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D HER 
 
 3UNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY 
 
OF "^Hi 
 
 UNIVEHbll Y 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 AND HER 
 
 COUNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. HELM 
 
 AUTHOR OF *' ASPECTS OF BALZAC," ETC. 
 
 EVELEIGH NASH 
 
 Fawside House 
 
 London 
 
 1909 
 
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
 
 bread street hill, e.g., and 
 
 bungay, suffolk. 
 
TO 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 H y -t 
 
"I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion 
 might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an 
 essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments 
 which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed 
 from that quality in the author. Good-nature produces 
 a disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly ; which 
 prompts them to express themselves with smartness 
 against the errors of men, without bitterness towards 
 their persons." — Steele, Tatler^ No. 242. 
 
NOTE 
 
 The author is much indebted to the Hon. C. M. Knatch- 
 bull-Hugessen, and also to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., 
 Ltd., for permission to make extracts from the Letters of 
 Jatie Austen. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 DOMINANT QUALITIES '^°^ 
 
 Jane Austen's abiding freshness — Why she has not 
 more readers — Characteristics of her work — 
 Absence of passion — Balzac, Jane Austen, and 
 Charlotte Bronte — Jane in her home circle — Her 
 tranquil nature — Her unselfishness — Compared 
 with Dorothy Osborne — Prudent heroines — 
 Thoughtless admiration . . . . .11 
 
 II 
 
 EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 Literary Influences — Jane Austen's defence of novel- 
 ists- — The old essayists — Her favourite authors — 
 Some novels of her time — Criticism of her niece's 
 novel — Sense of her own limitations — Her method 
 — Humour — Familiar names — Some character- 
 istics of style — Suggested emendations — A new 
 " problem " of authorship — A " forbidding " writer 
 — "Commonplace" and "superficial" — Thomas 
 Love Peacock — Sapient suggestions ... 47 
 
 III 
 
 CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 Origins of characters — Matchmaking — Second mar- 
 riages — Negative qualities of the novels — Close 
 knoa^ledge of one class — Dislike of '* lionizing'^'— ^ 
 Madame ~de"Stael — The "lower orders" — Trades- 
 men — Social positioif^Quality of Jane's letters^- 
 Balls and parties ...... 97 
 
 IV 
 
 ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 Dr. Whately on Jane Austen — " Moral lessons " of 
 her novels — Charge of " Indelicacy " — Marriage 
 as a profession — A " problem " novel — " The Nos- 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 talgia of the Infinite" — The "whitewashing" of 
 Willoughby — Lady Susan condemned by its 
 author — The Watsons — Change in manners — No 
 "heroes " — Woman's love — The Prince Regent — 
 The Quarterly Review . . . . -133 
 
 V 
 
 THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 What has woman done? — "Nature's SaHc law" — 
 Women deficient in satire — Some types in the 
 novels — The female snob — The valetudinarian — 
 The fop — The too agreeable man — " Personal size 
 and mental sorrow " — Knightley's opinion of 
 
 -" Emma — Ashamed of relations — Mrs. Bennet — 
 The clergy and their opinions — Worldly life — 
 Absence of dogma — Authors confused with their 
 creations 167 
 
 VI 
 
 PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 The novelist and her characters — Her sense of their 
 reality — Accessories rarely described — Her ideas 
 on dress — Her own millinery and gowns — Thin 
 clothes and consumption — Domestic economy — 
 Jane as housekeeper — "A very clever essay" — 
 Mr. Collins at Longbourn — The gipsies at High- 
 bury — Topography of Jane Austen — Hampshire — 
 Lyme Regis — Godmersham — Bath — London . 199 
 
 VII 
 
 INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE 
 
 Jane Austen's genius ignored — Negative and positive 
 instances — The literary orchard — Jane's influence 
 in English literature ...... 245 
 
 Bibliographical Note . . . . . -251 
 Index ......... 255 
 
 Frontispiece By Violet Helm. 
 
 A Letter of Jane Austen's . . . To face y^. 129. 
 
I 
 
 DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 AND HER 
 
 COUNTRY-HOUSE COMEDY 
 
 I 
 
 DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 Jane Austen's abiding freshness — Why she has not more 
 readers — Characteristics of her work — Absence of 
 passion — Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte 
 — Jane in her home circle — Her tranquil nature — Her 
 unselfishness — Compared with Dorothy Osborne — 
 Prudent heroines — Thoughtless admiration. 
 
 The year 1775, which deprived England of her 
 American colonies, was generous to English art 
 and literature. Had it only produced Walter 
 Savage Landor, or even no better worthy than 
 James Smith of the Rejected Addresses, it 
 would not have done badly. But these were its 
 added bounties. Its greater gifts were Turner, 
 Charles Lamb and Jane Austen. Could we be 
 offered the choice of re-possessing the United 
 States, or losing the very memory of these three, 
 which alternative would we choose } 
 
 13 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 It is difficult to appreciate the lapse of time 
 since Jane Austen was at work. We are now 
 within a few years of the centenary of her death. 
 She had been laid beneath that black slab in 
 Winchester Cathedral before the first railway had 
 been planned, or the first telegraph wire stretched 
 from town to town, or the first steamship steered 
 across the Atlantic. Yet the must of age has not 
 settled on her books. The lavender may lie 
 between their pages, but it is still sweet, and there 
 is many a successful novelist of our own times 
 whose work is already far more out of date than 
 hers. 
 
 This perennial timeliness of atmosphere is no 
 necessity of genius. Fielding and Scott remain 
 a delight for succeeding generations, because they 
 possess the essential quality of humanity, but the 
 life which they offer us is largely remote from our 
 own, foreign to our experience. Jane Austen 
 invites us to enjoy a change of air among people 
 with most of whom we may soon feel at ease, 
 finding nothing in their conversation that will dis- 
 turb our equanimity. If you are one of Jane 
 Austen's lovers, you come back to her novels for 
 a holiday from the noise and whirl of modern 
 
 14 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 fiction, as you would come from a great city to 
 the countryside or the coast village for rest and 
 restoration. 
 
 The failure of her books to attract the mass of 
 novel-readers is due in the first place to a lack 
 of " exciting " qualities. No syndicate that knew 
 its business would offer them for serial purposes; 
 they have no breathless "situations," and their 
 strong appeal is to the calmer feelings and the 
 intellect, not to the passions and the prejudices. 
 In one respect only has she anything in common 
 with the popular novelists of our day. Her set 
 of characters is even more limited than theirs. 
 The virtuous heroine, the handsome hero, the 
 frivolous coquette, the fascinating libertine, the 
 worldly priest, are to be encountered in her pages, 
 but the wicked nobleman and the criminal adven- 
 turess find no places there. What is often over- 
 looked, however, by those who speak of Jane 
 Austen's few characters, is that no two of them 
 have quite the same characteristics of mind. 
 They are differentiated with admirable art. Even 
 so, the types are few, and the smallness of the 
 field which she cultivated has been frequently 
 adduced as a bar to her inclusion among the 
 
 15 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 masters of English fiction. She has the least 
 range of them all. When one thinks of the host 
 of strongly-marked types in Scott, in Dickens, 
 in Thackeray, of the diversity of scenes and in- 
 cidents which fill the pages of their books, her 
 few squires and parsons and unemployed officers, 
 with their wives and daughters, who live out their 
 days in Georgian parlours and in shrubberies and 
 parks, make a poor enough show in the dramatic 
 and spectacular way. 
 
 No particular passion dominates the life of any 
 one of her leading personages. Avarice, which 
 has afforded such notable figures to almost every 
 great novelist, in her world is only represented 
 by meanness ; lust and hate are nowhere strongly 
 emphasized, even love is rarely permitted to 
 suggest the possibility of becoming violent. 
 There are no Pecksniffs, Quilps, Pere Grandets, 
 nor Lord Steynesj no Lady Kews, Jane Eyres, 
 nor Lisbeth Fischers. Only into the hearts of 
 her younger women does Jane Austen throw the 
 searchlight of complete knowledge, lit by her own 
 feelings, and tended with self-analysis, and her 
 heroines still leave a large part of virtuous 
 
 womankind unrepresented. 
 
 i6 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 Balzac, describing the origins of his play La 
 Mardtre to the manager who produced it, said : 
 "We are not concerned with an appalling melo- 
 drama wherein the villain sets light to houses and 
 massacres the inhabitants. No, I imagine a 
 drawing-room comedy where all is calm, tranquil, 
 pleasant. The men play peacefully at the whist- 
 table, by the light of wax candles under little 
 green shades. The women chat and laugh as 
 they do their fancy needlework. Presently they 
 all take tea together. In a word, everything 
 shows the influence of regular habits and harmony. 
 But for all that, beneath this placid surface the 
 passions are at work, the drama progresses until 
 the moment when it bursts out like the flame of 
 a conflagration. That is what I want to show." 
 The scene described is Jane Austen's — the 
 quiet parlour, the card-players, the women chat- 
 ting, and working with their coloured silks, the 
 tea-tray, the shaded candles, the general air of 
 ease and tranquillity. We find it at Mansfield 
 Park with the Bertrams, at Hartfield with the 
 Woodhouses, and, in spite of Lydia and her 
 " mamma," at Longbourn with the Bennets. But 
 the denouement to which Balzac looked for his 
 
 B 17 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 effect has no attraction for Jane Austen. 
 Catherine Morland, at Northanger Abbey, 
 imagines some such tragedy smouldering into life 
 below the surface of quiet habitude as Balzac 
 discovers in his horrid war of step-daughter and 
 step-mother, and Jane Austen herself laughs with 
 Henry Tilney at this impressionable country 
 maiden whom he mocks while he admires. 
 
 Balzac and Jane Austen both strove to depict 
 life, to show the motives and instincts of men and 
 women as the causes of action; in his case of an 
 energetic and passionate type, wherein the primary 
 instincts are freely exercised, in her case, of a 
 simple, orderly kind, which allows but little scope 
 for the display of violence or the elaboration of 
 plots. There are exceptions, of course, which for 
 fear of the precise critic must at least be illus- 
 trated. Balzac has his quiet Pierrettes and Rose 
 Cormons, who suffer as patiently and far more 
 poignantly than an Elinor Dashwood or a Fanny 
 Price ; Jane Austen has her dissolute Willoughbys 
 and disturbing Henry Crawfords, and also her 
 Maria Rushworths and Mrs. Clays, who throw 
 their bonnets over the windmills with even less 
 regard for their reputations than a Beatrix de 
 
 i8 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 Rochefide or a Natalie de Manerville. When a 
 lapse from virtue on the part of any of her 
 characters was, on some rare occasion, necessary 
 to her plan, Jane Austen did not allow any prudish 
 reserve to stand in the way, but it may be said 
 no less unreservedly that she never introduced 
 vice where her story could do quite as well without 
 it, and it is never the central motive of her novels. 
 It is, then, not alone for the narrowness of 
 her field that her title to greatness has often been 
 disputed. Many persons whose literary tastes 
 are marked by understanding and catholicity 
 refuse to acknowledge the genius of so peaceful 
 a novelist. Because of the absence of passion 
 and sentiment in Jane Austen's works, the author 
 of Jane Eyre would not recognize in her the great 
 artist that Scott and Coleridge believed her to 
 be. ".The passions," wrote Miss Bronte, "are 
 perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a 
 speaking acquaintance with that stormy sister- 
 hood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no 
 more than an occasional graceful but distant 
 recognition — too frequent converse with them 
 would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress." 
 
