The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  Evelina itself is startlingly intelligent, so intelligent, indeed, that it should have educated Cadell, the publisher, who eleven years later, was so snubbing to the shy soul of Jane Austen. It should have warned him that alone among the arts the novel was the one which suited the feminine genius perfectly, and that more would be heard of it presently. For a novel does not require rhetoric or the exercise of reason; two things at which men are conspicuously better than women. But it does require acquaintance with life and interest in other people; which is exactly what most women possess more abundantly than men. It would be possible for instance to comb and recomb Evelina for stretches of fine writing, or rich purple thoughts, or passages pregnant with penetration or observation (other than that which accompanies the formula of a rather ungracious female wit) and find none of them.

  Yet it would be hard to know exactly how to improve it in any particular. Had Fanny Burney lived thirty years later she would have displaced several reputations. As it is, she remains trapped in the notoriety of the century, a century of rakes and wenches and elegant postchaises and dinner at four o’clock and a dirty navy. Another generation and she would have been ageless. As things were planned, however, she is merely the most wide-eyed, pert, nervous, provocative reporter who strayed unsoiled through the refined raffishness of the eighteenth century.

  True, she did drift on, a woman with a splendid past always before her, into nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. The Queen adopted her and gave her full use of the royal backstairs. M. d’Arblay married her and set her up in a house of true French fussiness after Fanny came down the royal backstairs for the last time. Henceforward she was as industrious as she was unsuccessful. She died finally in Lower Grosvenor Street, her disordered mind surrounding her with phantoms peopling the reign of Queen Victoria with the spirits of Dr. Johnson’s circle.

  Jane Austen’s Unheavenly World

  It would seem impossible to overpraise the singular genius of Jane Austen. But with alarming accumulation of hyperbole it has been done.

  Though well intentioned, it probably began unintentionally. Lord Macaulay started the trouble with his slightly silly remark that “while Shakespeare has left us a greater number of striking portraits than other dramatists put together, he has hardly left us a single caricature,” and that though “Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second ” (here the silliness begins), “among the writers who, in that point in which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.”

  This remark would be perfectly true if it were not that in just such miraculous characters as Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet, Sir John Middleton, General Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Admiral Croft, and so forth, the supremacy of Jane Austen is most conspicuous. And a caricature does not cease to be a caricature because it has been done skilfully.

  Macaulay (now speaking absolute common sense) added, to his previous unfortunate remark, the comment that Jane Austen “has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.… And almost all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.”

  Macaulay certainly knew his Jane; he very nearly knew her by heart. For she herself said as much when she spoke of her books as “little bits (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” And if only people would remember that the miniature is no more than one of the charming younger sisters of art, some of the worst excesses of rabid Janeism would be avoided.

  The limitations of Jane Austen’s vision are as remarkable as its brightness of definition. Only a mind of unique certitude and self-possession could have cut out so much of life and then made so much of what was left. But it is well to remember that what is left is no more the whole of Life than Mozart is the whole of music.

  It is usual to illustrate the degree of Jane’s natural limitations by pointing out that though she lived through the whole scarlet and sensational period of the French Revolution, and actually shared a roof with a widow whose husband had been guillotined, she does not refer to it once.

  This, however, is not the final conviction that it has sometimes been taken for. The Great War and the Russian Revolution contributed nothing, or next to nothing, to the contemporary fiction of our time. Not that Jane’s mind necessarily turned away from anything so ungenteel as heads in a basket and a dead man in a bath, and the other lurid paraphernalia of Revolution. For she had something of the coarseness of the century which was so extremely well-mannered that it could talk about everything. But she certainly was on the side of God and his angels against Godwin and his Radicals. And if Godwin’s disciples were too raffish for her, probably she could not trust herself to find a name for the arrivistes who departed the Parisian scene as rapidly as they came.

  But the boundaries of Jane Austen’s mind may, within limits, be mapped out by saying that she cared less about the Battle of Trafalgar than she did about Marianne Dashwood’s twisting her ankle, that she said she would read Southey’s Life of Nelson only if her sailor brother, Frank, were mentioned in it, and that the death of Sir John Moore—and this was enough to make her a national leper—left her unmoved.

