Fénéon, an influential promoter of post-impressionist art (a term he coined), earned his living as a clerk at the War Ministry in Paris but led a double life as an anarchist. He was an associate of several notorious figures: François Claudius Koeningstein, known as ‘Ravachol’, the terrorist martyr who was guillotined for attempting to blow up two judges in 1892, Émile Henry, another bomber who ended up on the guillotine, and Laurent Tailhade, who was injured in a bombing at the Café Foyot the following year and who said memorably after the event, ‘Qu’importe l’acte, si le geste est beau?’ Fénéon was one of those suspected of planting the Café Foyot device and when his office at the Ministry was searched, the police found ten detonators and a vial of mercury. The suspect claimed that they had belonged to his late father, but this didn’t prevent his arrest under new legislation against Association of Malefactors and he was sent to prison to await trial. The papers made a great deal of this ‘arrestation sensationnelle’ of the civil servant and intellectual, and, quizzed by reporters, Fénéon’s friend Stéphane Mallarmé didn’t help by claiming ‘there are no better detonators than his articles’.
The show trial of thirty suspected anarchists took months to prepare, during which time Fénéon was kept in solitary confinement at Mazas. Probably the worst aspect of his incarceration was that he was refused access to periodicals or books from outside, due to the political nature of his crime, and had to rely on the prison library, in which the only works of literature (considered innocuous, as they were by women) were some novels of George Sand and a book called Northanger Abbey by a dead Englishwoman. The book’s ‘pithy style and keen insights on human nature’45 charmed Fénéon, who recognised in the author a sort of fellow-traveller, who could expose middle-class manners and mores with a few deft strokes, to devastating satirical effect. Perhaps like a buried bomb itself, Northanger Abbey had detonated in the mind of a very receptive reader. Fénéon’s friend, the American poet Stuart Merrill, was permitted to bring a dictionary into the prison, and the inmate sat down to make a translation. Unlike the poems and treatises written by another anarchist detainee, Charles Chatel, Fénéon’s translation was not thought to be inflammatory, and escaped confiscation.
At the ‘Trial of the Thirty’, which opened in August, 1894, Fénéon ran rings around the judge and prosecutor with his calm, insolent wit – an example is when the judge accused him of surrounding himself with the known anarchists Cohen and Lavel and Fénéon replied, ‘You can’t surround yourself with two people. You need at least three.’46 Perhaps he had been honing his ‘pithy style’ on that of Jane Austen; certainly Mallarmé, called as a witness, testified that ‘he is above using anything, other than literature, to express his thoughts’. The case ended with acquittal for everyone except three burglars, and Fénéon, kicked out of his job at the War Office, became editorial secretary of the influential literary magazine La Revue blanche.
Over the next four years, Fénéon finished and ‘meticulously refined’ his translation of Northanger Abbey,47 aided by his friend, the English poet John Gray, Oscar Wilde’s former lover and the man who was thought to be the model for fiction’s arch-aesthete, Dorian Gray. Wilde himself was languishing in Reading Gaol at exactly the same time, and, in an odd coincidence, dreamed of providing a better stock of books for the ‘poor imprisoned fellows I live with’ that would include ‘about a dozen good novels. Stevenson’s, some of Thackeray … Jane Austen (none here)’.48 Austen seemed a good choice for those in extremis. Across the Channel, Fénéon’s ‘Catherine Morland’ was published in serial form in the Revue blanche in 1898, the first French translation to replicate rather than simply exploit Austen’s text, reproducing as nearly as possible the elegant cadences and comical end-stops of her prose: ‘Personne qui ait jamais vu Catherine Morland dans son enfance ne l’aurait supposée née pour être une héroïne,’ he begins, clearly relishing the passages, such as the defence of the novel in Chapter 5, where Austen’s authorial voice comes through most clearly:
Las! Si l’héroïne d’un roman n’est pas patronnée par l’héroïne d’un autre roman, de qui pourra-t-elle attendre protection et égards? Laissons aux rédacteurs de revues le soin d’incriminer toute effusion d’imagination et de déplorer, sur un mode marmiteux, les riens qui font maintenant gémir les presses. Ne désertons pas notre propre cause. Nous sommes une caste fort décriée.