 The three novelists here brought into momentary 
 B2 19 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 association, the creators of Eugenie Grandet, 
 Emma, and [ane Eyre represent three distinctive 
 forces in fiction. Charlotte Bronte, disillusioned 
 with the world, of which she knew very little, and 
 angry at its follies and injustices, sat alone and 
 poured out her feelings in her books; Balzac, 
 hungry for fame, wrote furiously all night by 
 the light of a dip, stimulating his fiery imagina- 
 tion with the strong coffee which was the irre- 
 sponsible author of many of his most astonishing 
 chapters ; Jane Austen, taking her meals and her 
 rest regularly, sat at her little desk in the parlour 
 where her mother and sister were sewing or writing 
 letters, and placidly turned her observations and 
 reflections into manuscript. Her hazel eyes, we 
 may be certain, never rolled in any kind of frenzy, 
 her brown curls were never disturbed by the 
 spasmodic movements of nervous hands. Great 
 artist as she was, she had no greater share of the 
 " artistic temperament " than many a popular 
 novelist who "turns out" two or three serial 
 stories at a time by the simple process of shuffling 
 the situations, changing the scenery, and re-nam- 
 ing the characters. If she had been touched by 
 the strong emotion of a Charlotte Bronte, or the 
 
 20 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 burning imagination of a Balzac, she might have 
 produced work which would have set the world on 
 fire, instead of merely infusing keen happiness 
 into responsive minds and compelling their love 
 and admiration. That is only to say that if she 
 had been somebody else she would not have been 
 herself. It is peace, not war, that she carries to 
 us. Even her irony is not of the sardonic kind, 
 and in her work the " master spell " is so daintily 
 mingled that the bitter ingredients seem to have 
 disappeared in the making. 
 
 Respect and admiration and sympathy in a 
 high degree have been given by millions of minds, 
 not always emotional, to many authors, but Jane 
 Austen is loved as few have been. The love is 
 inspired by her works, and she shares it with 
 Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne 
 Elliot. Milton, in a line which is as clear in 
 meaning as it is foggy in construction, speaks of 
 Eve as "the fairest of her daughters." Jane 
 Austen is regarded by the generality of her lovers 
 as the most delightful of her own heroines, and 
 not merely as the woman who brought them into 
 existence. 
 
 Could we have loved her so much if we had 
 
 21 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 lived with her at Steventon Rectory or at Chawton 
 Cottage? What she was at home I think we 
 know much better from her own letters than from 
 her brother Henry's panegyric, which, in spite of 
 its obvious sincerity of intention, too nearly 
 resembles the memorial inscriptions of his own 
 period to be regarded with quite as much confi- 
 dence as respect. " Faultless herself," he wrote, 
 "as nearly as human nature can be, she always 
 sought, in the faults of others, something to 
 excuse, to forgive, or forget." "Always" is a 
 word which — as Captain Corcoran discovered of 
 its reverse — can hardly ever be used without 
 considerable reservations. We know, from her 
 own pen, that Jane — we call one unwedded queen 
 " Elizabeth," why should we not call another 
 "Jane"? — did not "always" show so much ten- 
 derness for the faults of others, and when we 
 remember the endless variety of human nature 
 we cannot but regard this ascription of "fault- 
 lessness " by an affectionate brother as of little 
 more evidential value than Mrs. Dashwood's 
 opinion (in Sense and Sensibility) of the " f ault- 
 lessness " of Marianne's lovers. It is no dis- 
 paragement to Henry Austen to say that his little 
 
 22 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 memoir is more convincing as a record of his own 
 character than of his sister's. Their nephew, Mr. 
 Austen Leigh, who wrote the fullest and most 
 admirable account of Jane Austen, was still in 
 his teens when she died. Apart from these sparse 
 reminiscences we know practically nothing about 
 her except from her own novels and letters, but 
 from them we may learn almost as much of the 
 mind of this delightful woman as any loving 
 relation could have told us. It may be possible 
 for an author to write an artificial novel without 
 betraying his own nature to any positive extent, 
 but such novels as Jane Austen's cannot so be 
 produced; it is possible to write letters which, 
 apart from the penmanship, offer no evidences of 
 character; but a pair of devoted sisters, however 
 different their ability or their philosophy of life, 
 could not correspond during twenty years without 
 displaying much of the workings of their minds. 
 Some of Jane's literary admirers think that she 
 was lively and talkative, others that she was 
 prone to silence in company. Probably both 
 views are correct. It depended on the company. 
 Among those who could appreciate her fun and 
 her wit, her harmless quips and quizzing, she was 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 full of vivacity; among those who raised their 
 eyebrows at her impromptu verses and missed the 
 points of her piquant remarks on persons and 
 incidents she was speedily content, within the 
 bounds of good manners, to observe rather than 
 to join in the comedy of conversation. We need 
 not unreservedly believe her brother's assurance 
 that "she never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or 
 a severe expression," but we may, from all we 
 know of her, be fairly confident that she had 
 a control over her tongue which few such 
 gifted humourists have possessed. As for her 
 temper, it was said in her family that " Cas- 
 sandra had the merit of having her temper always 
 under command, but that Jane had the happi- 
 ness of a temper that never required to be com- 
 manded." 
 
 That her nature was not, in any marked degree, 
 what is commonly called " sympathetic " we may 
 see from many passages in her letters, and her 
 novels afford ample corroboration. There was no 
 avoidable hypocrisy about her. In this at least 
 she is the counterpart of Elizabeth or Anne. " Do 
 not be afraid of my encroaching on your privilege 
 of universal goodwill. You need not. There are 
 
 24 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 few people whom I really love, and still fewer 
 of whom I think well. The more I see of the 
 world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and 
 every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency 
 of all human characters, and of the little depend- 
 ence that can be placed on the appearance of 
 either merit or sense." In a letter from Jane 
 Austen to Cassandra there would have been 
 nothing to surprise us in this passage, which is 
 actually taken from the remarks of Elizabeth 
 Bennet to her sister on the subject of Bingley's 
 long silence after the Netherfield ball. 
 
 If Jane Austen did not cry over misfortunes 
 which did not affect her, neither did she pretend 
 to ignore the affectations and weaknesses even of 
 her nearest relations. Can it be supposed, for 
 instance, that she was in the least degree blinded 
 to the shortcomings of a beloved mother of whom 
 she could, on various occasions, write such news 
 as that she "continues hearty, her appetite and 
 nights are very good, but she sometimes com- 
 plains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, 
 and a liver disorder"? 
 
 A daughter and sister and friend whose atten- 
 tion was so closely devoted, however unobtrus- 
 
 25 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 ively, to the study of character in a narrow circle, 
 would in most cases be " a little trying," but when 
 the observer was endowed with a keen sense of 
 the absurd, and an irony which, however weak in 
 caustic, was strong in veracity, it might be sup- 
 posed that she would be an enfant terrible of that 
 mature kind which in our own days is commoner 
 than the nursery variety. In her case, the sup- 
 position would be ill-founded. She was at once 
 too well-bred, and too kind-hearted, to let her 
 special powers of wounding take exercise on 
 gentle hearts. But falsehood of any sort was 
 abhorrent to her, and as a consequence she was 
 inclined, in communing with her sister, to show 
 herself a little intolerant even of those amiable 
 pretences of sorrow for common ailments and 
 small troubles which are so soothing to weak 
 humanity. She rejected, for example, the idea 
 of commiserating with any one on account of a 
 cold or a headache, unless there were feverish 
 symptoms ! 
 
 Of the "vacant chaff well-meant for grain" of 
 which Tennyson sings so sadly, Jane brought 
 little to market. She would express to Cassandra 
 her sympathy with their acquaintances under great 
 
 26 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 disasters and trivial misfortunes with the same 
 penful of ink. What she wrote to her sister — of 
 her devotion for whom, from earHest childhood, 
 her mother said, "If Cassandra was going to have 
 her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her 
 fate" — is far more free than what she uttered in the 
 family circle. Few have realized better the value 
 of the unspoken word, or given their relations 
 less opportunity to remind them of the evils of 
 indiscretion. 
 
 If she was unemotional and, in the ordinary 
 sense of the word, unsympathetic, she is not to 
 be blamed for this lack of the qualities with one 
 of which she so amply endowed Marianne and 
 with the other Elinor Dashwood. We can no 
 more make ourselves emotional or sympathetic 
 than we can make ourselves fair or dark, or rather, 
 we can only alter our ways as we can alter our 
 complexions, by artifice. The outward show of 
 sympathy which is not felt is one of the common- 
 est of hypocrisies, perhaps inevitable at times 
 from very charity. Happily it is not a necessary 
 part of that ultimate barrier which, even in the 
 truest friendships and the deepest love, makes it 
 as impossible for one human being to see the 
 
 27 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 whole of another's heart as it is impossible to see 
 more than a little of the "other side" of the 
 moon. We cannot help being more or less un- 
 feeling, but we can subdue our selfishness in 
 action. Almost everything that can be learned 
 about Jane Austen strengthens the conviction 
 that she was one of the least selfish of women. 
 
 In her last illness the fidelity of her spirit is 
 constantly shown, and her affection becomes more 
 unreserved in its utterance. There is one letter 
 wherein, after speaking of Cassandra, she says, 
 in a phrase curiously suggestive of Thackeray : 
 "As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection 
 of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can 
 only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more 
 and more." 
 
 That she was by nature "meek and lowly," as 
 one of her American adorers declares, I cannot 
 believe, but if she preferred the spacious rooms 
 and well-spread board of her brother's mansion 
 to the common parlour and boiled mutton-and- 
 turnips of her father's rectory, she did not grizzle 
 over her state, nor did she allow her conscious 
 superiority of intelligence to claim distinction in 
 her home. One of the few glimpses (apart from 
 
 28 
 
""^^^^^^ DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 her own writings) that we have of her in her family 
 relations is when, in the closing year of her life, 
 her illness having begun to weaken her body, she 
 was obliged to lie down frequently during the 
 day. There was only one sofa at Chawton 
 Cottage, and although Mrs. Austen, in spite of 
 the many ailments she had formerly complained 
 of, was a tolerably healthy old lady, the stricken 
 daughter made herself a couch by putting several 
 chairs together, and declared that she preferred 
 it to the sofa which her mother commonly 
 occupied. Sofas, we must remember, were at 
 least as rare then as oak-panelled walls are now. 
 It was in those days that Cobbett regretted that 
 the sofa had ever been introduced into his 
 country, and he no doubt, according to his habit, 
 held the Prime Minister responsible for the aid 
 to effeminate indulgence of which his contempo- 
 rary Cowper sang. 
 
 Jane's discontent with the comparative poverty 
 of her surroundings was not translated into ill 
 temper. There are many reasons for believing, 
 and few indeed for doubting, that she tried to do 
 her duty in that state of life to which she was 
 born, and from which she was not destined to 
 
 29 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 emerge into the more varied pleasures and pains 
 of a larger world. What if, among those whom 
 she trusted, she could not resist expressing the 
 lively thoughts suggested to her acute wit by 
 ^ the acts or utterances of her friends. She was 
 the pride of her family, and its sunshine, even 
 if her rays were more akin to the sun as we know 
 him on a fine spring day at home than as we seek 
 him on the Cote d'Azur. 
 
