"'Have you been long in Bath, madam?'
"'About a week, sir,' replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
"'Really!' with affected astonishment.
"'Why should you be surprised, sir?'
"' Why, indeed!' said he, in his natural tone; 'but some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other.'"
This bit of dialogue recalls a remark in a letter written by Jane to Cassandra: "Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help putting it down."
Mr. Collins is one of the most finished of Jane's studies of men. He comes near to the impossible at times, but she makes him a living creature. The speech in which he offers his hand and advantages to his cousin Elizabeth has often been quoted, and its charms can never fade. Only a page of it is necessary to tempt the reader to turn—again or for the first time—to Pride and Prejudice in order that he may find the rest of the inimitable scene—
"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh's footstool—that she said, 'Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own; let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite."
The immediate consequences of Elizabeth's refusal are delightfully imagined and described. The moment Mrs. Bennet hears of it, she rushes to her husband's room—
"'You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will not have him; and if you do not make haste he will change his mind and not have her.'
"Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by her communication.
"'I have not the pleasure of understanding you,' said he, when she had finished her speech. 'Of what are you talking?'
"'Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.'
"'And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.'
"'Speak to Lizzy about if yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him.'
"'Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.'
"Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.
"'Come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth replied that it was. 'Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?'
"'I have, sir.'
"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'
"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'
"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.'"
There is nothing "commonplace" about this. What matter that the characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford material for such excellent wit?
In one respect, judged by the present standard in fiction, Jane Austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." No novelist was ever less troubled in the search for names. She merely took those of people she had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. Bennet, Dashwood, Elliot, Price, Woodhouse—names that the modern "popular" novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a Darcy or a Tilney being her highest flights in nomenclature. As for the Christian names, they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, three of the prominent characters are named John—John Dashwood, John Middleton, and John Willoughby. There are two Catherines in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeths, Fannys, Annes, Marys, Henrys, Edwards, Roberts, "fill the bills," and such a name as Frank Churchill seems recondite. It is much the same in the letters, the truth being that the Gwladyses, and Evadnes, and Marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural society. The burden which her sister Cassandra bore must have strengthened Jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should not have unusual names, and so we have our Elinors and Elizabeths, and Fannys, with their Edwards and Edmunds, and Henrys. The Darcys are almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "Fitzwilliam" and "Georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life."
So much for names. How are the men and women who bear them "introduced" to us? When a Colonel Newcome, or an Alfred Jingle, or a Sylvain Pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us with similar formalities. Jane Austen, like a casual hostess at a modern dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in any way we can. Scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and crofters, was the most generous giver of types among Jane Austen's contemporaries; Maria Edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry of Ireland, and John Galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in the Scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. Jane had no use for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be specially described for a particular purpose. Only in one of her novels (Sense and Sensibility) is the busy life of London made the subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three towns-people back to their London houses from their country visits that is effected. (The general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks, and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. Yet, as we know from many passages in her letters, Jane during her visits was a keen spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she jestingly declared, played havoc with her character. "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from Cork Street in August 1796, "and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." And in the next month she sends this little message to Mr. Austen: "My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'." She was not "prodigal"—save in gloves and ribbons—but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in town. She went very often to the play, so often at times as to be weary of it. The Hypocrite (Bickerstaff's "alteration" of Cibber's "adaptation" of Tartuffe) "well entertained" her, Dowton and Mathews being the chief actors; and she saw Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss O'Neill, and Kean at the outset of his fame. "The Clandestine Marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in Don Juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." Such joys, however, did not move her mind enough to seduce her from the country as a source of inspiration for her work.
"All lives lived out of London are mistakes more or less grievous—but mistakes," said Sydney Smith, adapting, consciously or not, the saying of Mascarille to the Précieuses: "Pour moi, Je tiens que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens." The life of Jane Austen, whose humour the author of the Plymley Letters, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved generalization. Her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.
It is one of Jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. Lord Chesterfield told his son: "If, instead of saying that tastes are different, and that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb, and say, that 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ... everybody would be persuaded that you had never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids." Proverbial philosophy finds little encouragement from Jane, who places it in the mouths of her least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her books and her letters, that she agrees with her own Marianne Dashwood, who, when Sir John Middleton has dared to suggest that she will be "setting her cap" at Willoughby, warmly replies: "That is an expression, Sir John, which I particularly dislike. I abhor every commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." The offending Sir John "did not much understand this reproof," but he "laughed as heartily as if he did." Elizabeth Bennet's use of the saying, "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse shock than it can have given to Darcy, so unexpected is it from the mouth of a Jane Austen heroine. When one of Cassandra's letters had diverted Jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "I could die of laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as Marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say at school."
Whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by Catherine Morland when she said to Henry Tilney, "I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible," a remark which Mr. Tilney hailed with delight as "an excellent satire on modern language." Its origin may be found in that first volume of The Mirror which Catherine's mother brought down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected."
A peculiarity of Jane Austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty," "unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"—a pet fancy of hers, which occurs, I am told, at least eight times in Emma alone—being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion" in the older romances of Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years of her residence at Bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its text.
In clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to carelessness as to defective art. Not that she was exempt from all the weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of her sex. Henry Tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the author over her own achievements—
"'I have sometimes thought,' says Catherine, doubtfully, 'whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is, I should not think the superiority was always on our side.'
"'As far as I have had opportunity of judging,' replies Tilney, 'it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.'
"'And what are they?'
"'A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.'
"'Upon my word, I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment! You do not think too highly of us in that way.'
"'I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'"
Deficiency of subject has not been charged against Jane's published letters, but they have often been charged with deficiency of serious interest. Her works certainly do exhibit an occasional looseness of grammar, mostly due to bad punctuation. The faulty construction of Lucy's letters (Sense and Sensibility) is noted by the author, but while Jane would not have been likely to regard "Sincerely wish you happy in your choice" as a proper way of beginning a sentence, her own delinquencies with respect to commas are sometimes no less grave than those of Mrs. Robert Ferrars. She would have felt no serious sympathy with Cyrano's declaration concerning his literary compositions—
"... Mon sang se coagule
En pensant qu'on y peut changer une virgule."
Her blood was too cool to be frozen by the printer's fancies in punctuation.
In an old number of the Cambridge Observer the curious student may find some suggested emendations of Jane Austen's text by Mr. A. W. Verrall, many of them being concerned with what are probably printers' errors. Those which deal with punctuation need not reflect on the printer as prime offender. The author was a woman. Mr. Verrall's ingenious suggestion that when Jane Austen is made to say that William Price's "direct holidays" might justly be given to his friends at Mansfield Park (his own family seeing him frequently at Portsmouth, where his ship was lying), she really wrote "derelict holidays," has little to commend it, "direct" so evidently, I think, being used to differentiate his actual leave from his ordinary leisure hours when on service. But there are two emendations, typical of many which might be suggested (Mr. Verrall has probably noted them for the edition which he ought to undertake in time for the centenary), which are entirely acceptable. Fanny Price is made to say to Mr. Rushworth, on the occasion when Maria Bertram and Crawford gave that unfortunate person the slip in his own garden, "They desired me to stay; my cousin Maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." Mr. Verrall justly observes that no one had desired Fanny to stay, and she would be the last girl to utter "an irrelevant falsehood." He holds that "she really did on this occasion, for kindness' sake, say something 'not quite true,'" and it was: "They desired me to say—my cousin Maria charged me to say, that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts."
Again, when in describing the discussion over Mrs. Weston's proposed dance, Jane Austen is made to say (in Emma), "The want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be attempted to attend, were mentioned," the author's words were, in Mr. Verrall's opinion, "tempted to attend." Like Shakespeare's, the MSS. of Jane Austen's masterpieces are to seek, so that what she wrote we cannot prove. The probability that in these two cases, as in others, the author omitted to notice in proof the errors of the printer is more likely, on the whole, than that her pen had slipped badly, and that her "copy" had never been carefully read over. She cared little for such slips, however, as we know from a letter written after Pride and Prejudice was published, wherein she says: "There are a few typical errors, and a 'said he' or 'said she' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear, but 'I do not write for such dull elves,' as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves." "Typical," of course, is here used in its obsolete sense of "typographical."
The negative bond of union referred to above between Jane Austen and the only English writer whom some of her eminent admirers have allowed to take precedence of her—that the MSS. of both have disappeared—suggests the passing reflection that in these days when Shakespeare is not allowed to hold the title to his plays without challenge, when Anne and Emily Brontë are accused of being (so far as the public is concerned) mere pseudonyms of their sister Charlotte, when George Henry Lewes has been given the credit for George Eliot's novels, and the speeches of eminent statesmen are said to be written by their wives, it is rather surprising that no one in search of a striking subject for a magazine article has attacked the claims of Jane Austen to a place among English authors. There is no evidence in the memoirs of her time that any distinguished person ever found himself in her company, her name did not appear on the title-pages of any books, she was almost unknown outside a small provincial circle, and in that circle no one seems to have had any idea that there was anything specially remarkable about her. Is it likely that such an obscure little body should have written such admirable books? Is it not much more likely that they were the work of Madame d'Arblay, or that in these peaceful compositions Mrs. Radcliffe found rest and recreation after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous system involved in the production of her "èpouvantable" melodramas? Jane Austen lays claim to some of the novels in her letters, it is true, but, since Ben Jonson's references to Shakespeare, and all other contemporary evidence in favour of the Stratford actor's authorship of the plays have been explained away to the complete satisfaction of those who dispute his claims, it would be no very difficult task to persuade a number of earnest souls that Jane Austen's letters are not really evidence of her authorship of the novels. As for her nearest relations, they were not in the real secret. The secret they are supposed to have kept during her life was that she wrote the novels, but if so, where are the MSS.? Why did not her admiring brothers treasure those most precious relics? Two of her MSS. (in addition to the opening chapters of her final effort in fiction) her family did, as a fact, preserve, those of Lady Susan and The Watsons, and these (here italic type becomes necessary) are so inferior to the six novels acknowledged, soon after her death, as hers, that it is easy (if we like) to find it difficult to believe that they are from the same pen! The real secret was that she did not write those six novels. This fascinating theory is freely offered to whomsoever it may please to follow it up.
