by Jane Austen
Nor, indeed, would we. For even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. People are like that -- the girl of fifteen knew it; the mature woman proves it. At this very moment some Lady Bertram is trying to keep Pug from the flower beds; she sends Chapman to help Miss Fanny a little late. The discrimination is so perfect, the satire so just, that, consistent though it is, it almost escapes our notice. No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.
That elusive quality is, indeed, often made up of very different parts, which it needs a peculiar genius to bring together. The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob is a snob, because he departs from the model of sanity and sense which she has in mind, and conveys to us unmistakably even while she makes us laugh. Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense of human values. It is against the disc of an unerring heart, an unfailing good taste, an almost stern morality, that she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts a Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford's chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat. Hence the depth, the beauty, the complexity of her scenes. From such contrasts there comes a beauty, a solemnity even, which are not only as remarkable as her wit, but an inseparable part of it. In The Watsons she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder why an ordinary act of kindness, as she describes it, becomes so full of meaning. In her masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
What more natural, then, with this insight into their profundity, than that Jane Austen should have chosen to write of the trivialities of day-to-day existence, of parties, picnics, and country dances? No "suggestions to alter her style of writing" from the Prince Regent or Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, no adventure, no politics or intrigue could hold a candle to life on a country-house staircase as she saw it. Indeed, the Prince Regent and his librarian had run their heads against a very formidable obstacle; they were trying to tamper with an incorruptible conscience, to disturb an infallible discretion. The child who formed her sentences so finely when she was fifteen never ceased to form them, and never wrote for the Prince Regent or his Librarian, but for the world at large. She knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources. For example, she could not make a girl talk enthusiastically of banners and chapels. She could not throw herself whole-heartedly into a romantic moment. She had all sorts of devices for evading scenes of passion. Nature and its beauties she approached in a sidelong way of her own. She describes a beautiful night without once mentioning the moon. Nevertheless, as we read the few formal phrases about "the brilliancy of an unclouded night and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods", the night is at once as "solemn, and soothing, and lovely" as she tells us, quite simply, that it was.
The balance of her gifts was singularly perfect. Among her finished novels there are no failures, and among her many chapters few that sink markedly below the level of the others. But, after all, she died at the age of forty-two. She died at the height of her powers. She was still subject to those changes which often make the final period of a writer's career the most interesting of all. Vivacious, irrepressible, gifted with an invention of great vitality, there can be no doubt that she would have written more, had she lived, and it is tempting to consider whether she would not have written differently. The boundaries were marked; moons, mountains, and castles lay on the other side. But was she not sometimes tempted to trespass for a minute? Was she not beginning, in her own gay and brilliant manner, to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?
Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was "the most beautiful of her works". She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: "She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older -- the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning". She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of the "influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the country". She marks "the tawny leaves and withered hedges". "One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it", she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect the change. Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman's constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. "I doubt ", wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, "whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete." Had she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered. She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure.
And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the flattery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in P
ersuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvellous little speeches which sum up, in a few minutes' chatter, all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove for ever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is. She would have stood farther away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust -- but enough. Vain are these speculations: the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal, died "just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success".
Jane Austen and the Geese
Of all writers Jane Austen is the one, so we should have thought, who has had the least cause to complain of her critics. Her chief admirers have always been those who write novels themselves, and from the time of Sir Walter Scott to the time of George Moore she has been praised with unusual discrimination.
So we should have thought. But Miss Austen-Leigh's book shows that we were far too sanguine. Never have we had before us such certain proof of the incorrigible stupidity of reviewers. Ever since Jane Austen became famous they have been hissing inanities in chorus. She did not like dogs; she was not fond of children; she did not care for England; she was indifferent to public affairs; she had no book learning; she was irreligious; she was alternately cold and coarse; she knew no one outside her family circle; she derived her pessimistic view of family life from observing the differences between her father and mother. Miss Austen-Leigh, whose piety is natural but whose concern we cannot help thinking excessive, is persuaded that there is some 'misapprehension' about Jane Austen, and is determined to right it by taking each of the geese separately and wringing his neck. Someone, properly anonymous and we can scarcely help thinking fabulous, has expressed his opinion that Jane Austen was not qualified to write about the English gentry. The fact is, says Miss Austen-Leigh, that she was descended on her father's side from the Austens, who sprang, 'like other county families, from the powerful Clan of the Clothiers'; on her mother's from the Leighs of Addlestrop, who entertained King Charles. Moreover, she went to dances. She moved in good society. 'Jane Austen was in every way well fitted to write of the lives and feelings of English gentle people.' In that conclusion we entirely concur. Still the fact that you are well fitted to write about one set of people may be taken to prove that you are not well fitted to write about another. That profound observation is to the credit of a second anonymous fowl. Nor, to be candid, does Miss Austen-Leigh altogether succeed in silencing him. Jane Austen had, she assures us, opportunities for a wider knowledge of life than falls to the lot of most clergymen's daughters. An uncle by marriage lived in India and was a friend of Warren Hastings. He must have written home about the trial and the climate. A cousin married a French nobleman whose head was cut off in the Revolution. She must have had something to say about Paris and the guillotine. One of her brothers made the grand tour, and two were in the Navy. It is, therefore, undeniable that Jane Austen might have 'indulged in romantic flights of fancy with India or France for a background', but it is equally undeniable that Jane Austen never did. Yet it is difficult to deny that had she been not only Jane Austen but Lord Byron and Captain Marryat into the bargain her works might have possessed merits which, as it is, we cannot truthfully say that we find in them.