 She seems to have been more nearly under- 
 stood among the clergy and squires, and other 
 members of her family, than most humourists in 
 their immediate circles. The common experience 
 of the genius in childhood and youth, if bio- 
 graphers are to be credited, is for the delicate 
 shoots of his intelligence to be nipped by domestic 
 frosts; but if there had been any freezing in the 
 Austen family, it was more likely to be produced 
 // by the chill of Jane's own satirical remarks than 
 by any harm that the convention and narrowness 
 of others could do to a mind so well defended as 
 hers. There are few traces of any such wintry 
 weather having occurred at Steventon or Chawton. 
 Jane was certainly beloved, greatly and de- 
 servedly, in her home. She was, no doubt, a little 
 
 30 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 lonely, as genius, one may suppose, must always 
 be, and as those who are blest, or curst, with a 
 strong sense of the absurd must be whether they 
 be geniuses or not. Her sister was her closest 
 friend, but Jane's published letters to Cassandra, 
 read in the light of the novels, suggest a reserve 
 in discussing her inmost thoughts with that de- 
 voted spirit which seems hardly compatible with 
 the closest concordance of ideas, in spite of the 
 completest concordance of affection and a high 
 respect on Jane's part for Cassandra's sound sense 
 and critical judgment. Very different is the tone 
 of the letters of that other pretty humourist, 
 Dorothy Osborne, to William .Temple. In 
 Dorothy's case there was a perfect confidence in 
 the entire sympathy and comprehension of the 
 recipient. This factor apart, how much there is 
 in common between the two dear women. The 
 one was dead more than eighty years before the 
 other was born, but in all the history of woman- 
 hood is there any pair in which the smiling philo- 
 sophy that is the salt of the mind is more fairly 
 divided? Jane Austen lives still in Elizabeth 
 Bennet and in Emma Woodhouse; Dorothy 
 Osborne only in her sweet self. The one had 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 no passion but her work — and it was a quiet, 
 unconsuming passion. The other had no passion 
 but her love, and it was never able to overmaster 
 her intelligence. " In earnest," she wrote, " I am 
 no more concerned whether people think me hand- 
 some or ill-favoured, whether they think I have 
 wit or that I have none, than I am whether they 
 think my name Elizabeth or Dorothy." It was 
 not quite true in her case, nor would it have been 
 in Jane's, but it contains no more exaggeration 
 than is allowed to any woman of sense, and it was 
 as true of the one as of the other. 
 
 Love has lately been defined by a ruthless 
 analyzer of feelings as " a specific emotion, exclu- 
 sive in selection, more or less permanent in dura- 
 tion, and due to a mental fermentation in itself 
 caused by a law of attraction." Jane Austen had 
 never read such an explanation of love as this, yet 
 her views on the most powerful of the mixings of 
 animal and spiritual instincts are usually more 
 placid than would please the fancies of maidens 
 who sleep with bits of wedding-cake beneath 
 their pillows. That passionate love " is woman's 
 whole existence " is not exemplified by Jane's 
 favourite heroines. Emma or Elizabeth did not 
 
 32 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 so regard it, even if Anne Elliot did lose some of 
 her good looks and Catherine Morland her appe- 
 tite when their hopes of particular bridegrooms 
 seemed likely to be disappointed. Elizabeth 
 would not have worried greatly over Darcy if he 
 had not come back for her, and Emma would 
 have been as happy at Hartfield without a hus- 
 band as she had always been, so long as Knightley 
 was friendly. 
 
 We cannot imagine that Jane Austen could ever 
 have written to any man, as Dorothy Osborne 
 wrote to Temple of a love which she could not 
 make her family understand : " For my life I 
 cannot beat into their heads a passion that must 
 be subject to no decay, an even perfect kindness 
 that must last perpetually, without the least inter- 
 mission. They laugh to hear me say that one 
 unkind word would destroy all the satisfaction of 
 my life, and that I should expect our kindness 
 should increase every day, if it were possible, but 
 never lessen." 
 
 The conjugal instinct was not strongly de- 
 veloped in Jane ; and, although she seems to have 
 been very fond of children, and especially of her 
 nephews and nieces, it may be assumed with some 
 c 2>3 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 confidence that the maternal instinct also found 
 little place in her nature. 
 
 Marianne Dashwood, emotional, fastidiously 
 truthful — she left to her elder sister "the whole 
 task of telling lies when politeness required it " — 
 romantically fond of scenery and poetry as any 
 of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines, stands out among the 
 girls of Jane's imagining as the only one who out- 
 wardly exhibits the conventional signs of pas- 
 sionate affection for a lover, Catherine's and 
 Fanny's emotions being more suggestive of 
 maiden fancies, of "the flimsy furniture of a 
 country miss's brain," than of the yearnings of a 
 Juliet or a Roxane. 
 
 Nevertheless the idea that the Austen people are 
 cold-blooded is warmly opposed in an apprecia- 
 tive little essay published in America a few years 
 ago by Mr. W. L. Phelps. " Let no one believe," 
 he writes, "that Jane Austen's men and women 
 are deficient in passion because they behave with 
 decency : to those who have the power to see and 
 interpret, there is a depth of passion in her char- 
 acters that far surpasses the emotional power dis- 
 played in many novels where the lovers seem to 
 forget the meaning of such words as honour, 
 
 34 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 virtue, and fidelity." It may be that, like Richard 
 Feverel on a certain occasion, the Henrys and 
 Edwards, the Emmas and Annes are "too Brit- 
 ish to expose their emotions." But Lucy Feverel, 
 one of the purest and truest women in fiction, 
 shows passion so that no special "power to see 
 and interpret " is requisite on the reader's part, 
 and the same note is true of many of the charming 
 heroines drawn by the masters of imagination. 
 
 At any rate Jane allowed her heroines as much 
 passion and sentiment as — so far as we can dis- 
 cover — she experienced herself. The one known 
 man who seems to have come near to being 
 regarded as her accepted lover was Thomas 
 Lefroy, who lived to be Chief Justice of Ireland. 
 
 " You scold me so much," she writes, in her 
 twenty-first year, to Cassandra, "in the nice long 
 letter which I have this moment received from 
 you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how 
 my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to 
 yourself everything most profligate and shock- 
 ing in the way of dancing and sitting down to- 
 gether. I can expose myself, however, only once 
 more, because he leaves the country soon after 
 next Friday, on which day we are to have a 
 C2 35 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentle- 
 manlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I 
 assure you. But as to our having ever met, 
 except at the three last balls, I cannot say 
 much; for he is so excessively laughed at about 
 me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to 
 Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. 
 Lefroy a few days ago." 
 
 No coquettish " reigning beauty " was ever more 
 easy as to the fate of her lovers, or less likely to 
 suffer at their hands, than this Hampshire maiden, 
 whose fine complexion, hazel eyes, and well-pro- 
 portioned figure attracted so much admiration, and 
 whose sweet voice and lively conversation com- 
 pleted the conquest of those whom she cared to 
 entertain. 
 
 "Tell Mary," she writes to her sister (also in 
 1796), "that I make over Mr. Heartley and all his 
 estate to her for her sole use and benefit in future, 
 and not only him, but all my other admirers into 
 the bargain wherever she can find them, even 
 the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, 
 as I mean to confine myself in future to 
 Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care six- 
 pence." 
 
 36 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 This agreeable Irishman, to whom, in later 
 years, we find references in the records of the 
 Edgeworth family, was speedily to pass out of 
 Jane's young life. Very soon she has to write : 
 "At length the day is come on which I am to 
 flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you 
 receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I 
 write at the melancholy idea. William Chute 
 called here yesterday. I wonder what he means 
 by being so civil." 
 
 We need not picture her as stopping her writing 
 while she wiped the tears from her streaming eyes. 
 "We went by Bifrons," she says on another 
 occasion, " and I contemplated with a melancholy 
 pleasure the abode of him on whom I once fondly 
 doted." She never did " dote " on any man, so 
 far as can be discovered or reasonably surmised, 
 to any greater extent than her favourite Emma 
 may be said to have " doted " on Frank Churchill. 
 Emma's feelings about the man who was secretly 
 engaged to Jane Fairfax at the time, are thus 
 analyzed by Jane Austen — 
 
 " Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her 
 being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the 
 
 37 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 how much. At first she thought it was a good 
 deal; and afterwards but little. She had great 
 pleasure in hearing Frank Churchill talked of; 
 and, for his sake, greater pleasure than ever in 
 seeing Mr. and Mrs. Weston ; she was very often 
 thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, 
 that she might know how he was, how were his 
 spirits, how was his aunt, and what was the chance 
 of his coming to Randalls again this spring. But, 
 on the other hand, she could not admit herself 
 to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to 
 be less disposed for employment than usual. . . . 
 ' I do not find myself making any use of the word 
 sacrifice^ said she. ' In not one of all my clever 
 replies, my delicate negatives, is there any allu- 
 sion to making a sacrifice. I do suspect that he 
 is not really necessary to my happiness. So much 
 the better. I certainly will not persuade myself 
 to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in 
 love. I should be sorry to be more.' " 
 
 Save for Willoughby's burst of misplaced 
 enthusiasm over Marianne, Frank Churchill's 
 description of Jane Fairfax to Emma is the 
 warmest bit of love-painting in the Austen 
 comedy — 
 
 " She is a complete angel. Look at her. Is 
 not she an angel in every gesture? Observe the 
 turn of her throat. Observe her eyes, as she is 
 looking up at my father. You will be glad to 
 
 38 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 hear (inclining his head, and whispering seriously) 
 that my uncle means to give her all my aunt's 
 jewels. They are to be new set. I am resolved 
 to have some in an ornament for the head. Will 
 not it be beautiful in her dark hair? " 
 
 Such raptures as these are rarely permitted 
 to the Austen lovers. In their affairs of the heart, 
 as in the general conduct of their lives, plain 
 living and quiet thinking reflect the simple habits 
 of the people among whom Jane passed her own 
 smoothly-ordered life. 
 
 ,To the simplicity of that life we owe one of her 
 peculiar charms. If she had been the famous, 
 sought-after literary woman who is the necessary 
 complement of a dinner-party in a house of 
 cultured luxury, and whose name is found in the 
 index of every volume of contemporary reminis- 
 cences, she would not have been half so attractive 
 to the type of mind that most enjoys her novels. 
 Yet when all possible allowance has been made 
 for her lightness of expression her own predilec- 
 tions were certainly for the conditions of " opulent 
 leisure" rather than of decent comfort, for the 
 amenities of Mansfield Park and Pemberley 
 rather than for those of Fullerton Rectory or the 
 
 39 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Dashwoods' cottage. " People get so horridly 
 poor and economical in this part of the world," 
 she wrote from Steventon to her sister at God- 
 mersham, "that I have no patience with them. 
 Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody 
 is rich there." 
 
 This was written early in her life. In the year 
 before she died, writing to her niece Fanny, she 
 said : " Single women have a dreadful propensity 
 for being poor, which is one very strong argu- 
 ment in favour of matrimony, but I need not dwell 
 on such arguments with you, pretty dear." 
 
 Contempt for poverty is expressed by several 
 characters in her work. " Be honest and poor, by 
 all means " — says Mary Crawford to Edmund 
 Bertram — "but I shall not envy you; I do not 
 much think I shall even respect you. I have a 
 much greater respect for those that are honest and 
 rich." 
 
 Perhaps neither the real Jane nor the imaginary 
 Mary is to be taken quite literally, but that Jane 
 would have freely assented to a disbelief in the 
 wisdom of marrying on a small income, however 
 little she approved of Mary's "too positive 
 admiration for wealth," is certain from all that 
 
 40 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 we know of her opinions on the essentials of 
 happiness. 
 
 Godmersham is in Kent, and it was in that 
 spacious, well-provided house of her brother 
 Edward, amid all the charms of parks and beech- 
 woods, of home comforts and " elegances " that 
 marked the life of the large landowner in those 
 days, that she usually found herself most con- 
 tented. Then was the time when the squire was 
 not driven to find an income by letting his manor 
 to a company promoter to whom the difference 
 between an oak and an elm is scarcely known, 
 and whose chief object in hiring a mansion in 
 rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end 
 parties who play bridge indoors on summer after- 
 noons and leave the beauties of the gardens and 
 the park to the peacocks and the deer. 
 
 With such a modern plutocrat Jane would have 
 had little in common, but she would have had less 
 with the modern Socialist. Landed property 
 stood for everything stable and dignified in her 
 days, and those critics^ of Pride and Prejudice 
 who unkindly emphasized the fact that Elizabeth 
 Bennet only decided to marry Darcy after she 
 had seen the glories of Pemberley and its park 
 
 41 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 and gardens, while they implicitly libelled the 
 girl, were not so unfair to the general sentiment 
 of her period. Sir Walter Scott, by the way, was 
 one of those who regarded Elizabeth Bennet's 
 change of feeling towards Darcy as the result of 
 her visit to the fine place in Derbyshire. Surely 
 such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the 
 humour of the conversation on this point between 
 Jane Bennet and her sister. The elder girl asks 
 the younger how long it is since she has felt any 
 affection for Darcy, and Elizabeth replies : " It 
 has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly 
 know when it began; but I believe I must date 
 it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at 
 Pemberley." Even Jane Bennet, whose humour 
 sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give 
 a serious answer. 
 
