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  Harville, may be judged from the anecdotes given by Lord

  Brabourne. Sir Francis Austen was once on board, watching one of his officers taking a swim, when he saw that the bather was being pursued by a shark, and ejaculated with his usual precision: "Mr.

  Pakenham, you are in danger of a shark--a shark of the blue

  species!" From the Admiral's measured utterance, Mr. Pakenham thought he must be joking, and was only induced to come on board in the nick of time. On another occasion Sir Francis Austen took a chronometer back for inspection to the maker from whom he had

  had it five years before. "Well, Sir Francis," said the maker complacently, "it seems to have varied none at all!""Yes," said Sir Francis, "it has varied-- eight seconds!"

  On the question of Jane Austen's being identified with Anne Elliot, we need only ask, could Anne Elliot have written Pride and Prejudice? Anne Elliot's charms did not include vivacity and brilliance; she was clear-sighted and sensible, but her powers of judgment did not take the form of a startling insight into other people's characters; she could never have maintained a conversation such as Emma had with Mr. Knightley, or laughed at and with

  Captain Wentworth as Elizabeth's liveliness played over Mr. Darcy.

  Then we have a glimpse of what Anne Elliot had been at school; when Mrs. Smith first knew her she was a "blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen." Jane Austen, as a child, was blooming, indeed; but neither silent nor unformed. At twelve she was annoying Phila Walter with her airs; at fourteen she was writing Love and Friendship. But, at the same time, Jane Austen's own experience has left its mark on the

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  book, though not through the method of being transferred to it. If she had never known what it was to love, she could not have known

  what love meant to Anne Elliot, and the effort she had once been obliged to make so that no one but Cassandra should know how

  desperately unhappy she was, had told her what fortitude meant, in a daily round that was lived through at home, in close family

  intercourse, without the relief of outside employment. But she had recovered in a way that was not possible to such a nature as Anne Elliot's; it was true that she had refused Mr. Bigg Wither, as Anne had refused Charles Musgrove. But whereas Anne could never have loved again, Jane Austen in her own person boldly rebutted the idea that one could be blighted for life by such an incident. As she said to Fanny Knight: "It is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody." She said of Anne Elliot that the "only thoroughly natural, happy and sufficient cure," a second attachment, had not been possible to her, because the limited society in which she moved did not provide anybody whom she

  could love. The author therefore was prepared to believe that

  circumstances made a second attachment impossible to Anne Elliot; but Anne herself did not believe that her actual marriage with Captain Wentworth would have cut her off from other men more

  decidedly than her own feelings for him; and the differentiation between the character of the author and the creature of the author's mind is sealed by what Jane Austen said to Fanny about the novel:

  "You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me."

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  19

  MR. JOHN MURRAY owned the Quarterly Review. He had

  founded it in 1809, partly in opposition to the spirit of the Edinburgh Review, which to the list of its victims and opponents had added Sir Walter Scott. The fact that John Murray had published Emma was no doubt responsible for the novel's being reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly, but Scott's own appreciation of Jane Austen made his tribute a willing one. The actual review of Emma, however, is not so enthusiastic but that one believes that Mr. Jeffreys, who had been kept up by the novel for three nights, might have treated it rather better in the Edinburgh. Scott's review took the form of a discussion of Jane Austen's work as a whole; he celebrated the fact that she had developed and crystallized by her art that form of fiction which, he said, "has arisen almost in our own time, and which draws the character and incidents introduced more immediately from the

  current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel." Speaking particularly of Emma, he said that the novel showed the fault to which this form of fiction was liable: that though Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates were admirably presented, we saw

  too much of them, and therefore they were apt to become as tedious as they

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  would have been in real life. But though we may think the review deficient in appreciation, Jane Austen did not. For the first years of its appearance, Mr. Murray found it very difficult to produce the Quarterly at the date on which it should properly have appeared; and therefore, though Scott's review had been written in 1815, it did not appear till March of 1816. Murray sent Jane Austen a copy of the review, and on April 1st she returned it with her thanks, saying: "The authoress of Emma has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it"; but she was distressed that Scott, in referring as he did to Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, had omitted all mention of Mansfield Park. "I cannot but be sorry," she said, "that so clever a man as the reviewer of Emma should consider it unworthy of being noticed." But she leaves the topic immediately

  "You will be pleased to hear," she goes on, "that I have received the Prince's thanks for the handsome copy I sent him of Emma.

  Whatever he may think of my share of the work, yours seems to

  have been quite right."

  But, as not infrequently happens, the judgment of the critic when privately expressed is a good deal warmer than that which he permits himself to print. Nine years after Jane Austen's death Scott wrote in his diary the appreciative comment of her work which, rather than the Quarterly article, has become the accepted expression of his opinion. On March 14th, 1826, he recorded: "Read again for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had 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 ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the

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  description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" When Mr. Edward Austen Leigh visited Abbotsford after Scott's death, he was shown Scott's own edition of Jane Austen's works; he noticed how well-worn the

  volumes were; as "an unusual favor" he was allowed to take one of them into his hands.