We gain many vivid glimpses of Jane Austen's views of life in her novels, and Northanger Abbey holds a place apart from the others, not only for its many pages of burlesque, but as the vehicle by which so many of the author's reflections are conveyed, in a bright wrapping, to her appreciative readers. Let me give one or two examples—
"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable, and too well-informed themselves, to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages—did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."
The sister author is Fanny Burney. The opinion of men, the "trifling" or the "reasonable," is Jane Austen's. In Henry Tilney's remarks upon Catherine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's conduct to Mrs. Tilney we may discover something of Jane's view of the general condition of society in her time.
"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies; and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
Of Jane Austen as humourist there is no need to write specifically at any length. Almost every extract given from her novels, whatever the point to be illustrated, shows her in that capacity. It is impossible for long to separate her humour from the rest of her qualities. Yet there are people who see no humour in her, and actually like her novels in spite of their "seriousness "!
An American author, Mr. Oscar Adams, wrote a book about her some years ago in order "to place her before the world as the winsome, delightful woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her." Who were these "many" people? Evidently they existed (either without or within the author's own circle) or there would have been no reason to write a book for their conversion. They were probably those worthy persons—we have all met a few of them ourselves—who read Emma, and Pride and Prejudice, and the rest, without noticing that a malicious little sprite is for ever peeping between the lines. Imagine a reader who regards all Mr. Bennet's remarks as sober statements of considered opinion, and you will understand how Jane Austen might seem formidable. Though she is never so ruthless to her characters as Mr. Bennet is to his wife, Jane is herself a member of his family. Perhaps "ruthless" is the wrong word. You might apply it to a boy who throws pebbles at a donkey, but if the object of his attack was a rhinoceros, the boy would suffer more than the pachyderm. To the slings and arrows of her husband's outrageous humour Mrs. Bennet was less sensible than was Gulliver to the darts of the Lilliputians. Gulliver did feel a pricking sensation, whereas Mrs. Bennet was merely annoyed that Mr. Bennet did not always agree with her mood of the moment. In his critical introduction to Pride and Prejudice Professor Saintsbury forcibly says, in reply to those who resent the presence of such a husband as Mr. Bennet, that Mrs. Bennet was "a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but the ironic." The most unpleasant aspect of Mr. Bennet's sarcasms is not that they hurt his wife, which they could not, but that they were heard by his five daughters, three of whom at least were more or less able to understand them.
Jane Austen the novelist, then, may truly be "forbidding" to readers who take her au pied de la lettre. Such readers are in the position of Catherine Morland listening to Henry Tilney's imaginary account of the antiquities and mysteries of Northanger Abbey. She went there and painfully discovered the truth, while they can no more hope to discover it than a man with one eye can hope to see things as they appear to his fellows who have two. Still, he is a king among the blind, and the readers who find pleasure in Jane Austen as an entirely serious author are to be counted happy as compared with those who cannot read her at all.
It has been said by Mr. Goldwin Smith that there is no philosophy beneath the surface of Jane Austen's novels "for profound scrutiny to bring to light," her characters typifying nothing, because "their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing." Such justification as may be discovered for the charge that the subjects of the novels are commonplace is chiefly negative in kind. It is not that we may find in real life innumerable people as distinctive and entertaining as the principal characters of these stories, but that Jane does not introduce us to dramatically unusual scenes or persons. There are no houses like Dotheboys Hall or Ravenswood Tower, no incidents like the flight of Jos Sedley from Brussels or the arrest of Vautrin, no strange creatures like Mr. Rochester or Jonas Chuzzlewit, no scenes like those in Fagin's kitchen or Shirley's mill. She was immediately followed by a humourist whose scenes and characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. He is almost unknown to the great fiction-devouring public, and little read in comparison even with Jane Austen, with whom he has some strong affinities as well as antipathies. Thomas Love Peacock was never, so happily inspired—or so happy perhaps—as when he was "ironing" the insincerity or the unreasonable prejudice of the "well-to-do" class. There is, among the parsons of Jane Austen's creating, none who is more gloriously diverting than Dr. Ffolliot in Crotchet Castle, and it is pleasant to imagine Mr. Collins as curate to that militant theologian. The talk of the young women in Peacock's modern novels is better "informed" and much less natural than that of Elizabeth Bennet, or Emma, or Anne, and as for the men, while Mr. Tilney or Mr. Darcy might not have found it difficult to hold their own with most of the lovers in Peacock's novels, his intellectuals—Milestone, McQueedy, and the rest—would have found no one to refute their arguments among the company at Netherfield or at Mansfield Park. Peacock allows his satirical hobby-horse to run wild over the bramble-covered desert of British prejudice, while Jane Austen never leaves go of the rein. The result is that while he frequently makes us laugh at the absurdities of his Scythrops and Chainmails, whose performances we know to be burlesque, she makes us chuckle by her silver-shod satire of the class which she had studied from childhood. There are some who read Jane Austen and cannot read Peacock, and the reverse is also true. Those who can read both are never likely to be in want of pleasure on winter evenings so long as mind and eyes are left.