 This much may be admitted, that the idea 
 of marrying the curate never presented itself to 
 any one of the maidens who brighten the novels 
 of Jane Austen with their charms of mind and 
 appearance. Elinor Dashwood seems to have 
 regarded about £600 a year (with sure prospect 
 of increase) as the minimum on which married 
 life could hopefully be entered upon, and I fancy 
 
 42 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 Jane would have agreed with her. The majority 
 of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and 
 heroine whose love will triumph over all obstacles 
 of position, and opposition, of want of sympathy 
 on the part of others or of sense on their own, 
 and there have actually been readers who thought 
 Lydia Bennet more "interesting" than Eliza- 
 beth ! The prudence of the heroines may to 
 some small extent account for the failure of Jane 
 Austen's work to captivate the " great heart of the 
 public." In any case her fame is far from 
 universal. She has never been, and never will 
 be, popular in the sense in which the men and 
 women whose publishers cheerfully print first 
 editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. 
 Her appeal, in her own lifetime, when her name 
 was unknown, was not to " the general," and it is 
 only much less restricted now because of the 
 enormous increase in the reading public. Actually 
 it is immensely greater; relatively, its increase is 
 evidently small. One cannot, as in the case of 
 some authors, describe her work as being enjoyed 
 only by the cultured class, and neglected, because 
 misapprehended, by the rest. True culture is 
 always discriminating, even in the presence of its 
 
 43 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 divinities. Mr. Anthony Hope said not long ago, 
 referring to literary snobbishness : " There are 
 certain companies in which to suggest, even with 
 the utmost humility, that certain parts of Jane 
 Austen's novels are less entertaining than other 
 parts is thought considerably worse than draw- 
 ing invidious distinctions between various pas- 
 sages of Holy Writ." 
 
 With those who regard Jane Austen's work as 
 equally excellent in every part, no patience is 
 possible. The reader who finds it easy to get as 
 much enjoyment from Sense and Sensibility or 
 ' N or t hanger Abbey as from Pride and Prejudice 
 or Mansfield Park must be blessed with a com- 
 fortable absence of discrimination. Those who 
 see no degree of superiority in the presentation 
 of the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Anne 
 Elliot as compared with Elinor Dashwood and 
 Catherine Morland might be expected to regard 
 Blanche Amory and Mrs. Jarley as the equals 
 respectively of Becky Sharp and Mrs. Gamp. 
 
 Such uncritical admiration as Mr. Anthony 
 Hope referred to is even more annoying than the 
 tone in which I have heard a distinguished writer 
 speak of Jane Austen as " that woman " — the 
 
 44 
 
DOMINANT QUALITIES 
 
 mildest of the contemptuous terms that Napoleon 
 applied to Madame de Stael. The author who 
 spoke of Jane Austen so slightingly admitted her 
 power of presenting a " bloodless " and trivial 
 society in a life-like manner. No such recog- 
 nition of power is allowed to her by an American 
 critic of to-day, who says of her work " it may be 
 called art, but it is a poor species of that old 
 art which depended for its effect upon false 
 similitudes." It is hard to believe that the writer 
 of this astonishing opinion had read many pages 
 of the author he thus condemned to a place among 
 the third-rates. 
 
 45 
 
II 
 
 EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
II 
 
 EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 Literary influences — Jane Austen's defence of novelists — 
 The old essayists — Her favourite authors — Some 
 novels of her time — Criticism of her niece's novel — 
 Sense of her own limitations — Her method — Humour — 
 Familiar names — Some characteristics of style — Sug- 
 gested emendations — A new " problem " of author- 
 ship — A "forbidding" writer — "Commonplace" and 
 " superficial " — Thomas Love Peacock — Sapient sug- 
 gestions. 
 
 " I BELIEVE there is no constraint to be put upon 
 
 real genius; nothing but incHnation can set it to 
 
 work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, 
 
 observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane 
 
 Austen was born and died. But the inclination 
 
 itself is usually started by external suggestions, 
 
 and 'it is a mere truism that most books are 
 
 written because others have appeared before 
 
 them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny 
 
 Burney's example Jane Austen would never have 
 
 been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at 
 
 a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary 
 D 49 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 form which was common in the preceding age, 
 and was the method of her admired Richardson, 
 who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as 
 Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the 
 desire to do something that should please by the 
 absence of every quality that had made them 
 popular. 
 
 I doubt if there is any author of any period to 
 whom the most famous remark of Buffon could 
 be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. " Le 
 style est la fetnme Tneme " is a conviction which 
 becomes more and more firm as one reads her 
 novels and her letters, and reflects over their rela- 
 tionship. Her simple life and her limited oppor- 
 tunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient 
 explanation of her work. Part of that life, and 
 a part more important, in proportion to the rest, 
 than it would have been in the case of one who 
 had lived less remote from the world of thought 
 and action, was the reading of favourite books. 
 Clarissa^ Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela in- 
 fluenced her strongly, but she avoided more than 
 she took from them in the formation of her style. 
 Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, 
 
 50 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine 
 (who confesses she has never read Camilla) : 
 " You had no loss, I assure you ; it is the horrid- 
 est nonsense you can imagine ; there is nothing in 
 the world in it but an old man's playing at see- 
 saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is 
 not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of 
 this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor 
 Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. 
 She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very 
 highly, and she writes of a young woman whom 
 she met at a neighbour's house : " There are two 
 traits in her character which are pleasing — namely, 
 she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her 
 tea." 
 
 Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and en- 
 joyed. Three of his most popular novels — 
 Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary 
 — appeared during her lifetime, and their author- 
 ship, like that of her own works, was not avowed 
 until after her death. How wide-open was the 
 " secret " of their origin from the very first, years 
 before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in 
 one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: 
 "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; 
 
 D2 51 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 especially good ones. It is not fair. He has 
 fame and profit enough as a poet, and should 
 not be taking the bread out of the mouths of 
 other people. I do not like him, and do not mean 
 to like Waverley if I can help it, but I fear I 
 must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that 
 she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, 
 in any but shallow measure, was granted to her 
 whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, 
 " pant after distinction," nor was she of the " push- 
 ing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in 
 the cause of self-interest was the least possible of 
 sacrifices with her. 
 
 The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe — 
 *' la reine des efouvantements " as she has been 
 aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition — 
 were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less 
 epouvantable, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later 
 generation. The Radcliffe novels were published 
 between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, 
 when she was most open to romantic influences, 
 but however much she may have shuddered over 
 them in her teens, she laughed at them in her 
 twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize 
 the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction 
 
 52 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 which they represent that we chiefly owe North- 
 anger Abbey, a pleasant mixture of a serious love- 
 story and a burlesque, a motto for which might 
 have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare : 
 
 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; 
 Coral is far more red than her lips' red : 
 
 I grant I never saw a goddess go, — 
 
 My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground." 
 
 It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a 
 page or two to take care of themselves, the author 
 thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making 
 craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the 
 work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth — 
 
 " Let us not desert one another — ^we are an 
 injured body. Although our productions have 
 afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure 
 than those of any other literary corporation in the 
 worldj no species of composition has been so much 
 decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our 
 foes are almost as many as our readers ; and while 
 the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of 
 the history of England, or of the man who col- 
 lects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines 
 of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the 
 Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulo- 
 gized by a thousand pens, — there seems almost a 
 general wish of decrying the capacity and under- 
 
 53 
 
i/ 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting 
 the performances which have only genius, wit, and 
 taste to recommend them. ' I am no novel-reader. 
 — I seldom look into novels. — Do not imagine that 
 I often read novels. — It is really very well for 
 a novel.' Such is the common cant. ' And what 
 
 are you reading. Miss ? ' ' Oh ! it is only a 
 
 novel ! ' replies the young lady ; while she lays 
 down her book with affected indifference, or 
 momentary shame. ' It is only Cecilia^ or Camilla^ 
 or Belinda; ' or, in short, only some work in which 
 the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in 
 which the most thorough knowledge of human 
 nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the 
 liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed 
 to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, 
 had the same young lady been engaged with a 
 volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, 
 how proudly would she have produced the book, 
 and told its name! though the chances must be 
 against her being occupied by any part of that 
 voluminous publication of which either the matter 
 or manner would not disgust a young person of 
 taste ; the substance of its papers so often consist- 
 ing in the statement of improbable circumstances, 
 unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, 
 which no longer concern any one living ; and their 
 language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no 
 very favourable idea of the age that could endure 
 it." 
 
 54 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 This is a hard saying for those who count " Sir 
 Roger de Coverley," " Mr. Bickerstaff," and many 
 " Clarindas " and " Sophronias " among their 
 friends. The age of the Regency may or may 
 not have been as lax in its moraHty as some of its 
 detractors have declared, but that it was one in 
 which ladies could reasonably have been expected 
 to blush over the pages of the Spectator is not 
 easily to be believed. 
 
 The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages 
 of those days formed their literary tastes on native 
 productions without going abroad for their novels. 
 They did not read French fiction as their grand- 
 mothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as 
 their cousins in town still did in spite of such 
 warnings as that of a contemporary critic who 
 held it scarcely possible to read French "without 
 contracting some pollution, so extensively and 
 radically is its whole literature depraved." Times 
 had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed 
 the voluminous romances of Calprenede and 
 Mademoiselle de Scuderi with William Temple. 
 
 Another important branch of Jane's private and 
 voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in 
 the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison 
 
 55 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 and their colleagues, but in the various successors 
 of the Spectator and the Tatter which had their 
 little days and died, particularly during the reign 
 of George II. Not only in the Rambler and the 
 Idler of the great man whom she so highly re- 
 spected, but in the World, the Mirror, the 
 Lounger, the Connoisseur, and other less remem- 
 bered publications of their class, you may come 
 upon characters and reflections and incidents 
 which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to 
 one who, after the manner of genius, could turn 
 even the dulness of others into sparkling delight 
 of her own. 
 
 Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met 
 him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as 
 her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to 
 say, " If she ever married at all, she could fancy 
 being Mrs. Crabbe." Her appreciation of such 
 poems as The Village and The Parish Register 
 / is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to 
 illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born 
 in a family which was itself a part of the landed 
 gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously 
 conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class 
 and the peasantry. George Crabbe, on the other 
 
 56 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 hand, the son of lowly folk, was born and nurtured 
 in poverty, and he never forgot that he had sprung 
 from the sand-dunes of the East Coast. His pic- 
 tures of the poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the 
 most delightful of his verses; his ease in their 
 society, his understanding of their minds and 
 characters mark him off as clearly from Jane 
 Austen as — to take a very modern instance — the 
 admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in 
 la Vendee offered in La Terre qui meurt distin- 
 guish M. Rene Bazin from M. Marcel Batilliat, 
 who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence of 
 the chateau in La Vendee aux Genets. Jane 
 found in Crabbe something that she missed in 
 herself, a ready appreciation of all classes. 
 
 She loved Cowper too, both in his poems and 
 his prose. There was much in The Task that 
 could not but please her, though the humour must 
 have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and 
 the descriptions over-laboured. Cowper, though 
 kindly to the rural poor, and often referring to 
 their occupations, smiles derisively at those who 
 pretend to envy the labourer's lot and to regard 
 his cottage, if properly "rose-bordered," as pre- 
 ferable to any other kind of residence. 
 
 57 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 "So farewell envy of the peasant's nest! 
 If Solitude make scant the means of life, 
 Society for me ! thou seeming sweet, 
 Be still a pleasing object in my view ; 
 My visit still, but never mine abode." 
 
 Jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of 
 these lines. In some verses — composed in 1807 
 for a family competition in producing rhymes 
 with " rose " — which, but for the rhyming, are a 
 burlesque of Cowper's style, we find a picture of a 
 cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be naturally of 
 small account, are lines that would mark it, without 
 the direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not 
 Cassandra's or Mrs. Austen's. 
 
 "Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes ! 
 In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose. 
 And hat upon his head, to church he goes ; 
 As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws 
 V A glance upon the ample cabbage-rose. 
 
 Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose, 
 
 He envies not the gayest London beaux. 
 
 In church he takes his seat among the rows. 
 
 Pays to the place the reverence he owes, 
 
 Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows. 
 
 Lists to the sermon in a softening doze. 
 
 And rouses joyous at the welcome close." 
 
 There is a letter of January 1758 from Johnson 
 to Bennet Langton which, as Boswell remarks, 
 shows its writer " in as easy and pleasant a state of 
 
 58 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever per- 
 mitted him to enjoy." I cannot help quoting it 
 here as evidence of an affinity of Johnson, in his 
 happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful 
 admirer, Jane Austen — 
 
 "The two Wartons just looked into the town, 
 and were taken to see Cleone, where, David says, 
 they were starved for want of company to keep 
 them warm. David and Doddy have had a new 
 quarrel, and, I think, cannot conveniently quarrel 
 any more. Cleone was well acted by all the 
 characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. 
 I went the first night, and supported it as well as 
 I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and 
 I would not desert him. The play was very well 
 received. Doddy, after the danger was over, 
 went every night to the stage-side, and cried at 
 the distress of poor Cleone. I have left off 
 housekeeping, and therefore made presents of 
 the game which you were pleased to send me. 
 The pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the 
 bustard to Dr. Lawrence, and the pot I placed 
 with Miss Williams, to be eaten by myself. ... 
 Mr. Reynolds has within these few days raised 
 his price to twenty guineas a head, and Miss is 
 much employed in miniatures. I know not any- 
 body else whose prosperity has increased since 
 you left them." 
 
 59 
 
/ 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 If the date and the reference to the writer's 
 relations with the dramatist had been suppressed 
 the letter might have been given as one of Jane's 
 own without arousing suspicion in any but a con- 
 firmed " Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of 
 course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley, author of 
 the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Lang- 
 ton pheasant is the author of Clarissa, another of 
 Jane's favourites more than thirty years after, 
 when she had had time to be born and grow 
 up. 
 
 Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria 
 Edgeworth (after 1800), Scott (as poet), Johnson, 
 Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more 
 solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She 
 had studied the essayists of Queen Anne's time 
 and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with 
 Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary 
 books that came from the circulating libraries of 
 the day. " Mrs. Martin," she writes of a book- 
 seller in her neighbourhood who had started such 
 a library, " as an inducement to subscribe tells me 
 that her collection is not to consist only of novels, 
 but of every kind of literature, etc. She might 
 have spared this pretension to our family, who 
 
 60 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being 
 so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self- 
 consequence of half her subscribers." Un- 
 happily, this "high-class" venture was a total 
 failure. 
 
 The novels supplied by " Mrs. Martin " and 
 others, forerunners of those which now go forth 
 from the Strand and Oxford Street, are fre- 
 quently referred to in Jane's letters, and some 
 of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at 
 the British Museum. There was, for example, 
 Sarah Burney's Clarentine, which Jane and her 
 mother read for the third time (in 1807), and 
 **are surprised to find how foolish it is . . . full 
 of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; 
 there was Self -Control, a book "without any- 
 thing of nature or probability," but which Jane 
 feared might be " too clever," and that she might 
 find her own work forestalled by it; there was 
 the Alpkonsine of Madame de Genlis, which 
 "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty 
 pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has 
 indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so 
 pure " ; and there was Margiarna, which the 
 Austens were reading in the winter of 1809, at 
 
 61 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Southampton, and " like very well indeed. We 
 are just going to set off for Northumberland to 
 be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there 
 must be two or three sets of victims already 
 immured under a very fine villain." 
 
 About the same time Cassandra tells of some 
 romance which the Godmersham circle has been 
 devouring, and Jane replies — "To set up against 
 your new novel, of which nobody ever heard 
 before, and perhaps never may again, we have 
 got Ida of Athens, by Miss Owenson, which 
 must be very clever, because it was written, as the 
 authoress says, in three months. We have only 
 read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not 
 make me expect much. If the warmth of her 
 language could affect the body it might be worth 
 reading in this weather." 
 
 We shall not find much criticism of books either 
 in the novels or the letters. There is a passage 
 in one of "Aunt Jane's" letters to her niece 
 Anna, written in 1814, in which her point of view 
 on one important question of style is clearly 
 expressed. Anna, probably inspired by her aunt's 
 example — for the authorship of Sense and Sen- 
 sibility and Pride and Prejudice had leaked out 
 
 62 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 in the family in spite of all precaution — had 
 written a novel herself, and had sent the MS. to 
 Jane for kindly consideration and advice. The 
 result was not wholly encouraging — 
 
 " Your Aunt C. (Cassandra) does not like desul- 
 tory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too 
 much so, that there will be too frequently a change 
 from one set of people to another, and that cir- 
 cumstances will be introduced of apparent con- 
 sequence which will lead to nothing. It will not 
 be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow 
 much more latitude than she does, and think 
 nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering 
 story, and people in general do not care so much 
 about it for your comfort. ... I have scratched 
 out the introduction between Lord Portman and 
 his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon 
 (don't tell Mr. C. Lyf ord) would not be introduced 
 to men of their rank, and when Mr. P. is first 
 brought in, he would not be introduced as the 
 Honourable. That distinction is never mentioned 
 at such times, at least I believe not." 
 
 Of a later novel of Anna's, which Jane " read to 
 your Aunt Cassandra in our own room at night, 
 while we undressed," she tells the girl that 
 " Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity 
 is extremely good, but I wish you would not let 
 
 63 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 him plunge into a ' vortex of dissipation.' I do 
 not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the 
 expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and 
 so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first 
 novel he opened. . . ." 
 
 Mrs. Austen had said, and Jane agreed with her, 
 that Anna had allowed a married couple in the 
 novel to be too long in returning a visit from 
 the Vicar's wife, and Jane had ventured to ex- 
 punge, as "too familiar and inelegant," the 
 *' Bless my heart " in which Sir Thomas, one of 
 the characters, indulged. Jane's own Emma 
 might say '' Good God ! " when she pleased, but 
 Anna's Sir Thomas might not even bless his 
 heart 1 
 
 A last criticism on Anna's book is worth quoting 
 for its direct bearing on the critic's own method. 
 " You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions 
 are often more minute than will be liked. You 
 give too many particulars of right hand and 
 left." 
 
 Jane's estimate of her own manner of work is 
 modest enough. " The little bit (two inches wide) 
 of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as 
 produces little effect after much labour," she says. 
 
 64 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 With this phrase of her own as a text she has been 
 called a "miniaturist/' but if authors and artists 
 are to be compared, there is quite as much of the 
 selection and the richness of a Gainsborough in 
 her work as of the minuteness of a Metzu or a 
 Meissonier. 
 
 In her reply to the amazing proposal of the 
 librarian at Carlton House that she should com- 
 pose an historical romance founded on the records 
 of the Saxe-Coburg family, she writes, not without 
 a touch of her gentle satire — 
 
 " I am fully sensible that (such a romance) 
 might be much more to the purpose of profit or 
 popularity than such pictures of domestic life in 
 country villages as I deal in. But I could no 
 more write a romance than an epic poem. I could 
 not sit seriously down to write a serious romance 
 under any other motive than to save my life ; and 
 if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and 
 never relax into laughing at myself or at any other 
 people, I am sure I should be hung before I had 
 finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my 
 own style and go on in my own way ; and though I 
 may never succeed again in that, I am convinced 
 that I should totally fail in any other." 
 
 Her limitations of subject are clear to her own 
 mind. Even of the "domestic life in villages" 
 
 E A:- 
 
V 
 
 y 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 she would only deal with the side where the daily 
 bread was provided out of income, not out of 
 retail profits or weekly wages. It is a suggestive 
 fact, to which I have already alluded, that she 
 never even tried to draw a peasant's family. Her 
 heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a 
 cottage to inquire after a sick child or leave a 
 charitable gift, but of the conditions under which 
 the labouring classes lived, during the hard times 
 of the French wars, we learn nothing at all from 
 her writings. The nearest approaches to such 
 subjects are the account of the Prices' home at 
 Portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, 
 I think not unjustly, to be as vivid in its sugges- 
 tion of impecuniosity and discomfort as anything 
 written by Zola), and the similar, but far less 
 effective, picture of the Watsons' family life. 
 
 Her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and 
 so, in comparison with that of "stylists," it cer- 
 tainly is. She had stored her mind with good 
 literature while still in her teens, and no doubt 
 most of her limpid sentences flowed freely from 
 her pen. But the consistent absence of super- 
 fluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence 
 that she had consciously formed an ideal of com- 
 
 66 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 position, and that she thought out the means of 
 producing her effects is clear from several pas- 
 sages in her letters. To her niece who addressed 
 her as "Dear Miss Darcy," and wanted her to 
 answer in that character, Jane replied — "Even 
 had I more time I should not feel at all sure 
 of the sort of letter that Miss D. would write." 
 She had studied her art till she could analyze 
 its qualities, as we may see from a letter written 
 from Chawton in 1813. Mrs. Austen had been 
 reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to Jane and 
 Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austens), and 
 Jane tells Cassandra that — 
 
 " Though she perfectly understands the charac- 
 ters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. 
 Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, 
 and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too 
 light and bright and sparkling, it wants shade — 
 to be stretched out here and there ... an essay 
 on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the 
 history of Buonaparte, or something that would 
 form a contrast, and bring the reader with in- 
 creased delight to the playfulness and epigramma- 
 tism of the general style." 
 
 Happily she did not provide the conventional 
 "shade," which would have been on a par with 
 
 E2 67 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 the "brown tree" that, according to Sir George 
 Beaumont, was an indispensable feature of every 
 properly composed landscape painting. Shade, 
 however, did appear in several chapters of Per- 
 suasion, which, for a certain suggestion of melan- 
 choly, stands apart from the other novels, though 
 not as markedly as Northanger Abbey stands 
 apart for its exuberant frivolity. 
 
 Macaulay declared of Fanny Burney's later 
 style that it was "the worst that has ever been 
 known among men." Jane Austen's style, in its 
 happy hours, is so admirably adapted to its pur- 
 pose that, while we may not call it "the best," a 
 term which advertisement has rendered meaning- 
 less as a standard of excellence, it has never been 
 surpassed as a means to a desired end. It seems 
 trite to say that the first point to consider in any 
 question of style is the intended result, but it is a 
 point so frequently overlooked that much criticism 
 about art and letters, as about politics or agricul- 
 ture, is vitiated by the hopeless effort to set up an 
 abstract ideal applicable to all cases, like a 
 universal watch-key. 
 
 The result for which Jane Austen worked can 
 scarcely be put in question. She was impelled to 
 
 68 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 make her little world live in fiction, not precisely 
 as she saw it and heard it, but as she could most 
 attractively present it to minds possessing the 
 indispensable modicum of humour, without which 
 the charm is lost at least as nearly as the charm of 
 a Turner sunset by a person whose optic nerve is 
 irresponsive to the red rays. Apart from her pre- 
 vailing humour, the modesty of her style is a 
 continual beauty. There is none of that florid 
 eloquence which depends more on sound than 
 sense for its effect, nor of that forcing of strange 
 phrases which in these days so often passes for 
 literary excellence. There is no preciosity about 
 her books; the narrative is easy, the incidents are 
 probable; the dialogue, with few exceptions, is 
 natural, the bright people being differentiated 
 from the dull by their talk, and not, as in most 
 novels, by the author's assurances. If Mr. Mere- 
 dith was right when he declared that ''it is un- 
 wholesome for men and women to see themselves 
 as they are, if they are no better than they should 
 be," there must be many "unwholesome" pages 
 in Jane Austen's work for the tolerably large class 
 to which he referred. Neither in real life nor in 
 the Hfe of her books did she "suffer fools gladly," 
 
 69 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 and so far as the men of her creation are concerned 
 she is on the whole more successful in represent- 
 ing the foolish than the wise. Her chief failure is 
 in the realization of such a young man as one of 
 her heroines would have been likely to admire. 
 Most of the younger men are sketchily drawn, and 
 we who are men would fain believe that she did not 
 understand the nature of a man's heart, seeing that 
 she never found one worth accepting. Knightley 
 ;and Bertram seem to have been favourites of hers, 
 but they are not lively people, nor sufficiently 
 wanting in priggishness. The liveliest of them all 
 is Henry Tilney, whatever his qualities of mind. 
 The Jane Austen touch is charmingly varied, and 
 it is felt in some of its happy strokes in the talk 
 between this mercurial young rector and the girl 
 whose early-budding affections he so speedily 
 returns. 
 