  When Scott referred to "that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting," he laid his finger on one of the most integral aspects of Jane Austen's art, and that one in relation to which the story of her life is the most important.

  The occult power of creating human personality--the rarest form of literary genius--which invests Jane Austen's work with its

  extraordinary nature, was a part of her with which, so to speak, she had nothing to do. Her conscious effort was merely directed to the exercising of it to what seemed to her the best advantage. The genius seems, in most cases, to be born with some self-protective

  consciousness, which enables him to adopt the conditions necessary to the producing of his work. It may be that those conditions involve a complete overthrowing of the conventional régime of existence; or it may be that, as in Jane Austen's case, he escapes the interference of the world by so identifying himself with ordinary life that he avoids its observation altogether. However much the methods differ, the end is always the same. To keep yourself unspotted from the world is not only true religion before God; it is also one of the first necessities of art. The injunction does not imply a separation of the artist from the world, but quite the contrary; in fact it may be doubted whether those great souls who are obliged to retreat to uninhabited localities and shake off the restrain
ts of civilization before they can put pen to paper have very much strength of creative impulse behind their work.

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  But it does imply that he must have the strength of mind and the desire to work irrespective of the intoxication of popular success. It would scarcely be denied that the majority of successful writers have not this strength and this desire, and the popular writers of today are more severely handicapped than those of fifty years ago, because the machinery of publicity has become so highly organized. Of

  publicity, we might say, what Burns said of adultery, that:

  "It hardens all within, and petrifies the feeling."

  The method of expression imposed upon Jane Austen, by

  circumstance and personal choice, was one particularly liable to injury from the distortion of existence incurred by becoming a celebrity. If she had not been a genius, but merely a very talented writer, she would not, could not, have withstood the poison of success. Her persistent refusal to be known as an authoress, her anonymous publications, her distress at Henry Austen's revealing her identity, her gratitude to Captain Frank Austen for keeping it a secret, seem incomprehensible to many people of today. There was, it is true, an inducement to a woman writer then to preserve her anonymity which now barely exists. The female novelist and poet and writer of belles lettres was not then the accepted creature that she is today. In 1820 the gentle Charles Lamb was expressing the following views: he spoke of Mrs. Inchbald, the translator of Lover's Vows, as "the only endurable clever woman he had ever known"; the others as "impudent, forward, unfeminine, unhealthy in their minds."

  Of Letitia Landon he said: "If she belonged to me, I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think."

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  At the same time, the prejudice against women writers was not

  universal, as may be seen by the brilliant success of Fanny Burney, and the praise which Jane Austen received from men even during her lifetime. Had she wished to appear before the world as a novelist, and to taste in her own person the pleasures of celebrity, she could have done it. Not only could she have developed her acquaintance with Mr. Clarke, whom she had completely fascinated, and through him made her entrée into a very distinguished circle of literary society; it was her own positive refusal that prevented her doing so as it was. While she was with Henry in London on the occasion of her visit to Carlton House, Henry was approached by "a nobleman"

  whose name, in repeating the anecdote, he did not give. This

  gentleman was giving a party at his town house, at which Madame de Staël was to be present. Madame de Staël had said that she would very much like the opportunity of meeting Miss Jane Austen. The host was very anxious to meet her also. Would she therefore come to the party? She refused to do so without a moment's hesitation.

  Considering Jane's fondness for parties and social amusements, and how gladly she would have gone in the ordinary way with Henry to escort her, her refusal is significant. It was not the company she demurred at; she would have been quite at ease, in her unassuming way; she would have been interested enough to see Madame de Staël if she could have done so as an onlooker. It was the fact of having to appear as an author that made her reject the idea instinctively; and the incident suggests how mistaken those writers are who, in

  deploring her early death, say that had she lived longer she would have been able to emerge from her obscurity into a round of

  lunching and dining with the great.

  Her immediate sensation in recoiling from the position

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  she would naturally have held was no doubt one of unaffected

  modesty; she delighted to hear of praise, but she did not want to receive it in person; but whatever the conscious motive which led her to refuse to enter society as an authoress, she was actually obeying a profound instinct of self-preservation. The resolute determination never to relinquish the vantage ground of the ordinary human being had always possessed her. It accounted for her

  otherwise extraordinary attitude to Cassandra. Caroline Austen remembered that when she asked her Aunt Jane to tell her anything or explain anything to her, her Aunt Jane, in giving the required explanation, always said that Aunt Cassandra knew much more

  about the matter than she did, or could have explained it better. She invariably represented her sister as wiser, better informed, more important in every respect than she was herself; nor can one doubt that she really thought so. Affectation was as foreign to her as conceit. But it was not love and admiration only which guided her opinion; it was the need to take shelter behind another person, so that undue prominence and attention should not have to be supported by herself. Henry Austen said that nothing would have persuaded his sister, had she lived, to allow any of her novels to be published under her own name, and similarly, one feels nothing would have induced her to accept a position, even in her family, in which she had to support a well-defined attitude, or to be anything but the most natural and simple of human beings; such a position would have been abhorrent to her conscious mind, and it would have threatened that capacity of vision that was the inspiration of her art.