The issue before the serialisation began, an article on Austen appeared in La Revue blanche by Fénéon’s friend and colleague Théodore Duret. It assumed that the reader had no knowledge of her at all, and relied for its few biographical details not on the Memoir, but on Henry’s 1831 ‘Note’, which prefaced all the early editions of Northanger Abbey. Duret promoted the idea of Austen as an isolated, natural genius, ‘développée spontanément, sur ellemême’, and also stressed her precocity, an impression immensely enhanced by the woodcut which accompanied the article, derived from the Rice Portrait, which made Austen look more alert and knowing than the subject of the painting, but every bit as young. The artist, Félix Vallotton, was well known in avant-garde periodicals of the day for his striking expressionist style, though his subjects were usually political and contemporary: police brutality, anarchist protests and street scuffles.
Duret’s accompanying article was a significant piece of criticism, and not only because it singled out aspects of Austen’s craft that hadn’t been noticed before, but because being ‘taken up’ in Paris by the Revue blanche gave Austen the imprimatur of an exclusive and demanding intellectual elite. Duret and Fénéon were at the heart of the French avant-garde. Fénéon himself, apart from being Georges Seurat’s first and most enthusiastic promoter, was also the first publisher of James Joyce in French. His associates at the Revue blanche, and its successor, the Nouvelle revue française, included Mallarmé, Édouard Vuillard, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and André Gide, who later wrote of Austen, ‘her horizon is a limited, a little empty, but what delicacy in her delineation of feelings! Jane Austen may not be animated by any mighty demon, but on the other hand, what unfailing, what sure understanding of others.’49 Politically, Austen appealed to Fénéon as a critic of the bourgeoisie; intellectually, she represented a stringent anti-romanticism. Like her Yellow-Bookish makeover by Monsieur Vallotton (so much classier than the insipid transformation effected by Andrews and Lizars in 1869), Austen was here taking her place among the cosmopolitan, multicultural icons which appealed most to the artists and intellectuals shaping the coming age.
* * *
The Austen family, in its many branches, continued to exert a strong influence on how the author was presented to the public, and in the generation following James Edward Austen-Leigh and his sisters produced a flurry of books on their illustrious great-and great-great-aunt. Catherine-Anne Hubback’s son, John, collaborating with his daughter Edith in 1906, shifted the biographical focus to ‘Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers’ in a book of that title. It included the previously unpublished letters from Jane to Frank and Charles, a remarkable photograph of Frank in his old age and the first publication of Cassandra’s original sketch of Jane. The history of Frank’s and Charles’s naval careers – which touched on Trafalgar and the siege of Corunna – was a salutary reminder that life in the Austen family during the Napoleonic Wars wasn’t all spilikins and satin stitch.
Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh followed up a 1911 monograph about her father, James Edward, with Personal Aspects of Jane Austen in 1920, which revisited a great deal of the material in the Memoir of Jane Austen and added to the biographical stock by printing extracts from Jane’s marginalia in Goldsmith’s History of England, the Steventon schoolroom copy of which had passed down to her. Mary Augusta used her authority as a blood-relative of the subject to enforce what had previously been surmises; she insisted that Cassandra Austen ‘kept only those [letters] which she considered so totally devoid of general interest that it was impossible anyone should, at any time, contemplate their publication’ and quibbled with a critical biography pub
lished in France, Léonie Villard’s Jane Austen: sa vie et son œuvre,50 over the degree and intensity of Jane Austen’s religious feelings. On the whole, though, Mary Augusta favoured leniency towards the interloper, seeing it as a patriotic motive not to pursue her criticisms too far ‘at the present time, when a strong desire is felt that the bonds between our nearest Ally and ourselves should be drawn closer, those formed by a mutual study of each other’s literature can hardly be neglected’.51 This wasn’t fanciful; the proliferation of translations of Austen into French in the inter-war period (and another big post-war surge in the late 1940s) was second only to the wave of interest following the Austen film adaptations of the 1990s.