 " ' 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 
 
 70 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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. 
 iThe speech in which he offers his hand and advan- 
 tages 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 cir- 
 cumstances (like myself) to set the example of 
 matrimony in his parish ; secondly, that I am con- 
 vinced 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 
 
 71 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 7ny 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 any- 
 thing 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 
 
 ^2 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 it 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?* 
 
 n 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 " ' Yes, or I will never see her again/ 
 " ' An unhappy alternative is before you, Eliza- 
 beth. 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 " com- 
 monplace." 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 Middle- 
 ton, and John Willoughby. There are two 
 
 74 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 EHzabeths, 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 intro- 
 duce 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 
 
 75 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaint- 
 ance 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 Gait 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 
 Hfe, 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 transfer- 
 ence 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. 
 iThe 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 jest- 
 
 76 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 ingly declared, played havoc with her character. 
 " Here I am once more in this scene of dissipa- 
 tion 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 Hyfocrite (Bickerstaff's " alteration " 
 of Gibber'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, how- 
 ever, did not move her mind enough to seduce 
 
 n 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 her from the country as a source of inspiration 
 for her work. 
 
 ''All Hves 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 Precieuses: " 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 divert- 
 ing anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to 
 show the weakness of such unreserved generaliza- 
 tion. 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 
 
 78 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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." LThe 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 ot Cas- 
 sandra's letters had diverted Jane "beyond 
 moderation," and she added : " I could die of 
 
 79 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 " accord- 
 ing 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," "unre- 
 pulsable," " unf astidious," "untoward," and "un- 
 exceptionable " — a pet fancy of hers, which 
 occurs, I am told, at least eight times in Emma 
 alone — being as common in her novels as "hali- 
 dome " and " minion " in the older romances of 
 Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost novel 
 of hers, written during the apparently idle years 
 
 80 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 judg- 
 ing,' 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 in- 
 attention 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.' 
 F 8i 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 " ' 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 con- 
 cerning 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. 
 
 82 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 Ports- 
 mouth, 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 accept- 
 able. Fanny Price is made to say to Mr. Rush- 
 worth, on the occasion when Maria Bertram and 
 Crawford gave that unfortunate person the slip in 
 his own garden, "They desired me to stay; my 
 F2 83 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 cousin Maria charged me to say that you would 
 find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." Mr. Ver- 
 rall 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 w^hat 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 
 
 84 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 im- 
 mediately clear, but ' I do not write for such dull 
 elves,' as have not a great deal of ingenuity them- 
 selves." "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 Bronte 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 states- 
 men 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 
 
 85 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 recrea- 
 tion after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous 
 system involved in the production of her ^' epou- 
 vantabW melodramas? Jane Austen lays claim 
 to some of the novels in her letters, it is true, 
 but, since Ben Jonson's references to Shake- 
 speare, 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 diiSicult 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 
 
 86 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 not in the real secret. The secret they are sup- 
 posed 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 addi- 
 tion 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 deaths 
 as hers, that it is easy (if we like) to find it difficult 
 to believe that they are from the same fen! 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 N orthanger 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 
 
 87 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 them- 
 selves, 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 Cath- 
 erine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's 
 conduct to Mrs. Tilney we may discover some- 
 thing 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. Re- 
 member that we are English : that we are Chris- 
 tians. Consult your own understanding, your own 
 sense of the probable, your own observation of 
 
 88 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 what is passing around you. Does our education 
 prepare us for such atrocities ? Do our laws con- 
 nive at them ? Could they be perpetrated without 
 being known, in a country Hke this, where social 
 and Hterary intercourse is on such a footing; 
 where every man is surrounded by a neighbour- 
 hood 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, de- 
 lightful 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 
 
 89 
 
\^ 
 
 \J 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 notic- 
 ing 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 sensa- 
 tion, 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 pre- 
 sence of such a husband as Mr. Bennet, that Mrs. 
 
 90 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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 pain- 
 fully 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 
 
 91 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 to light," her characters typifying nothing, because 
 *' their doings and sayings are famiUar and com- 
 monplace. Her genius is shown in making the 
 familiar and commonplace intensely interesting 
 and amusing." Such justification as may be dis- 
 covered 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 princi- 
 pal 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 imme- 
 diately followed by a humourist whose scenes and 
 characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. 
 He is almost unknown to the great fiction-devour- 
 ing 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 
 
 92 
 
u- 
 
 EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 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. FfoUiot 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 Nether- 
 field 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 
 
 93 
 
u 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 Pea- 
 cock, 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. 
 
 94 
 
EQUIPMENT AND METHOD 
 
 Jane was amused by the suggestions for improv- 
 ing 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 " fault- 
 less " 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. 
 
 95 
 
Ill 
 
 CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
i^ 
 
 III 
 
 CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 Origins of characters — Matchmaking — Second marriages 
 — Negative qualities of the novels — Close knowledge 
 of one class — Dislike of " lionizing " — Madame de 
 Stael — The "lower orders" — Tradesmen — Social posi- 
 tion — 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 insin- 
 cerity 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. 
 G2 99 
 
 / 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 feel- 
 ings which would make her fancy herself uncom- 
 fortable 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 be- 
 haviour 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 
 
 100 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 lan- 
 guage 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 every- 
 thing 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 trans- 
 mission 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 meet- 
 ing. This seems a more likely tale, a better 
 devised imposture." 
 
 lOI 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 ' The sting is where stings usually are. 
 
 Scandal was as distasteful to her as it can have 
 been to Madame du Chatelet, of whom Voltaire 
 said that " tout ce qui occufe la societe etait de son 
 ressort, hors la medisance'^ 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 decor- 
 ous air." Mrs. Jennings, Sir John Middleton's 
 mother-in-law, would have told the story quite 
 seriously, and with immense gusto, at the Barton 
 
 102 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 a 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 Wood- 
 house and her match-making propensities, about 
 which Mr. Knightley spoke so harshly. By 
 Emma's advice Harriet Smith, having refused 
 
 103 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 untrust- 
 worthy about people and dates when she talked 
 such nonsense. Jane was, however, on her own 
 showing, fond of looking out for possible hus- 
 bands for her pretty little nieces. Here is an 
 instance, from a letter of 1814 — "Young Wynd- 
 ham 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 
 
 104 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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, dis- 
 covered that she preferred, or thought she pre- 
 ferred, 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 
 
 105 
 
JAT^E AUSTEN 
 
 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 neighbour- 
 hood. '' 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 every- 
 body 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 
 
 1 06 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 ''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 
 menages and no mysterious occurrences or detect- 
 ives, and as nobody dies, nobody makes death- 
 bed revelations," the retort would probably imply, 
 " What stupid stuff they must be." These novels 
 
 107 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 do, indeed, depend for their effect on less of " plot 
 and passion" than almost any others of conse- 
 quence yet written. There are many novels of 
 small plot. Balzac, in E^igenie 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 ex- 
 
 io8 
 
l/ 
 
 CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 pressed 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 Mans- 
 field 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 Stael. 
 "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 some- 
 times 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 
 
 " 109 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 com- 
 panion. There is no suggestion that any hint as 
 to Madame de Stael'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 sermon- 
 izing 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 
 
 no 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 prefer not to be matched with a lady who had put 
 to so practical a test her theories " de V 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 water- 
 ing-places, and the financier's stout and ugly 
 daughter, whose political activities were so per- 
 sistent 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 direc- 
 tion 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 u^ 
 concerned for the obscure and lowly. Admire 
 her work as we may, and love her as many of us 
 
 III 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 draw- 
 ing, though the phrase with which the author 
 finishes off the man-servant — "Thomas and the 
 table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon dis- 
 missed " — 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 com- 
 mon cases as the answering of a bell or waiting 
 
 112 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 unreason- 
 ably suppose that Jane to some extent shared t. 
 Emma's prejudice. There was, however, a not- 
 able exception to Jane's remoteness from the 
 
 farming class. The joint tenant of the Manor 
 H 113 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 in- 
 offensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation 
 at St. James's had made him courteous." He is 
 
 114 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 recol- 
 lection 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' rela- 
 tions, the agricultural class, amid whose homes 
 H2 115 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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; 
 
 116 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 
 
 117 
 
 L^ 
 
/ 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 in- 
 different as a writer to the concerns of the govern- 
 ing 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 solici- 
 tudes 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 
 
 ii8 
 
/ 
 
 l^ 
 
 CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 under- 
 standing." 
 
 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 
 
 119 
 
\y 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 time to speed the parting guests before he must 
 turn to welcome their successors. But no states- 
 man, 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 out- 
 break of the Revolution till the first exile of 
 
 I20 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any 
 but the most adventurous of squires to choose for 
 a pleasure-trip, nor, after tTie 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 ele- 
 ments of interest as are introduced, for example, 
 by the appearance of Byron in Veneiia, or of 
 Shelley in Nightmare Abbey, but the opportuni- 
 ties 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 con- 
 temporary 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 know- 
 ledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little 
 interest in anything outside the social and family 
 life of her own class in the country. Her pub- 
 lished correspondence has been described as 
 " trivial " (as her novels have been, for that is what 
 
 121 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Madame de Stael meant by '' vulgaire'^ and not 
 ** vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh and others 
 have supposed), and, in comparison with such con- 
 temporary letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her 
 accounts of her dances and her bonnets are cer- 
 tainly 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 Eliza- 
 beth because though she is "tolerable," she is 
 
 T22 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 *' not handsome enough " to tempt him. *' I 
 danced twice with Warren last night, and once 
 with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpress- 
 ible astonishment I entirely escaped John 
 Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, how- 
 ever. 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, Por- 
 tals, 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 
 
 123 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 Bruns- 
 wick Square just such an account as Jane Austen 
 to her sister at Godmersham — 
 
 " There were very few beauties, and such as 
 J;here 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 Mait- 
 lands 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 
 
 124 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 pro- 
 posed, 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 
 
 125 
 
 T -D P A r. ;?^ 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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 with- 
 out 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 freux chevalier and 
 saved Emma's lovely protegee from the humilia- 
 tion of being the only "wallflower." In describ- 
 ing how Elizabeth at Netherfield, Catherine at 
 Bath, Harriet at Highbury, and Fanny at Mans- 
 field Park idly watched the dancing because no 
 ^an had asked them to join it, Jane, pretty girl 
 and excellent dancer as she was, spoke from per- 
 sonal 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 
 
 126 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 intro- 
 duced 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 ob- 
 servations 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. Church- 
 ill, 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. 
 
 127 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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. Wood- 
 house. " 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." 
 
 128 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, 
 she is ever ready in return for news of Cassandra's. 
 
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 '^k;f 
 
 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, 
 she is ever ready in return for news of Cassandra's. 
 "T .shall be extremelv anxious to hear the event 
 of your bail, and shall hope to receive so long 
 and minute an account of every particular that I 
 shall be tired of reading it. Wp were at a 
 
 ball on Saturday I assure ;■.■ w^ dined at 
 Goodnestone and in the evening danced two 
 country dances and the Boulangeries.'' This 
 French dance, by the way, was on the un- 
 written 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 ha^ds 
 and dancing up and down the streets. 
 