  That, as a private individual, she was not of a retiring nature, is shown by the keen pleasure she took in social events, in the daily intercourse of family and friends. Her

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  life and her work cannot really be described as in accord, because no external mode of life could suggest that extraordinary method which she practiced of selecting from a range of imaginative experience those details which are so profoundly significant that they carry with them depth upon depth of implication, and are yet displayed so artlessly that it is only the impact of the whole which leads one gradually to apprehend the adamantine solidity and strength of its construction. But from a superficial point of view her experience of life may be recognized as providing the texture of the backgrounds of her stories, and her acutely sensitive reactions to the social scene about her were what she guarded by her humility. She had the love of the children; her presence at Godmersham and Steventon could not but make a joyous stir; but, generally speaking, the scene did not alter because she came upon it; that was why she could see it with such undisturbed clarity. It is a favorite pastime to try to establish how much of it in actual detail she converted to her own use. The scarlet strawberries discovered at Chawton perhaps gave the idea of Mrs. Elton's strawberry party; the apricot detected on one of the trees, that of Mrs. Norris' acrimonious discussion with Dr. Grant.

  The fact that she thought Charles Austen's children not in such "good order" as they ought to be and easily might be, is perhaps reflected in the behavior of little Walter Musgrove, who would climb on to his aunt's back as she was kneeling by his sick brother; an accident to the Austen's connection, Fanny Cage, who was taken to the White Hart and suffered dreadfully from the noise, may have had some share in the description of Louisa Musgrove's convalescence, in which she could not bear even the sudden shutting of a door. Jane Austen's desire to drive out in the phaeton of the somewhat

  disreputable gentleman at Bath may have had some bearing on Cathe rine

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  Morland's adventures with John Thorpe. The topaz cross, and the delights of having home a young midshipman brother who was

  vigorously fond of dancing, had indubitably made their contributions to her work. But, in general, it was not the actual scene, just as it was not the precise locality, which informed her work; it was the

  distillation of it produced by her imagination; and though it is fascinating to stand in Leatherhead church and read that Mr.

  Knightley rebuilt the pulpit, it is a kind of amusement to which it is easy to attach too much value, and which is apt to obstruct the approach to a true understanding of Jane Austen's genius. The

  attempt to reconstruct something of biographical significance from those characters who form the chief part of each
novel not only underrates the power of Jane Austen's achievement, it also overlooks the tendency in the mind of the imaginative person to create a compensation for what is not there; not in the crude sense of what is described as "wish fulfillment," by which Jane Austen would be presumed to be writing a story of successful love because her own had been unsuccessful; but in the sense that the eye, where it has been dazzled by a primary color, on being turned away from it, sees the complementary color for a moment. People who pride

  themselves upon a knowledge of psychological matters are

  frequently very eager to infer from the presence of certain types in a novel the presence of those types in the author's experience. They would show themselves better informed if they argued from it a condition exactly the reverse.

  The idea that Jane Austen preyed, as it were, upon society to find material for her books, was not only repudiated by herself, when she said she was too proud of her gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Captain B.--it was strenuously denied by her relations.

  Caroline Austen

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  said there was no one of whom it was so little reasonable to be afraid as of her Aunt Jane; and the stillness she often maintained in her latest years, though it was sometimes ascribed by people who had, against her will, heard that she was a novelist, to a taking of mental notes, was owing, said her family, to the fact that, with all her pleasantness, she was a little reserved and shy before strangers.

  But Miss Mitford, in her Recollections of a Literary Life, expressed a different view. Miss Mitford said, that her mother had said, that when she had lived in the neighborhood of Steventon before her marriage, Jane Austen had been "the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly" Mrs. Mitford ever remembered. The portrait, allowing for Miss Mitford's spite, is an attractive one, though some doubts are cast upon its reliability by Mr. Edward Austen Leigh where he says in his memoir that Mrs. Mitford had married in 1785, when Jane was ten years old, and that Mrs. Mitford had actually left Ashe, of which parish her father Dr. Russell was the Rector, in 1783, and therefore her acquaintance with the Austen family had ceased when Jane was seven. But Miss Mitford went on to say: "A friend of mine who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of