  It was not, however, merely what lay across the Channel that was foreign to her and her interests, but what lay within the heart as well. There is the famous passage in which Charlotte Bronte, with more heart than head, condemns her natural opposite, whose heart was the size of a humming bird’s and whose head was as hard as a hailstone:

  Anything like warmth or enthusiasm—anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outre and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions 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, Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman.

  Unfortunately it has become customary to say “Poor Jane! ” instead of “Bravo, Charlotte! ” after that diatribe.

  There is, nevertheless, a portrait of Jane Austen, which could be constructed, that is at least as credible as the face with Madame de Sévigné’s smile beneath Homer’s brow, crowned with a lace cap, which has with variations been imposed on our imagination. And the portrait is that of a smug little face seen pressed close behind a muslin window curtain. I do not say that it is the true portrait. Indeed, I would say that it is as untrue as the other; which is to say that it is not true at all. It is merely in the manner of a corrective. It is, however, worth remembering that the one description of Jane Austen that is cherished is that of a “clear brunette with a rich colour … full round cheeks, a mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair, forming natural curls round her face ”—the very portrait of a village quiz.

  To link Jane Austen’s name with the names of Hom
er and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Scott, as one of her earlier commentators has rashly done, is simply to invite Folly to play with fire. Upon investigation, the comparison collapses as utterly as if we were to search for a troop of feminine counterparts to Fielding or Smollett.

  It has often been said that Jane Austen, as a writer, rose superior to the natural walls and barriers of her sex; that she becomes a kind of unseen, all-seeing, sexless Ariel. It is doubtful, however, whether this means very much more than that she writes so well that, if you had not known her to be a woman, you might take her ability to be that of a man. True, no man ever had just that patience of observation, that ear for absurdity, that eye for incongruity, that sense of mischief and minutiæ; and certainly none had the opportunity for exerting their talents that Jane had. She is perfectly feminine in her range of experience; and in her competence of reporting feminine experience, perfectly masculine.

  But competence alone is no more than a ticket entitling the holder to travel first-class to Perfection; it is not the journey accomplished. Sooner or later when competence is mentioned, some reference must be made to the materials. And when once we step beyond speaking of Jane Austen’s competence, we become uncomfortably aware that another step would take us clean off the map. For the boundaries of her mind, as distinct from its depths, are such that no more than a fragment of human experience, the size of a hencoop, is enclosed.

  Misjudgments of Jane Austen usually arise from two simple errors. Those who decry her have generally searched for things utterly outside her scope and so been disappointed, and those who applaud her extravagantly are usually those who are content with something alarmingly less than the whole of normal adult range of life.

  It is one of the great commonplaces of criticism that minds like Homer’s and Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’—Scott perhaps should not be included by the earlier critic—exhibit no obvious boundaries, and reveal no peculiar landmarks.

  It is the whole of life that beats back at us from them. Homer has somehow contrived to avoid putting his foot through the scenery of the Odyssey as, say, Thackeray is always putting his foot through his novels. At the end of Hamlet and Don Quixote, we are convinced that we know more of everyone, including ourselves, and excepting the author. But Jane Austen is for ever unintentionally breaking through. I do not refer to her archness, which is as much a part of her novels as it evidently was of her, but rather to moments when we realise that we have caught her completely off her habitual guard. And when it is so, we become aware of the natural limitations of a character so lively that its size is deceptive. I do not suggest that these limitations are necessarily those of a small mind. Nevertheless, in a greater mind no hint of, say, anything so trivial as dislike of noisy children would, as in Sense and Sensibility, trickle through, leaving in the reader’s memory the image of a shadowy spinster with nerves and teeth set permanently on edge.

  There are any number of ways of looking on life; and the way of the humorous spinster is one. Jane Austen, indeed, showed that it could be a remarkably good one. Regard Jane as the greatest spinster in letters and you have said too little. Regard her as one of the great masters of fiction and sooner or later you will have to make excuses for her.

  Jane certainly showed that a maiden lady in a small village could know as much about human nature as the philosopher on the highest hill. The wise second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, in which cupidity reduces the generosity of a will to terms so low and disgusting that we seem to hear the dead benefactor turning over and over in his grave like a bobbin, is one of those scenes that glow with the luminosity of disillusion. Jane Austen, indeed, seems to have been born disillusioned. Had she lived longer she might have grown philosophic. As it is she was always better at painting a human weakness than a human virtue—a peculiarity of old maids. Indeed, that habit of hers of never looking up at a saint or down at a sinner, but only straight in front of the curate, is what destroys any claim to absolute greatness that can be made for her.