Mary Augusta’s book seems retrogressive compared with the biography published seven years earlier by her brother, William, and nephew Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, a well-known scholar of King’s College Cambridge. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record rather turned James Edward’s method on its head by seeking to be as documentary, factual and unsentimental as possible, using family authority in the service of biographical accuracy, not to court popularity. Some sort of example was needed of ‘rational’ appreciation of Austen when even Professors of English, such as A. C. Bradley, could be found swooning over the author and her creations, saying of Lizzie Bennet, ‘I was meant to fall in love with her, and I do.’52 Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh took the ‘scientific’ approach even further with the publication of Austen Papers 1704–1856 in 1942, a fascinating dossier (if rather stark, in literary terms) of family letters, accounts, wills and contracts. Such documentation was obviously more valuable as a means to understanding Jane Austen in the twentieth century than praise of her dexterity and vague surmises about her niceness; but it’s interesting that the movement away from ‘dear aunt Jane’ started in the family, and was aimed not at the general reader but at the critical establishment.
* * *
By the time of the Great War, ‘Jane’ had come to represent qualities that not only defined a sorely threatened English culture, but held out the means to repair it. Books were one of very few solaces for men at the front; they were easily acquired from home through the efficient Field Postal Service and constituted one of the quickest means of escape. Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, has written about the popularity of eighteenth-century authors among soldiers in the trenches, whose books offered ‘an oasis of reasonableness and normality, a place one could crawl into for a few moments’ respite’.53 Edmund Blunden acknowledged that the copy of Young’s Night Thoughts that he had with him at Passchendaele ‘kept me from despair’ – ‘I felt the benefit of this grave, intellectual voice, speaking out of a profound eighteenth-century calm’ – and Alec Waugh felt similarly grateful in the same battle to have just received a copy of Matthew Prior’s poems. The effect was two-edged: Augustan writing comfortingly recalled an age of rationality, distant composure and preindustrial calm, while the act of reading it in the grotesque context of trench warfare, facing mortal danger, generated its own kind of nihilist comedy. As Paul Fussell remarked, ‘the gross inappropriateness of certain books was part of their value’, citing Geoffrey Keynes’s choice of Courtney and Smith’s Bibliography of Samuel Johnson between bursts of fire at Ypres.
Austen was prime among the texts that went to war, and the trenches were full of Janeites. It is not known whether Siegfried Sassoon had with him any of his extraordinary Austen collection, but he owned a rare copy of Emma (one of only three surviving of the 1816 edition pirated in Philadelphia), a first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and early editions of the other novels, all of which had belonged to Harris Bigg-Wither’s sister, Elizabeth.54 Perhaps he felt, like Austen’s future editor and scholarly champion, Robert William Chapman, that ‘to handle a first edition again’ in the theatre of war could re-create the sense of home.
At the outbreak of the war, R. W. Chapman had taken with him on active service three editions of Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides to collate, a task which he hoped would help block out the realities of life as a temporary gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery in Salonika. ‘Upright in his stifling burrow’,55 surrounded by the sights and sounds of modern warfare, the cultivated life Chapman had left behind in Oxford came back to him more in the form of hallucinations than memories:
The graces of civilisation and the delights of learning are far from me now. But my nomadic and semibarbarous existence is still solaced by a few good books; and the best odes of Horace, the best things in Boswell or Elia, often awake memories of Attic nights. Memories and visions in which gleaming mahogany and old morocco are seen darkling in a haze of smoke, and an old man in his big chair by the fire draws forth, for my pleasure and his, the hoarded treasures of his rich old mind.56
The scholarly Chapman was subsisting on literary scraps, reading an Alfred Austin anthology over and over again and poring over his copies of Boswell ‘in the hope of finding a corruption in the text’. ‘If there still be any Gentlemen of England’, he wrote in Macedonia, ‘who sit at home in ease, and hop like elderly sparrows from shelf to shelf of their well-appointed libraries, tell them they do not know what a book can be.’57 Though Johnson and Boswell had been his main scholarly interests before the war, by the end of his term of active service, Chapman had begun to make notes for a school edition of Emma. The edition was never finished but provided much-needed entertainment and distraction for the lonely bookworm. His notes show him calculating the distances between Hartfield and Randalls, Hartfield and Donwell, Highbury and London, not just as if they were all equally real places that he could map, but as if he could travel to that world, and inhabit it.58
