keep it from the dirt. I long to know what his colors are--I guess greens and purples." She hoped they would be in the cottage "in time for Henry to come to us for some shooting in October at least;--but a little earlier, and Edward may visit us after taking his boys back to Winchester." Meantime they were having a last fling at the gaieties of Southampton. She meant to make up a party for a play; she thought Martha ought to see the inside of the theater before she left, and Jane imagined that one visit would be enough. She and Martha went to some of the assemblies.
Of one of them she said: "It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years
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ago!--I thought it all over,--and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then." She went on: "You will not expect to hear that I was asked to dance, but I was--by the gentleman whom we met that Sunday with Captain D'Auvergne." At another one she was so well entertained she would have liked to stay longer "but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them waiting in the cold. The room was tolerably full, and the ball was opened by Miss Glyn;--the Miss Lances had partners, Captain D'Auvergne's friend appeared in regimentals. Caroline Maitland had an officer to flirt with, and Mr. John Harrison was deputed by Captain Smith, being himself absent, to ask me to dance. Everything went well, you see, especially after we had tucked Mrs. Lance's neckerchief in behind, and fastened it with a pin." She regarded a ball now as more in the nature of a party, when people of her age were occasionally asked to dance but expected more of their entertainment in the tea and card room or among the spectators' benches; but she delighted to hear of Anna, whose dancing season had just begun. Anna had been to a ball at Manydown, which turned out to be a very small affair.
Jane was glad Anna had enjoyed it, but she said: "At her age it would not have done for me." Anna had been to a much bigger one afterwards, and sent Jane a "very full and agreeable account of it."
"The grandeur of the meeting," said Jane, "was beyond my hopes. I should like to have seen Anna's looks and performance--but that sad cropped head must have injured the former."
In January, Henry was at Godmersham, and when Jane had a letter from Charles, she said she should say as little about it as possible, as
"that excruciating Henry" was sure to have had one too, and would make her information valueless.
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The letter was from Bermuda, and all were well. She reproached Cassandra with not returning her a due amount of news. Something had been in the air about Edward Cooper's sermons being published, but had Cassandra told her anything of it? "I tell you everything, and it is unknown the mysteries you conceal from me."
Jane's passion for news was insatiable, not only for receiving but for giving it; but fond as she was of writing letters she sometimes felt she had had enough. "As for Martha, she had not the least chance in the world of hearing from me again, and I wonder at her impudence in proposing it.--I assure you I am as tired of writing long letters as you can be. What a pity that one should still be so fond of receiving them." Another time she concluded a letter with saying: "Distribute the affectionate love of a heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it."
The letters of Jane Austen will always be a source of controversy, for a sound judgment of them is rendered impossible from the start.
Most collections of letters are edited for publication, but hers is the only one which has been given to the public on the understanding that everything of an interest
ing nature has been first cut out. What remains is, to some readers, trivial and flat, its insipidity relieved only by touches of startling frankness and that remorseless clarity of perception and expression that will always make some people
uncomfortable. The intrinsic merits of the letters can be decided only by the reader's personal taste. No one would read them for a picture of the age, for they are the letters that are written in every age and have been since letter-writing began. Nor do they convey, as Byron's letters convey, a complete and instantaneous portrait of the writer. At best they give a sidelight only on Jane Austen's character. Here and there, as when she writes to the Prince Regent's
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librarian or to a schoolboy nephew, an objective impression of the writer's personality emerges for a moment; but the vast majority of the letters were written to someone with whom her intimacy was so complete that, as regards normal daily life, everything but trivial detail was too well known to need or to be capable of expression.
The mass of small and disintegrated detail, of persons, places, episodes and anecdotes, appears, on a casual reading, unintelligible; but the notes supplied by Dr. Chapman cause such a blossoming of comprehension in the reader's mind that it is possible under its influence to see, however obliquely, something of the letters' value to their original recipient. That Jane Austen herself regarded them as of no importance and was even dismayed at the idea of anyone else's doing otherwise was shown when she heard how much Fanny
Austen cherished her letters. She wrote to Cassandra: "I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write--but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning criticism may not hurt my style."
She would have been considerably embarrassed if she had known
that in 1930 one of her letters was to be sold for a thousand pounds.
To those who are fond of Jane Austen the letters need no apology, for even without the elucidation of Dr. Chapman's notes they provide a treasury of interest and delight, shot through as they are with sentences that cast a ray of light on something that she saw or felt, a country walk in a hard frost or on roads disagreeable with wet and dirt, a hamper of apples to be unpacked, a leaky store closet, a gown or a pair of shoes, the comings and goings of her family, the
occasional outbreak into words of her love for Cassandra. "Adieu, sweet You!" But they have an importance for even the indifferent reader: they reveal how much conscious art went to the formation of the novels.
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The letters are an expression, as it were, of the raw material, unsifted and unrefined, out of which the novels were composed. They are exquisitely written, with a racy, careless perfection the novels themselves do not surpass; but there is an earthiness about some of them which the novels, despite their directness of attack, do not smack of; yet such is the intense vitality of the latter, it implies in their author a full apprehension of life, an outspoken plainness in her own consciousness, at least. One of the erasures made by Cassandra Austen suggests that the sisters spoke plainly to each other of their bodily functions. Of a lady whose family increased too fast Jane said: "Good Mrs. D! I hope she will get the better of this Marianne, and then I would recommend to her and Mr. D the simple regimen of separate rooms." Visiting a young Craven at a fashionable boarding school, she said: "The appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like, amused me very much . . . if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the mantelpiece, which must be a fine study for the girls, one would never have smelt instruction." Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot would not have made these remarks, but Jane Austen was not either of these women; she was the person who created them both, and that was a very different matter.