It is certain that no one familiar with either author could mistake a page written by one of them for a page by the other. Jane Austen's people, in spite of the humour with which the atmosphere is charged, are always possible—except, some of her most intimate admirers say, for Mr. Collins—while Peacock was never to be deterred from breaking through the fence which borders the pathway of probability. Only such readers as the prelate who declined to believe some of the incidents in Gulliver's Travels could be expected to regard Melincourt or Nightmare Abbey as veracious narratives. For all that Peacock, whose first novel, Headlong Hall, appeared in the year (1816) in which Jane Austen's last (published) work was done, was her immediate successor as a satirist of the follies and foibles of English men and women, and he was succeeded in turn by the splendid Thackeray, whose most obvious difference from Jane Austen lies in his frequent indulgence in sentimental reflections.
Jane was amused by the suggestions for improving her work, or for the plots of fresh novels, given to her from time to time, and among the papers found after her death was one endorsed "Plan of a novel according to hints from various quarters," the names of some of these human "quarters" being given in the margin. There were to be a "faultless" heroine and her "faultless" father driven from place to place over Europe by the vile arts of a "totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion." Wherever she went somebody fell in love with her, and she received frequent offers of marriage, which she referred to her father, who was "exceedingly angry that he should not be the first applied to." The "anti-hero" again and again carried her off, and she was "now and then starved to death," but was always rescued either by her father or the hero! For even the mildest varieties of the plots thus burlesqued Jane had no use, unless to laugh at them.
Origins of characters—Matchmaking—Second marriages—Negative qualities of the novels—Close knowledge of one class—Dislike of "lionizing"—Madame de Staël—The "lower orders"—Tradesmen—Social position—Quality of Jane's letters—Balls and parties.
In her letters, as in her books, the satiric touch was on almost everything that Jane Austen wrote. Her habit of making pithy little notes on the doings of her acquaintances was, in writing to her sister, irrepressible. The pith was not bitter. It was just the comment of a highly intelligent woman to whom the gods had given the gift of humour, and who, at an age when most girls of her day were as ingenuous as Evelina or as Catherine Morland, had learnt how much insincerity and affectation coloured the conduct even of kind and well-meaning people.
In her references to the foibles of real men and women we gain many glimpses of the origins—if not the originals—of some of her character studies. At an Ashford ball in 1798 one of the Royal Dukes was present, and among those who supped in his company were Cassandra and a Mrs. Cage, with whom the Austens were well acquainted. This lady was uneasy in the presence of Royalty, and her mistakes were described in a letter from Cassandra. Jane's mention of the incident in her reply is a fair sample of the way in which, in her more serious mood, this young woman of twenty-three regarded the weakness of her less cool and reasonable friends: "I can perfectly comprehend Mrs. Cage's distress and perplexity. She has all those kind of foolish and incomprehensible feelings which would make her fancy herself uncomfortable in such a party. I love her, however, in spite of all her nonsense."
One can see a hint of Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Bennet in the silly woman who flustered herself and fidgeted her companions in her attempts to assume what she supposed to be the right behaviour on such an occasion. Jane, who had never seen a prince, so far as we know, would have had no "distress and perplexity." She would have curtsied in the prettiest way, the Duke would have been charmed by her graceful figure, her clear complexion, and her soft brown eyes, and she would next day have written to her sister "all the minute particulars, which only woman's language can make interesting."
Her reflections on the gossip of the hour are not always quite so kindly. When Charles Powlett (of whose rejected offer of a kiss we have already heard) brings home a wife, Jane tells her sister that this bride "is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant." Once, when a story has reached her in the way that "Russian Scandal" is played, by the muddling up of half-understood particulars in the process of transmission from mouth to ear, she has to correct a previous statement about some of the Austen circle—
"On inquiring of Mrs. Clerk, I find that Mrs. Heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the Crooks and Morleys. It is young Mr. Crook who is to marry the second Miss Morley, and it is the Miss Morleys instead of the second Miss Crook who were the beauties at the music meeting. This seems a more likely tale, a better devised imposture."
The sting is where stings usually are.
Scandal was as distasteful to her as it can have been to Madame du Châtelet, of whom Voltaire said that "tout ce qui occupe la société était de son ressort, hors la médisance." Jane gave Cassandra many little bits of news about their friends which the principals might have resented, but between sister and sister such things are not scandalous, and as for those who read them now, they may talk about the incidents referred to as freely as they like without harm to any one. Many of the "scandals" Jane mentions are "serious" only in her innocent fun. We hear, for instance, that in 1809, "Martha and Dr. Mant are as bad as ever, he runs after her in the street to apologize for having spoken to a gentleman while she was near him the day before. Poor Mrs. Mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married daughters." Jane amused herself and her sister and teased poor Martha by her jokes on this affair. "As Dr. M. is a clergyman," she writes, "this attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air." Mrs. Jennings, Sir John Middleton's mother-in-law, would have told the story quite seriously, and with immense gusto, at the Barton breakfast-table, but Dr. Mant and Martha were not transferred to a novel to the discomfort of themselves and their families and the delight of the roman à clef hunters of Southampton.