 After Jane Fairfax had sung herself hoars<j at 
 the Coles' party — 
 
 *' The proposal of dancing — originating nob(idy 
 exc'ii tly knew where — was so effectually promoted 
 by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly 
 cleariviL: away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, 
 capit; ' her country dances, was seated, and 
 begii. an irresistible waltz; and Fr.nk 
 
 Churcniu, coming up with most be al- 
 
 lantry to Emma, had secured her hai «! ed 
 
 her up to the top, (where) she led -^ - ce 
 
 1^9 V, 
 

 ■7i'^ 
 
 -^-; 
 
 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 un- 
 written 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, v/as seated, and 
 beginning an irresistible waltz; and Frank 
 Churchill, coming up with most becoming gal- 
 lantry to Emma, had secured her hand, and led 
 her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance 
 with genuine spirit and enjoyment." 
 I 129 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 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. 
 
 130 
 
CONTACT WITH LIFE 
 
 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 em- 
 phasize 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 18071 "shyness and the sweat- 
 ing 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 
 12 131 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 garter-buckles" through the silks and kersey- 
 meres as they danced, and altogether so suitable 
 for a classical revival that a contemporary poet 
 was moved to utter the quatrain — 
 
 "When dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days, 
 Scarce an atom of dress on them leave; 
 Nor blame them, for what is an evening dress 
 But a dress that is suited to Eve." 
 
 Thus the mother of mankind is accused by one 
 poet of having danced the first waltz, and held 
 responsible by another for the airy fashions of the 
 Recamier period. 
 
 One of the principal differences of etiquette, we 
 may note before passing on, between the customs 
 of the ball-room a century ago and now, was that 
 in the days when John Lyford was eluded with 
 so much difficulty a girl danced two successive 
 dances with the same partner as a matter of course, 
 so that neither an imaginary John Thorpe nor a 
 real John Lyford could be got rid of by the 
 promise of one dance. 
 
 The scraps from the letters, given on the last 
 few pages, help us to realize how clearly Jane 
 Austen's own life is at times reflected in her books. 
 
 132 
 
IV 
 ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
IV 
 
 ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 Dr. Whately on Jane Austen — '* Moral lessons " of her 
 novels — Charge of " Indelicacy " — Marriage as a pro- 
 fession — A "problem" novel — "The Nostalgia of the 
 Infinite " — The "whitewashing " of Willoughby — Lady 
 Susan condemned by its author — The Watsons — ■ 
 Change in manners — No "heroes" — Woman's love — 
 The Prince Regent — The Quarterly Review. 
 
 " The moral lessons of this lady's novels/' wrote 
 Archbishop Whately in his Quarterly article of 
 1 82 1, *' though clearly and impressively conveyed, 
 are not offensively put forward, but spring in- 
 cidentally from the circumstances of the story." 
 So inoffensively, indeed, are they offered to our 
 notice, that Dr. Whately himself seems to have 
 been unable to discover them at all. " On the 
 whole," writes the Archbishop, " Miss Austin's {sic) 
 works may safely be recommended, not only as 
 among the most unexceptionable of their class, but 
 as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction 
 with amusement, though without the direct effort 
 
 135 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 at the former, of which we have complained, as 
 sometimes defeating its object." 
 
 The most obvious " moral " of Jane Austen's 
 novels is that if you are a heroine you need not 
 trouble yourself about your future. You are cer- 
 tain to marry a worthy man with an income suffici- 
 ent for a comfortable existence. He may be 
 endowed with something less than a thousand 
 a year, like Edward Ferrars, with a couple of 
 thousand like Captain Wentworth, or with the 
 ten thousand a year which made Darcy appear so 
 admirable to Mrs. Bennet. In any case you will 
 not have to eat bread-and-scrape or go without a 
 fire in your bedroom. The Country-house Comedy 
 of Jane Austen is full of morals if you are in need 
 of them, but it was not written to improve you, 
 only to amuse you — and its maker. If you must 
 have a clear moral for each story, after the manner 
 of tracts, you may take them thus. Pride and 
 Prejudice conveys the useful lesson that the per- 
 son you most dislike in one month may be the 
 one you will very sensibly give your affection to 
 in the next; Sense and Sensibility that when the 
 bad man falls into the pit he has dug for himself, 
 the good man comes by his own ; Emma that the 
 
 136 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 man whose society is most necessary to a woman's 
 quiet contentment is the man she ought to marry ; 
 Mansfield Park that a simple, unaffected girl who 
 gains the second place in a man's affections may 
 win the prize through the disqualification of her 
 more brilliant rival; Persuasion that nothing is 
 more likely to revive an old passion than to see 
 its object warmly admired by some other eligible 
 party; Nortkanger Abbey that a tuft-hunting 
 father may be induced to receive a daughter-in- 
 law of no importance by the kindly influence of a 
 son-in-law of superior rank. As for Lady Susan, 
 the moral of that unpleasing story is that if a 
 worldly mater fulchra is the rival in love of an 
 ingenuous filla fulchrior she will probably lose 
 the battle after much suffering on either side ; and 
 from The Watsons we may see that if a girl is 
 educated above her family she will find it hard 
 to be happy beside the domestic hearth. All 
 these are plain workable morals. Whether the 
 author of the novels would have endorsed them 
 we cannot certainly know, but it is more than 
 probable she would not. 
 
 We need not suppose that Jane Austen was 
 ignorant of the coarseness of conversation, the 
 
 137 
 
y 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 hard-drinking, the wild gambling, the moral laxity 
 of a large section of society that are so frequently 
 exhibited in the records of the age, in spite of 
 the improvement in manners. But we can hardly 
 help laughing at the objection taken to her novels 
 even by some of her contemporaries, that they 
 were " indelicate " ! The " indelicacy " was usually 
 found in the views of marriage held and expressed 
 by the heroines and their families. The love- 
 affairs of these country maidens were not often, 
 we must admit, such as to steal away their beauty 
 sleep or spoil their appetites for breakfast. Mrs. 
 Jennings' kindly endeavour to cure a girl's dis- 
 appointment in love by a variety of sweetmeats 
 and olives, and a good fire, was perhaps not 
 wholly unjustified by experience. In those days, 
 when no profession save that of governess was 
 open to women, when nursing the sick was re- 
 garded as an occupation specially suitable for 
 those of a low class, when no door opened from 
 the drawing-room on to the professional stage, and 
 when the very idea of a " female " as secretary to 
 a man of affairs or of business would have been 
 condemned as "improper," marriage was un- 
 doubtedly viewed by most people as the only aim 
 
 138 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 of a young woman, " the plcasantest preservative 
 from want/' as Charlotte Lucas regarded it, and, 
 moreover, the average age of brides was much 
 lower than it is now-a-days. To avoid being a 
 governess by attracting the admiration of a man 
 who could afford a wife was the hope, at least, of 
 most poorly endowed girls, and even if matrimony 
 is not viewed with so much sentiment and reserve 
 by Jane Austen's heroines as by the excessively 
 squeamish Evelina, we may be inclined to prefer 
 the " indelicacy " of Jane Austen to the elaborate 
 delicacy of Fanny Burney. Scott himself, by an 
 ingenious paradox, has been accused — as a novel- 
 ist — of immorality, and Quentin Durward in par- 
 ticular described as " one of the most immoral 
 novels that has even been written," because its 
 romance expresses nothing. The interest a boy 
 takes in its romantic passages " depends on the 
 fact that he dreams himself to be in similar cir- 
 cumstances; he must treat the novel subjectively, 
 and it is the subjective use of the imagination 
 which does all the damage. It is in reading such 
 books as this that a bad habit of mind is begun, 
 and Quentin Durward is more immoral for a boy 
 of fourteen than a translation of the most shock- 
 
 139 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 ingly indecent French novel." Well may the 
 anonymous writer of this unexpected criticism 
 add : " There are paradoxes to be met everywhere, 
 and most of all in the question of morality." This 
 particular kind of immorality has not yet, so far 
 as I know, been charged against Jane Austen. She 
 cannot be justly accused of writing romance which 
 "expresses nothing," but she certainly leaves 
 plenty of opportunity for young readers to exer- 
 cise their imaginations, and thus begin a "bad 
 habit of mind." 
 
 The view of marriage as a profession, with or 
 without ardent affection, is not the only thing that 
 has shocked the delicacy of many of Jane Austen's 
 readers. Serious objection has been taken to her 
 introduction of episodes of an " imxproper " nature. 
 How is the charge supported.'^ Lydia Bennet, a 
 vulgar, badly brought-up girl still in her teens, 
 infatuated with the red coats of the militia officers, 
 insists on going away with Wickham, and lives 
 with him as his mistress until, by the generous aid 
 of Darcy, and the determination of the Gardiners 
 — her uncle and aunt — " a marriage is arranged " 
 and does " shortly take place." This episode, say 
 the stern critics, was (i) unnecessary to the plot, 
 
 140 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 and (2) if it was necessary, it is too much insisted 
 on and developed. That it is an essential part of 
 the little plot, worked in to exhibit the best side 
 of Darcy's character, which before has only been 
 seen in its least attractive light, seems to me 
 obvious, and I agree with Professor Saintsbury's 
 opinion that it brings about the denouement with 
 complete propriety. Lydia's entire indifference to 
 the moral aspect of her conduct is and was unusual 
 in a girl of sixteen and of her class, but her char- 
 acter from first to last is consistently drawn, and 
 the contrast between the selfishness of Wickham 
 and Lydia, who care nothing for any one's happi- 
 ness except their own, and not even for each 
 other's, and the sympathy of heart and variety of 
 temperament which bring Elizabeth and Darcy 
 together is admirably drawn. 
 
 Then we are asked to be shocked at the illus- 
 tration of the bad character and selfish cruelty of 
 Willoughby given to Elinor Dashwood by the 
 very worthy and very dull Colonel Brandon in 
 Sense and Sensibility. It is a painful story. Wil- 
 loughby, the faithless lover of Marianne Dash- 
 wood, had seduced an impressionable girl whom 
 Brandon, out of affection for the memory of her 
 
 141 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 mother, herself ruined by a scoundrel, had practic- 
 ally adopted, and whom such scandal-mongers as 
 Mrs. Jennings declared to be the Colonel's own 
 child. "(Why drag in this nasty story?'* ask the 
 objectors, and above all, "why allow the Colonel 
 to pour it into the ears of a young girl like 
 Elinor?" That it comes unfortunately from 
 Brandon, who is a rival — hopeless as it had 
 seemed — of Willoughby for Marianne's affection, 
 and that in the middle-class society of to-day a 
 well-bred man would not tell such a tale to a 
 girl if he could find any other means of achieving 
 an imperative object is undeniable. 
 
 What was Brandon to do? He knew that 
 Marianne was pining for love of a man at least 
 as unworthy of her as, in his worst days, was Tom 
 Jones of Sophia, and he believed, with or without 
 reason, that the knowledge of Willoughby's char- 
 acter would be a bitter but efficacious medicine for 
 her heart-sickness. Elinor, the sensible, prudent, 
 devoted sister, seemed the only person to whom 
 he could tell the story with any hope that it would 
 be discreetly used. " He had spent many hours 
 in convincing himself that he was right," and 
 when Elinor said, " I understand you, you have 
 
 142 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 something to tell me of Mr. Willoughby that will 
 open his character farther. Your telling it will 
 be the greatest act of friendship that can be shown 
 to Marianne. My gratitude will be ensured imme- 
 diately by any information tending to that end, 
 and hers must be gained by it in time. Pray, 
 pray let me hear it," there is little reason for 
 wonder that "upon this hint he spake," and told 
 the story of the moral ruin of the mother and the 
 cruel desertion of the daughter which the reader 
 of Sense and Sensibility will recall. Elinor lost 
 little time in retailing it to her sister, with the 
 immediate and apparently unexpected effect of 
 increasing the girFs unhappiness. " She felt the 
 loss of -Willoughby's character yet more heavily 
 than she had felt the loss of his heart," though we 
 know that she soon afterwards became as fond 
 a wife of Colonel Brandon as she ever could have 
 been of Willoughby. 
 