Leaving these exalted regions of literary criticism the reviewers now attack her character. She was cold, they say, and 'turned away from whatever was sad, unpleasant, or painful'. That is easily disposed of. The family archives contain proof that she nursed a cousin through the measles, and 'attended her brother Henry, in London, in an illness of which he nearly died'. It is as easy from the same source to dispose of the malevolent assertion that she was the illiterate daughter of an illiterate father. When the Rev. George Austen left Steventon he sold five hundred books. The number that he must have kept is quite enough to prove that Jane Austen was a well read woman. As for the slander that her family life was unhappy, it is sufficient to quote the words of a cousin who was in the habit of staying with the Austens. 'When among this Liberal Society, the simplicity, hospitality, and taste which commonly prevail in different families among the delightful vallies of Switzerland ever occurs to my memory.' The malignant and persistent critic still remains who says that Jane Austen was without morality. Indeed, it is a difficult charge to meet. It is not enough to quote her own statement, 'I am very fond of Sherlock's sermons.' The testimony of Archbishop Whately does not convince us. Nor can we personally subscribe to Miss Austen-Leigh's opinion that in all her works 'one line of thought, one grace, or quality, or necessity... is apparent. Its name is Repentance.' The truth appears to us to be much more complicated than that.
If Miss Austen-Leigh does not throw much light upon that problem, she does one thing for which we are grateful to her. She prints some notes made by Jane at the age of twelve or thirteen upon the margin of Goldsmith's History of England. They are slight and childish, useless, we should have thought, to confute the critics who hold that she was unemotional, unsentimental and passionless. 'My dear Mr G -- , I have lived long enough in the world to know that it is always so.' She corrects her author amusingly. 'Oh! Oh! The wretches!' she exclaims against the Puritans. 'Dear Balmerino I cannot express what I feel for you!' she cries when Balmerino is executed. There is nothing more in them than that. Only to hear Jane Austen saying nothing in her natural voice when the critics have been debating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.
Jane Austen Practising
The summer of 1922, remarkable for public reasons in many ways, was privately remarkable for the extreme coldness of its nights. Six blankets and a quilt? A rug and a hot water bottle? All over England men and women went to bed with such words upon their lips. And then, between two and three in the morning, they woke with a start. Something serious had happened. It was stifling. It was portentous. Steps must be taken immediately. But what a frightful effort it needs in the early hours of the morning to throw off all one's clothes!
All over England for the past ten or twenty years the reputation of Jane Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and blankets. The voices of the elderly and distinguished, of the clergy and the squirearchy, have droned in unison praising and petting, capping quotations, telling little anecdotes, raking up little facts. She is the most perfect artist in English literature. And one of her cousins had his head cut off in the French Revolution.
Did she ever go fox hunting? No, but she nursed Miss Gibson through the measles. Her knowledge of the upper middle classes was unrivalled. One of her ancestors entertained King Charles. Macaulay, of course, compared her with Shakespeare. And where is Mansfield Park? So they pile up the quilts and counterpanes until the comfort becomes oppressive. Something must be done about it. But what a frightful effort it needs at this time of day to shake off all these clothes!
Now opportunely, in the nick of time, comes Love and Friendship to give us the very chance we want. Here is a little book written by Jane Austen long before she was the great Jane Austen of mythology. The Jane Austen of Love and Friendship was a girl of seventeen scribbling stories to amuse the schoolroom. One is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother. Another is nearly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. Nobody (for we may leave Mr Chesterton to the end) has been here before us, and so we may really read Jane Austen by ourselves for the first time.
She is a girl of seventeen writing in a country parsonage. And on page two, without turning a hair, out she raps 'natural daughter'. Yet her mother might have come in at that very moment. The eighteenth century, of course, still persisted. The little Austens had the freedom of the house as no other children were to have it for a century at least. Money and marriage would no doubt be jokes in the nursery as they were, much more coarsely, jokes upon the stage. And clever children, beginning to laugh at their elders, would in the year 1790 pick up the last new novel and make fun of its heroine. 'Ah! what could we do but what we did? We sighed and fainted on the sofa.' When Jane Austen read that aloud, no doubt her brothers and sisters took the reference to Adeline Barrett, or whoever was the fashionable heroine of the moment. And as the Austens were a large family, and Mrs Austen stitched and darned and lay an invalid on the sofa, her daughters, while still very young, were well aware that life in a country parsonage has little in common with life in Mrs Radcliffe's novels. This is all plausible enough, and much more might be written in the same strain. But it has nothing whatever to do with Love and Friendship. For this girl of seventeen is not writing to amuse the schoolroom. She is not writing to draw a laugh from sister and brothers. She is writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; she, in short, is writing. 'A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends, my Acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called. Alas! how altered now! Tho' indeed my own Misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other.' The authoress of those lines had, if not a whole sitting room to herself, some private corner of the common parlour where she was allowed to write without interruption. But now and then, as the writing of Love and Friendship proceeded, a brother or a sister must have asked her what she was laughing at. And then Jane Austen read aloud, 'I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura.... Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint....'And taking up her pen again she wrote, it is clear, as fast as she could write, and faster than she could spell, for the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia popped into her head as quick as lightning. She was in the enviable position of having one page to fill and a bubbling fancy capable of filling half a dozen. So if she wants to dispose of the husband of Phillipa she decrees that he shall have one talent, driving, and one possession, a coach, and he shall drive for ever between Edinburgh and Stirling, or, for Jane Austen does not exaggerate, shall drive to Stirling every other day. And Philander and Gustavus - what shall we do with them? Oh, their mothers (and, by the way, no one knew who their fathers were - perhaps Philip Jones the bricklayer, and Gregory Staves the staymaker) - their mothers kept their fortune of nine hundred pounds in the table drawer. So they stole it, and wrapped it in nine parcels, and spent it in seven weeks and a day, and came home and found their mothers starved, and went upon the stage and acted Macbeth. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense, there can be no doubt that Love and Friendship makes excellent reading. But what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of seventeen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.