The letters do seem occasionally to bring us into the company of people whom we know quite well in the novels. Jane, replying to Cassandra at Christmas 1798, says: "I am glad to hear such a good account of Harriet Bridges; she goes on now as young ladies of seventeen ought to do, admired and admiring.... I dare say she fancies Major Elkington as agreeable as Warren, and if she can think so, it is very well." Alter the surnames, and this passage might apply as well to Harriet Smith as to Harriet Bridges. "I dare say she fancies Mr. Martin as agreeable as Mr. Churchill, and if she can think so, it is very well," might have been written by Emma to dear Anne Weston about the "little friend" from the boarding-school. Jane, as in this case of Harriet Bridges, took so much interest in the love affairs of her friends that we often think of Emma Woodhouse and her match-making propensities, about which Mr. Knightley spoke so harshly. By Emma's advice Harriet Smith, having refused Robert Martin, the young farmer, had regarded Mr. Elton as a prospective husband, and when he went elsewhere Emma had selected Frank Churchill for the vacant post. Then, through a serious mistake, Mr. Knightley was the man, until at last the "inconsiderate, irrational, unfeeling" nature of her conduct became clear to her mind, and Harriet was allowed to marry the constant Martin.
Mrs. Mitford declared that Jane Austen was husband-hunting at twelve years of age, but the old lady's memory was evidently quite untrustworthy about people and dates when she talked such nonsense. Jane was, however, on her own showing, fond of looking out for possible husbands for her pretty little nieces. Here is an instance, from a letter of 1814—"Young Wyndham accepts the invitation. He is such a nice, gentlemanlike, unaffected sort of young man, that I think he may do for Fanny." Next day she is less pleased with him—"This young Wyndham does not come after all; a very long and very civil note of excuse is arrived. It makes one moralize upon the ups and downs of this life."
That the habit was hereditary—it was a custom of Jane's time, even more than it is of our own—we may see from a report she sent to Cassandra of the pleasure with which Mr. and Mrs. Austen, with one accord, lighted upon a suitable "match" for their elder daughter. He was "a beauty of my mother's." Having no affaire of her own to trouble her rest, Jane took an active part as adviser for those in whose fate she was affectionately interested. Especially was this the case with this favourite niece, Fanny Knight, who, having fancied she was "in love" with one man, discovered that she preferred, or thought she preferred, another.
"Do not be in a hurry," wrote Aunt Jane, "the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before."
Fanny, who was "inimitable, irresistible," whose "queer little heart" and its flutterings were "the delight of my life," might have been fickle, but she did not, said her aunt, deserve such a punishment as to fall in love after marriage, and with the wrong man.
Jane's views on second marriages are expressed in the case of Lady Sondes, whose haste to find consolation after the death of Lord Sondes was the subject of much chatter among the Mrs. Jenningses and Mrs. Bennets of her neighbourhood. "Had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches, and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can will her, to be happy."
In the novels no woman of consequence—excepting the callous and selfish Lady Susan Vernon—is allowed a second mate, nor is the courtship before any of the marriages much in accord with the general practice of English fiction. There is not even a description of some splendid wedding. Jane, by the way, did not regard a marriage as the proper occasion for public advertisement of the bride's qualities. "Such a parade," she writes of the conduct of a certain "alarming bride," is "one of the most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine. To attract notice could have been her only wish."
It might seem, indeed, that the most original characteristic of her works is the absence of almost all the qualities of plot and treatment on which fiction usually depends for success with the public. If we were asked of some modern lady writer, "What are her books like?" and we replied, "In one respect they are conventional, for they all end in the choosing of wedding-rings. But scarcely anybody in these novels feels the 'grand passion,' they have no relation to current events, nobody ever has a strange adventure, only one married woman is faithless to her vows, no adventuress appears, there are no foreigners, no one is in revolt against anything, nobody is seriously troubled about the trend of society or the decadence of morals and taste, nobody starves, or commits a murder, or engineers a swindle, there are no cruel husbands, no triple ménages and no mysterious occurrences or detectives, and as nobody dies, nobody makes death-bed revelations," the retort would probably imply, "What stupid stuff they must be." These novels do, indeed, depend for their effect on less of "plot and passion" than almost any others of consequence yet written. There are many novels of small plot. Balzac, in Eugénie Grandet, George Sand, in Tamaris, show what even "stormy" novelists can do with a modicum of events. But the lack of both plot and passion is rare in the work that lives. It is thus that the genius of Jane Austen is strongly displayed. Only genius could give a vital, an enduring fascination to a record chiefly concerned with the ordinary experiences of a few respectable country people, almost all of one class.
She had the power, because, with the gifts of expression and of humour, she combined an almost perfect knowledge of a typical section of society, all the more clearly exhibited because of her comparative ignorance of any other section. She did not care to study the very poor, the very rich were outside her circle of common experience, and she would rarely write about people or phases of life that were not as familiar to her as the squire's daughter and the manners of the hunt ball. She had none of Disraeli's audacity. "My son," said Isaac Disraeli, when some one expressed surprise at the knowledge of "exalted circles" shown in The Young Duke, "my son, sir, when he wrote that book, had never even seen a duke." Jane Austen, "never having seen a duke," or a ducal palace, never attempted to describe either. She shrank from any kind of "lionizing," whether in village society or in the "great world," and to this healthy pride is no doubt partly due the obscurity in which she lived and died. One instance of her reserve may be adduced. Soon after the appearance of Mansfield Park she was invited, "in the politest manner," to a party at the house of a nobleman who suspected her of the authorship of that book, and who, as an inducement, intimated that she would be able to converse with Madame de Staël. "Miss Austen," says her brother, "immediately declined the invitation. To her truly delicate mind such a display would have given pain instead of pleasure." The story, which has sometimes been regarded as evidence of improper pride on the part of the English novelist, is in keeping with all that is known of Jane Austen's nature.