But the most striking aspect of the letters so far as their relation to the novels is concerned is their very lack of objective
impressiveness. In a letter written daily to Cassandra everything was merely noted down. Cassandra knew the people and the scenes of which Jane wrote as well as Jane knew them herself, and the simple mention of them was enough to bring the living image before
Cassandra's mind. In a novel, where the reader knew nothing but from the author's information, every detail must be charged with significance, every word must tell. A comparison of one of
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the letters with the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice conveys some idea, however inadequate, of the concentration of energy
which has gone to form the work of art.
The making of verses was a social pastime in an age without
mechanical amusement. Jane Austen had no talent for poetry though she wrote excellent charades, spirited and neat. To congratulate Captain Frank Austen on the birth of his son she wrote an entire letter in doggerel, quite as bad as anyone's sister might have written; but though she could not carry her extraordinary felicity into rhyme, one set of verses remains which shows that what she felt
passionately she could express with simplicity. On her thirty-third birthday, the third anniversary of Mrs. Lefroy's death, she wrote a short poem expressing the hope that when she was dead she might see Mrs. Lefroy again.
From her writing it is easier to see how much the world about her cared for poetry rather than the extent to which she cared for it herself; but one may judge how well the revivers of Shakespeare had done their work when in 1813 Henry Crawford was made to say:
"Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. He is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct." Jane Austen herself had had an education in poetry in common with the circle in which she moved. She thought that one of Edward's visitors must be a man of taste because she saw him in the Godmersham library reading Milton. One might have
expected that she herself would have been a whole-hearted admirer of Pope. It is true that by the end of the eighteenth century Pope's great fame had suffered an overthrow correspondingly complete; but in spite of the lack of sentiment, the indifference to natural beauty, and the use of clichés derived
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from classical literature which obliged Marianne Dashwood to make sure, before capitulating altogether to the charm of Willoughby, that he admired Pope "no more than was proper," one might have supposed that some of his qualities would have kindled a responsive admiration in Jane Austen; his delineation of character, conveyed, as in a streak of lightning, his devastating satire and the diamond-like lucidity of his expression. Some of his couplets are what, had she been a poet, she might have written herself, such as
Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
But the only sign of familiarity with them that she gives is one misquotation, in a letter, from the Essay on Man, and a quotation from the Elegy of an Unfortunate Lady which she cites as one of the tags that formed Catherine Morland's education. Her indifference speaks much for the truth of the tradition that James Austen helped to form her taste, and perhaps it is a rebuke to our tendency to fit a character to the Procrustean bed of a previous conception; perhaps we can learn something of importance about Jane Austen from the conclusion that she admired Pope "no more than was proper."
The same passage in Northanger Abbey makes perfunctory mention of Thomson, and though much of Thomson's work would have
become ponderous to a circle attuned to the simplicity of Gray and Cowper, many passages of the Claude of Poets, his descriptions of meadows in the spring evening and the autumn woods, "a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun," could not but give pleasure to one who thought that beauty of landscape must make one of the joys of
Heaven.
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Her genuine criticism is, in an intesting manner enough, reserved for the poets contemporary with herself. Burns, if one may accept the opinion of Sanditon's heroine as her own, she admired but thought too rough and profligate to be considered as of the first rank. The conversation of Anne Elliot and Ca
ptain Benwick was upon "the richness of the present age" in poetry, but they confined themselves to Scott and Byron. Jane Austen said on first hearing Marmion that she did not know whether she liked the poem or not, but afterwards her favorable opinion of it increased, and she demanded praise for having sent her copy of it abroad to Charles. Anne Elliot's gentle hint to the lovelorn Captain Benwick, apropos of Lord Byron's
"impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony" that she thought it the
"misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly," is beautifully in harmony with the characters, their previous history and the scene; it was what Anne Elliot would have thought, and it was advice sorely needed by Captain Benwick; but that Jane Austen herself could be credited with such extreme
sensibility to Byron's poetry seems doubtful. Her one reference to him in the published correspondence is as follows: "I have read The Corsair and mended my petticoat and have nothing else to do."
It is difficult today to associate the mass of Cowper's neat and thoughtful verse with ardent, youthful enthusiasm, yet Marianne Dashwood said she had been "driven nearly wild" by his lines--
perhaps it was The Castaway she was thinking of rather than The Sofa. But strange as it seems to us that lovers of poetry were once ravished with enthusiasm for Cowper's work, it is partly explained by the fact that the
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readers of 1800, though in full revolt against the conventions of the Augustan age, had had as yet no opportunity of reading Keats or Shelley, or even Scott and Byron. Lyrical Ballads had been published in 1798, but the newness of Wordsworth's style made it at first a sealed book to the common readers. Cowper gave them the ideas and feelings of sensibility, clothed in a language which, though to them it appeared the perfection of simplicity after the tarnished splendors of poetic diction, was more comfortably close to what they were used to, than the disconcerting nakedness of Wordsworth.
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