The therapeutic potential of Austen’s novels in wartime was recognised on a wider scale when they were chosen as ‘salubrious reading for the wounded’ and prescribed as an aid to convalescence for the most severely shell-shocked soldiers. Thus Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility appeared at the top of a graded ‘Fever-Chart’ drawn up for use in military hospitals by an Oxford don exempted from military service, H. F. Brett-Smith, a history fellow at Oriel College and author of the slim volume Poems of the North (1912). In this way, Austen’s novels can be said to have seen active service themselves, and it is odd to think of how many damaged and dying men in field hospitals and convalescent homes might have swum in and out of consciousness to the sound or the memory of ‘Divine Jane’’s words.59
Austen’s symbolic significance in the minds of distressed English servicemen at the front was given its most elaborate expression in Rudyard Kipling’s story of the trenches, ‘The Janeites’, written in 1924. The edition of ‘The Storyteller’ in which it first appeared had as cover illustration a picture of a soldier sitting on a box in a battlefield, engrossed in reading an Austen novel. The legend next to it was ‘“THE JANEITES” … The first story RUDYARD KIPLING has written for five years’. Kipling’s strange narrative, like several others in the 1926 collection Debits and Credits where it was published, has a frame-narrative set in an imaginary Freemason’s lodge, ‘Lodge Faith and Works, 5837’ (the author was a Freemason from his youth and founder of two lodges connected with the War Graves Commission). A group of Masons who are cleaning the regalia of their lodge one Saturday in 1920 get into conversation about their experiences in the trenches. Humberstall is a shell-shocked ex-private soldier, discharged in 1917 ‘after the dump went up at Eatables’, who returned to the front voluntarily in preference to staying at home with his agitated womenfolk – ‘Not for me thank you! till the war was over.’60 He recalls the officers whom he served as mess-waiter on this second trip to the trenches, Hammick, a former divorce lawyer, and his friend Mosse, a private detective, and how, when Humberstall overheard them conversing about ‘Jane’, he was struck by their change of tone: ‘She was the only woman I ever ’eard ’em say a good word for.’ Cordin’ to them Jane was a nonesuch. I didn’t know then she was a Society.’61
Humberstall only begins to attend to what they are saying a
bout ‘Jane’ after a new officer, ignored at first by Hammick and Mosse, reacts to the name with delight: ‘no sooner ’ad Gander passed that remark than they both shook ’ands with the young squirt across the table an’ called for the port back again. It was a password, all right! Then they went at it about Jane – all three, regardless of rank.’ Another time, when the three officers are lamenting the fact that ‘Jane’ died barren, Macklin, Humberstall’s immediate superior, interrupts them with a fifteen-minute lecture on how she did leave lawful issue ‘in the shape o’ one son; and ’is name was Enery James’. Amazed at how Macklin gets away with this insubordination, Humberstall bribes him to reveal the ‘Jane’ secret, and is told the password, ‘Tilneys and trap-doors’. When Humberstall uses this phrase in the hearing of an officer, the effect is immediate: he looks at him ‘through and through’ and silently hands over half a dozen Turkish cigarettes.
In order to maintain the flow of patronage, Humberstall pays Macklin for a crash-course in ‘Jane’, who, he finds, was a real person, ‘a little old maid ’oo’d written ’alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago.’ Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ’em.’ Though Humberstall has to have the books drummed into him, and feels that ‘’er characters was no use! They was only just like people you run across any day,’ Austen is seen working in him surreptitiously: he soon feels completely familiar with her characters and names four of the guns after them: the Reverend Collins, Miss Bates (a noisy one), General Tilney and ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’. Though Lady Catherine buries Mosse when the position is bombed, and Humberstall is the only Janeite to survive, his knowledge does turn out to be of use, after all; overheard by a nurse semi-raving about Miss Bates, he gets the treatment which, it is clear, would have been denied him otherwise:
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