Had the meeting of the authors of Emma and Corinne come about, one would like to have heard their conversation. The talking would have been largely on one side. Madame, who knew the "world," and enjoyed the distinction of having been called a "wicked schemer" and a "fright" by the greatest man of her time, would have tried in vain to impress the unaffected Englishwoman who cared so little for politics and Napoleon that, in those novels which Madame regarded as "vulgaire," she scarcely alluded to either. Jane would have listened attentively, and now and again, when Madame paused for breath, would have made a polite remark, the covert humour of which would have been lost on her famous companion. There is no suggestion that any hint as to Madame de Staël's reputation had reached Chawton Cottage, otherwise some might suppose that it was not only the diffident modesty Jane's brother alleges which prevented her from going to the party. It is quite likely that she who described the loves of Lydia Bennet and Maria Rushworth with such an entire absence of sermonizing would yet have felt that, though she might like to converse on a more private occasion with the author of Corinne and Delphine, she would prefer not to be matched with a lady who had put to so practical a test her theories "de l'influence des passions sur le bonheur."
Could there be a stronger contrast, physical or moral, than between the country parson's slight and good-looking daughter, whose knowledge of men and affairs was gained in the parlours of manor-houses and the assembly-rooms of watering-places, and the financier's stout and ugly daughter, whose political activities were so persistent that she had been expelled from Paris, who had travelled, mingling in the society of the governing classes, the artists, the men of letters in Italy, Germany, and other lands, and whose literary performances, historical, political, and imaginative, were read wherever educated readers existed?
If Jane had no strong desire to be brought into contact with the great, wise, and eminent of her time, neither were her tastes at all in the direction of social equality or the advocacy of the "rights of man," and while she was indifferent to the famous and influential, she was scarcely more concerned for the obscure and lowly. Admire her work as we may, and love her as many of us must, we cannot recognize that she was much in sympathy with any class but her own. It is certainly to no undue regard for social position, to no want of charitable intention, that we can attribute her general neglect of the drama, comedy and tragedy alike, of humble life. It might be said that she could, and if she would, have drawn the poor as well as she drew the "gentry." She knew her limitations, and thus such rare sketches of the "lower orders" as she gives stop short of any errors of understanding. Mrs. Reynolds, Darcy's housekeeper, whose admiration for her master and his sister is so strongly expressed, and Thomas, the servant at Barton Cottage, who comes in to describe how he has seen "Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars" in Exeter, are in no way out of drawing, though the phrase with which the author finishes off the man-servant—"Thomas and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon dismissed"—so aptly suggests the position accorded to the working classes in her own works that it almost seems to have a double meaning. Let any one familiar with the novels try to recall occasions when a servant is introduced even in such common cases as the answering of a bell or waiting at table, and he will find it hard to add to the examples already given any with a better part than the overworked Nanny at the Watsons', who, when Lord Osborne is paying his untimely visit, puts her head in at the door and says, "Please, ma'am, master wants to know why he be'nt to have his dinner." As for the class from which most of these servants came, it has no place at all. Emma takes Harriet to a cottage where there is a convalescent child who requires jellies or beef tea, but the incident is of no account except as leading up to the visit to Mr. Elton; and she goes to see an old servant while Harriet pays her formal call at the Abbey Mill Farm. Robert Martin is a farmer, and a letter from him is introduced, but he has no share of any consequence in the dialogue. When we remember Jane Austen's avowed partiality for Emma, and Emma's disgust at the idea of Harriet marrying a mere farmer, no matter how much her admirer Knightley might support the man's claims, we may not unreasonably suppose that Jane to some extent shared Emma's prejudice. There was, however, a notable exception to Jane's remoteness from the farming class. The joint tenant of the Manor farm at Steventon, the happily named James Digweed—who seems to have been ordained later on—was admitted to so much favour that she could not only dance and dine, and gossip with him, but could chaff her sister about his evident desire to gain Cassandra's affection.
Two or three apothecaries are admitted into the novels. One attends Jane Bennet at Netherfield, and another attends Marianne Dashwood at Cleveland. Apothecary was almost a term of contempt in those days, and one of Jane's hits at the neighbourhood of Hans Place was that there seemed to be only one person there who was "not an apothecary." She even, as we have seen, corrects her niece for supposing that a country doctor—not a mere "apothecary"—would ever be "introduced" to a peer!