  The destruction of Janeism could be continued on other counts still without detracting in any way from discerning appreciation of her books.

  Her plots are childlike where they are not absurd; Lady Susan—the only startling one among them—is very much what might have resulted had the strenuously irregular “Colette” handed over one of her earlier novels for dialogue by the author of Sandford and Merton. Jane Austen is never lyrical; she is not even religious. The beginnings of her novels are dull to disappointment, and her prose is among the most unmusical in the language; Alice Meynell called it a “mouthful of thick words.”

  Jane Austen could not draw a man that is recognisable as other than the sort of man an unmarried woman sees. She knew passion as the canary knows the cat; as something to be avoided. Her landscapes, though popular, are mere green crêpe and stiff cardboard. As for example:

  Cleveland was a spacious wooden-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. The pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and, like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk; a road of smooth gravel, winding round a plantation, led to the front …

  Spacious house, situated on a sloping lawn, delightful gardens, gravel-drive … many estate-agents have said more. And this deficiency of physical observation in remarking any distinguishing things, sometimes makes us wonder whether Jane Austen had any eyes at all to use, or whether she merely relied on the quivering antennae of her intelligence—which were of no use in informing her of inanimate things.

  Elsewhere in Sense and Sensibility, we find a vivid demonstration of her essential weakness and her strength. First we have the masterpiece of inefficient description:

  Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking …

  and so on, till even a rural policeman might be forgiven for believing that his description of the missing and the dead had more of accuracy and more of art.

  Then comes the change from utter inefficiency to complete and perfect competence, when Jane stops saying pleasant things about someone’s face and begins saying unpleasant things behind someone else’s back.

  Brandon is just the kind of man … whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see and nobody remembers to talk to.

  Alice Meynell, again, spoke of the essential meanness of Jane Austen’s art and called hers an unheavenly world. Certainly it was a world that was brightened by a bachelor as by a beacon, and lit up for pages by a legacy.

  It has been added to most comminations of this kind, that Jane is often callous, with the calculated callousness of the cad. And in support of this it is usual to quote the letter in which she writes:

  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.

  It is an ugly remark. A sensitive mind to which a dead baby is a disgusting, chastening and even a terrifying thing, could never have harboured that genuinely comic afterthought. And that is not the only letter which has about it that same gnattish humour. But such letters are magnificently misrepresentative of the whole.

  There are letters to Jane’s favourite sister, Cassandra, as for instance the one in which she says: “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one might say to the same person by word of mouth. I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter,” which persuade us that here is the perfect letter-writer corresponding with the perfect sister.

  It has also frequently been observed that Jane Austen is obsessed by money. She is. And in very much the way in which a railway time-table is obsessed by trains. It was her subject. She had the unsentimental sense to see how far marriage is at the mercy of money. The real strangene
ss is not that her characters talk about it so much, but that they talk about it in such terms. It simply means that the novels of Jane Austen are a chapter in the domestic and marital economics of a system that has been supplanted.

  If ever there were a woman designed for spinsterhood it was Jane Austen. She wore the cap of middle age early in life; and she wore it from youth in her books. She could never have found a man within reach who was mentally her equal. And since she gives no hint of passion in her nature she could hardly be expected to have committed the indiscretion of misalliance. Her life is so placid and uneventful, even where it is known, that it has scared off the biographers and turned them, for the most part, into commentators on her books.

  Her nephew, in his Memoir, purely as an afterthought, mentions two faint, male figures, one of which faded out shortly afterwards in death, who attempted the unequal match with Jane Austen, probably without even glimpsing the mind that lay within, and (so the nephew again assures us) without deeply disturbing his aunt’s tranquillity of emotion.

  All that we know of the physical Jane was that she was brought up in Steventon Parsonage, an island of local culture, where charades and cribbage and bouts-rimés and “miles of fringe and acres of carpet” were all worshipped, and where the rest of the world was Ultima Thule, seen across seas of mud, where every billow was a cart rut.

  Jane Austen’s life, apart from the fact that her books were written in it, is one of the sweet blanks of literature. It was a life in which the peaks of experience were no more than emotional molehills. And it was a life that seems to have been crowded imperatively forward.