The only country tradesman who figures at all prominently is Sir William Lucas, who had "risen to the honour of Knighthood by an address to the King during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business.... By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous." He is not so diverting a creature as Martin Tinman of Crikswich in Mr. Meredith's delightful comedy The House on the Beach, who, when rescued from that storm-beaten home on a terrible night, was found to be wearing the Court suit in which, long before, he had presented an address to the throne! But Sir William Lucas's constant recollection of the fact that he had been received by the sovereign, while his neighbours, the "small" country-gentlemen, had not, is illustrated with admirable art. In his "emporium," with his stock-in-trade around him, his portrait would never have been drawn. Mr. Weston also made money in trade, apparently "in the wholesale line," after he had retired from the militia, and of the proud and conceited Bingley sisters we are told that "they were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade."
Jane has many kindly things to tell her sister about, her mother's maids, especially of a faithful and industrious "Nannie." Of the maids' relations, the agricultural class, amid whose homes she passed nearly all her life, she has, as I have said, left no account in her novels. Her letters do indeed contain many bits of news concerning the ploughmen and washerwomen of the parish, and they are significant as to the manner, proper to the age, in which she regarded her humble neighbours. Her references to the cottagers are commonly devoid of any indication of deeper feeling than the consciousness of a need to give them clothes. Of the people employed on her father's farm, she says—
"John Bond begins to find himself grow old, which John Bond ought not to do, and unequal to much hard work; a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labour, and John himself is to have the care of the sheep. There are not more people engaged than before, I believe; only men instead of boys. I fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters. Lizzie Bond is just apprenticed to Miss Small, so we may hope to see her able to spoil gowns in a few years."
About Christmas (1798) she writes—
"Of my charities to the poor since I came home you shall have a faithful account. I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins, amounting in all to about half-a-guinea. But I have no reason to suppose that the Battys would accept of anything, because I have not made them the offer."
Of personal service we hear but little. There is just the old "Lady Bountiful" idea, adapted to the purse of the parson's younger daughter. Alms were what the poor chiefly wanted, and alms they received—if not in money, in warm garments. She gave them worsted stockings, and flannel to wear in the cold weather. She did not often, so far as we hear, sit and chat with Dame Staples and Dame Kew over the things that made up their life-interests, or listen to the confidences of Lizzie Bond and Hannah Staples concerning their rustic lovers.
Sometimes we do hear of talks with poor women, as when Jane writes, "I called yesterday upon Betty Londe, who inquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, which I am sorry to have merited, and from which I will profit." We may well believe that Jane was no pioneer in "district visiting." Her services to humanity were of another kind. Almost alone among the greater novelists who have written the fiction of drawing-rooms, she was hardly less indifferent as a writer to the concerns of the governing class of her day than of the voteless class, unless, indeed, she was a hostile witness so far as her knowledge went. Among the worst-bred persons in the novels, with John Thorpe, Mr. Collins, and the ever-delightful Mrs. Bennet, are Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the hero whose manners are most open to reproach is Lady Catherine's nephew, Darcy—before he has been refused by Elizabeth.
Jane Austen's views on the claims of social position, as distinct from individual character, were much the same as Anne Elliot's. Mr. Elliot and Anne, we learn—
"Did not always think alike. His value for rank and connection she perceived to be greater than hers. It was not merely complaisance, it must be a liking to the cause, which made him enter warmly into her father's and sister's solicitudes on a subject which she thought unworthy to excite them.... She was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen—a wish that they had more pride.... Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created; but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding."
The Dalrymples and Lady Catherine de Bourgh do not lead one to suppose that Jane's acquaintance with their class was a fortunate one. Had it been, she would probably have given some happier examples of the titular aristocracy. Lord Osborne, in The Watsons, is in some ways a more amiable type, but too "sketchy" to be of much account as an antidote to such unpleasing people as the aunt of Darcy and the cousins of Anne Elliot.
If persons of artificial eminence are almost unknown in the novels, there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for their individual gifts or achievements. Sir John Middleton fills his too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. He hardly allows time to speed the parting guests before he must turn to welcome their successors. But no statesman, or traveller, or professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those ever-open doors. They do not come, for one reason—and it seems a sufficient one—because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and Madeira around the mahogany tables at Netherfield, or Barton, or Uppercross, know and care nothing whatever about them and their performances. "Each thinks his little set mankind" is as true of the characters in Jane Austen's books as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their author. The Morlands, and Musgroves, and Woodhouses, and Bennets have never travelled, unless an occasional visit to London may count as travel. They have been into some neighbouring county, they have been perchance to Bath. They have not so much as been to Paris. Emma had never seen the sea. Twenty years earlier it would have been different. Darcy at any rate would have known something of France had he been twenty years older. From the outbreak of the Revolution till the first exile of Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any but the most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after the rise of Napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the Continent very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. Thus, not only are the conversations which Jane Austen offers devoid of any such elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance of Byron in Venetia, or of Shelley in Nightmare Abbey, but the opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. On the other hand, we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a contemporary of Jane Austen's declared, "If you introduce the name of a river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the Rhine, or make you dizzy with the height of Mont Blanc."
In any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities for enlarging her knowledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own class in the country. Her published correspondence has been described as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what Madame de Staël meant by "vulgaire," and not "vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. They are, however, exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. Her satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her time. It is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are hunting or shooting—the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids, the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that young woman who is so pretty—enlivened by Jane's wit.
The dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops" were among the favourite pleasures of Jane Austen. If you have read her letters you will feel that she is present when Fanny Price dances so prettily at Mansfield Park, or when Darcy declines to dance with Elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is "not handsome enough" to tempt him. "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however. We had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated in a very elegant manner." Such bits of news are common at all periods of Jane's correspondence. For example: "The ball on Thursday was a very small one indeed, hardly so large as an Oxford smack;" and again, "Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but twenty-three people in the room"—just as it was when they got up the scratch dance at the Bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall."
On another occasion, at a public hall at the county town—
"The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. There was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. I danced nine dances out of ten—five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute, and James Digweed, and four with Catherine. There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves."
Jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another girl as with a man—it was the dancing she loved, and watching the behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs and affectations.
Emma Woodhouse, the day after a dance at Highbury, might have sent to her sister in Brunswick Square just such an account as Jane Austen to her sister at Godmersham—
"There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome." One of the girls seemed to her: "A queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She danced away with great activity. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice."
A ball to which Jane Austen went in 1808—her thirty-fourth year—was "rather more amusing" than she expected. "The melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years 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. We paid an additional shilling for our tea." This letter is but one of many bits of evidence that no memory of a Captain Wentworth troubled Jane's own life. The "shame" such a woman could have felt in being "older" one can scarcely imagine, and the context shows it was not seriously felt.
The most pathetic dancing incident in the novels was the impromptu affair at Uppercross (in Persuasion), where Anne saw her old lover apparently losing his heart elsewhere. "The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual; and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved." She did not know that Wentworth, who was making so merry with the Musgrove girls, was faithful all the time to his old love—herself. We might doubt whether the author knew it until later on in the story, were it not that the idea of ending a novel without the marriage of the principal maiden to the man she liked best would have been entirely foreign to Jane Austen's method. So Frederick Wentworth danced with the Musgroves, and Anne played for their delight.
The dance most fully described was that given by the Westons at the "Crown," when Mr. Elton behaved so abominably to Harriet Smith, and Mr. Knightley showed himself a preux chevalier and saved Emma's lovely protégée from the humiliation of being the only "wallflower." In describing how Elizabeth at Netherfield, Catherine at Bath, Harriet at Highbury, and Fanny at Mansfield Park idly watched the dancing because no man had asked them to join it, Jane, pretty girl and excellent dancer as she was, spoke from personal experience. Once at any rate, when "in the pride of youth and beauty," she was able to write, after a dance at a neighbouring house—
"I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about."
She would not, if she could help it, dance with bad partners. "One of my gayest actions," she writes after a ball, "was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured."
It is in connection with one of the Westons' parties that Mr. Woodhouse makes his sage observations on the eternal question of ventilation. When Frank Churchill says that the fresh air difficulty will be settled by their dancing in a large room, so that the windows need not be opened, because "it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows, letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which does the mischief," Mr. Woodhouse cries—
"'Open the windows! but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent! I never heard of such a thing. Dancing with open windows! I am sure neither your father nor Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it.'
"'Ah! sir—but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. I have often known it done myself.'
"'Have you, indeed, sir? Bless me! I never could have supposed it. But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear.'"
The conversation of this valetudinarian quietist is always diverting. He suggests that Emma should leave the Coles' party before it is half over, as it is so bad to be up late. "But, my dear sir," cried Mr. Weston, "if Emma comes away early it will be breaking up the party."
"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse. "The sooner every party breaks up the better."
Advancing maturity did not do much to spoil Jane's love of dances. From Southampton, in 1809, she wrote: "Your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, and could have stayed 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."
A letter of Jane Austen's
A letter of Jane Austen's
If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, she is ever ready in return for news of Cassandra's. "I shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it.... We were at a ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone and in the evening danced two country dances and the Boulangeries." This French dance, by the way, was on the unwritten programme at Mr. Bingley's ball, in Pride and Prejudice. It seems to have had its birth in the Revolution, when the bakers, men and women together, kept themselves warm by joining hands and dancing up and down the streets.
After Jane Fairfax had sung herself hoarse at the Coles' party—
"The proposal of dancing—originating nobody exactly knew where—was so effectually promoted by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly clearing away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, capital in her country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and Frank Churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to Emma, had secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment."
The waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be classed as a country dance. It had been imported from Germany, where Mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after Jane Austen had written her earlier novels, and I cannot remember any other reference to it in her work. It was at first considered an "improper" dance, and one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered by the new fashion. Sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room, repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when Emma danced at the "Crown" and Jane Austen at Goodnestone.
"With tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance,
Behold the well-paired couple now advance.
In such sweet posture our first parents moved,
While, hand in hand, through Eden's bowers they roved,
Ere yet the Devil, with promise fine and false,
Turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz."
Little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if Edmund Bertram, Fanny, and Sir Thomas were shocked at the very idea of play-acting by the family and guests at Mansfield Park. Not that there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a play, when Lady Bertram asked her children not to "act anything improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer, but because "Sir Thomas would not like it."
The Bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which Mrs. Weston played, serve to emphasize the place which Jane Austen fills as an historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific nineteenth. "What is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks her sister in 1807; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." Morals change but little as compared with moeurs. The girls who act in private theatricals every winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet was moved to utter the quatrain—