 Far more remarkable, I think, than Brandon's 
 telling Elinor the miserable story of his sister-in- 
 law and her daughter is the manner in which 
 Elinor herself receives Willoughby's attempt to 
 excuse his conduct. He admits his treatment of 
 Miss Williams, but asks how Elinor could think 
 
 143 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Colonel Brandon an impartial reporter of the 
 affair, and proceeds to offer his own excuse in 
 the words that follow — 
 
 "I do not mean to justify myself, but at the 
 same time cannot leave you to suppose that I have 
 nothing to urge, — that because she was injured, 
 she was irreproachable, — and because I was a 
 libertine, she must be a saint. If the violence of 
 her passion, the weakness of her understanding — 
 I do not mean, however, to defend myself. Her 
 affection for me deserved better treatment, and I 
 often, with great self-reproach, recall the tender- 
 ness which, for a very short time, had the power 
 of creating any return. I wish — I heartily wish 
 it had never been. But I have injured more than 
 herself; and I have injured one whose affection 
 for me (may I say it?) was scarcely less warm 
 than hers, and whose mind — oh ! how infinitely 
 superior." 
 
 In other words, the inexperienced child was of 
 weak understanding, and loved him passionately, 
 and therefore he was not so much to blame as if 
 she had been less warm in her affection and 
 stronger in her intelligence. Surely the reason- 
 ing should have been reversed. Yet after this fine 
 oration Elinor "pities" him, and, when he goes 
 on to disparage his wife, whom he has married for 
 
 144 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 her fortune, and to express his continued love for 
 Marianne, all that Elinor says is, '' You are very 
 wrong, Mr. Willoughby, very blamable, you ought 
 not to speak in this way, either of Mrs. Willoughby 
 or my sister," and in saying this "her voice, in 
 spite of herself, betrayed her compassionate 
 emotion." When he left her, Elinor assured him 
 that she thought better of him than she had done, 
 *' that she forgave, pitied him, wished him well — 
 was even interested in his happiness — and added 
 some gentle counsel as to the behaviour most 
 likely to promote it;" counsel which he showed 
 little disposition to take. 
 
 tThis tolerance by Elinor for a man who, on 
 his own admission, had " taken advantage " of a 
 simple young girl, ignorant in the world's ways, 
 this readiness to allow extenuating circumstances 
 to a mercenary breaker of reputations and hearts, 
 is a far more serious fact than the mere intro- 
 duction of a story which does fit quite easily 
 into the plan of the novel. Elinor's reflections 
 when Willoughby had ended his apologies suffi- 
 ciently show that the point of view suggested in 
 the duologue between the sinner and the sister 
 was deliberately set up by the author — 
 ^ 145 
 
JAXE AUSTEN 
 
 " She made no answer. Her thoughts were 
 silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too 
 early an independence and its consequent habits 
 of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in 
 the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man 
 who, to every advantage of person and talents, 
 united a disposition naturally open and honest, 
 and a feeling, affectionate temper. The world had 
 made him extravagant and vain; extravagance 
 and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. 
 Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the 
 expense of another, had involved him in a real 
 attachment, which extravagance, or at least its off- 
 spring necessity, had required to be sacrificed. 
 Each faulty propensity, in leading him to evil, had 
 led him likewise to punishment. The attachment 
 from which, against honour, against feeling, against 
 every better interest he had outwardly torn him- 
 self, now, when no longer allowable, governed 
 every thought ; and the connection, for the sake of 
 which he had, with little scruple, left her sister to 
 misery, was likely to prove a source of unhappi- 
 ness to himself of a far more incurable nature." 
 
 The chapter describing this interview between 
 Willoughby and Elinor is the only one in all the 
 novels of Jane Austen wherein a " problem," after 
 the kind dear to the dramatist of to-day and the 
 novelists of yesterday, is fully presented and con- 
 
 146 
 
ETHICS i\ND OPTIMISM 
 
 sidered, the heroines, with this exception, answer- 
 ing to Mr. Andrew Lang's description, being 
 "ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted 
 with vain yearnings and interesting doubts." 
 Elinor only, as we find her on this occasion, is a 
 pioneer of that school of sociology which white- 
 washes the individual at the expense of his early 
 environment and education. Her defence of this 
 wretched man is, in principle, that which an Old 
 Bailey advocate offers when he cites the theories 
 of Lombroso in favour of a beetle-browed criminal 
 who has stuck his knife into the breast of some 
 confiding woman. It was " the world " that had 
 made him what he was, he was to be pitied, not 
 condemned. 
 
 Though we have not to consider here whether 
 Elinor and the advocate are right or wrong, it is 
 hard to avoid the thought that, when she wrote this 
 remarkable chapter, Jane Austen was influenced 
 in a degree quite unusual in that age with people 
 of her class by the sense of futility which, not long 
 before her day, had been the motive of Candide. 
 Voltaire's irony is bitter, in spite of the optimism 
 which his book preaches, and of the essential kind- 
 ness of his nature, while Jane Austen's is as sweet 
 K 2 147 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 as irony can ever be. That she was intentionally 
 ironical in this case of Elinor's tolerance is 
 scarcely possible. Only a cynic would treat a 
 pure-minded maiden's apology for a heartless 
 seducer as a subject for covert satire, and Jane 
 was not a cynic. 
 
 Writing of Maria Edgeworth in his Notes for 
 a Diary, Sir M. E. Grant Duff says : " In her, as 
 in Miss Austen, there is something wanting. Is it 
 what has been called the nostalgie de VInfini ? " 
 That intellectual ailment is more common now-a- 
 days than it was in the eighteenth century, and 
 there was little of it in the grey matter of any 
 country brains when Jane w^as born. Certainly it 
 cannot be diagnosed from her work generally. 
 Only in the particular case of Elinor and Wil- 
 loughby does that idea of the helplessness of man 
 in the maelstrom of Infinity which has paralyzed 
 the wills of so many unhappy victims, and induced 
 the devastating literature of determinism, seem to 
 have entered into her plan of work — for only 
 thus can I account for the moral whitewashinof of 
 Willoughby, not by a " man-of-the-world," with 
 his ''after all," and his "human nature" argu- 
 ments, but by a country ingenue. The more I 
 
 148 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 read Jane Austen's writings the stronger grows 
 my conviction that she was one of those fortunate 
 beings whose optimism is differentiated from 
 pessimism by the good offices of an excellent 
 digestion and an even pulse. 
 
 We need not suppose that she had thought 
 much about the philosophical sanction of conduct 
 as opposed to the purely religious, or that she had 
 studied the French Encyclofcedia. She was 
 born and brought up in an atmosphere wherein 
 convention, in regard to the things that matter, 
 was almost omnipotent, and she was not of the 
 type whereof iconoclasts are made. She attacked 
 no system, social or religious; but she had no 
 fondness for " isms," and thus it is that dogmatism 
 is quite as hard to discover in her writings as 
 scepticism. 
 
 It has been said already that Jane Austen was 
 not a cynic, Yet it would be easy, by making 
 Lady Susan one's text, and ignoring the rest of 
 her writings, to show that she was as cynical as a 
 Swift or an Anatole France. Of course I do not 
 mean that her apparent cynicism in this case was 
 exercised on the kind of subjects which is ridi- 
 culed in TJie Tale of a T.ub or in Ulle des Pin- 
 
 149 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 gouins. But I know nothing, in its way, more 
 cold-blooded in the presentation of " love " than 
 the conclusion of that novel of Jane's springtime, 
 which she herself, her own wise critic, withheld 
 from publication. The rivalry of mother and 
 daughter for the affections of the same man must 
 always be an unpleasant subject, and the story of 
 the conflict between Lady Susan Vernon and her 
 daughter for the matrimonial prize represented by 
 Reginald de Courcy, as told in letters among the 
 characters concerned, is on a low plane. The 
 morals of the " heroine '' may not be suspect, but 
 her tone is below suspicion. 
 
 What is the denouement of Lady Susan ? The 
 mother's schemes to marry the man of the 
 daughter's choice have ended in her own marriage 
 to the wealthy noodle whom she had tried to force 
 upon the daughter. '' Frederica," says the author, 
 — dropping the " correspondence" plan in order to 
 wind up the book more readily — *' was therefore 
 fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt till such 
 time as Reginald de Courcy could be talked, flat- 
 tered and finessed into an affection for her which, 
 allowing leisure for the conquest of his attach- 
 ment to her mother, for his abjuring all future 
 
 150 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 attachments, and detesting the sex, might be 
 reasonably looked for in the course of a twelve- 
 month. Three months might have done it in 
 general, but Reginald's feelings were no less last- 
 ing than lively. .Whether Lady Susan was or was 
 not happy in her second choice, I do not see how 
 it can ever be ascertained. . . ." 
 
 It is certain that to some considerable extent 
 Lady Susan was a satire on several lady novelists 
 of the period. All Jane Austen's novels are more 
 or less satirical, from Northanger Abbey, which is 
 full of burlesque passages, to Persuasion, in which 
 they are so rare that it needs a hunt to discover 
 any. Whether or not Lady Susan was intended 
 to be taken more seriously than in jest, it is a dull 
 performance. The whole plan and treatment of 
 the book are artificial. It was not Jane's natural 
 instinct or her finer art which was at work in its 
 making. So foreign is it to herself that if the MS. 
 had been found in some cupboard of a manor- 
 house no occupants of which had been of known 
 relationship to the Austens, I doubt if it would 
 have been attributed to her by any one who had 
 not made a meticulous comparison of its phrase- 
 ology with her acknowledged works. 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 There is, I think, no surer evidence of Jane's 
 fine taste, aHke in character and in literature, than 
 that, having brought this novel to completion, she 
 deliberately suppressed it. Had she sold it to a 
 publisher, and allowed it to run its chance of 
 popularity like the rest of her finished novels, we 
 should have had to revise our views on her nature 
 and judgment to a considerable extent. As it is, 
 the fact that having written a poor novel of dis- 
 agreeable tendency she recognized the unsatis- 
 factory thing that she had done in time to cancel 
 it is much in her favour, and justifies the opinion 
 that whatever defects of subject or of treatment 
 we may find in Lady Susan were condemned by 
 its author. It is for this reason that we need not 
 regret the decision of her nephew and niece to 
 publish, many years after their aunt's death, the 
 book which she herself had withheld. Onlv, let 
 us never forget as we read it that it was cancelled 
 by the author. 
 
 \rhe Watsons was produced, as far as can He 
 ascertained, in that middle period of Jane's life 
 when, after her father's resignation of the Steven- 
 ton living he was spending his few remaining years 
 at Bath with his wife and daughters. Having 
 
 152 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 written three of her six novels in the nineties of the 
 eighteenth century — the six novels by which she 
 chose to be judged — at Steventon, she produced 
 nothing more of her best until at Chawton, in the 
 early years of the nineteenth century, she com- 
 pleted her life's work. 
 
 All her books that live by their own merits 
 were written in the heart of the country. The 
 book that comes nearest to the commonest fiction 
 of her period was chiefly written in a town which, 
 however staid and irreproachable in its tone at 
 the present date, was in her time a centre of 
 worldliness and frivolity. i 
 
 The Rivals was first acted in the year of Jane 
 Austen's birth, but the picture it offers of Bath 
 society is almost as true of 1802 as of 1775. Dress ^ 
 had changed much in the intervening years, but in 
 all else there seems to have been little change be- 
 tween the Bath of Sheridan the lover of Elizabeth 
 Linley, and the Bath of Sheridan the friend of the 
 Prince Regent. It was among Lydia Languishes 
 and Captain Absolutes that Jane Austen walked 
 in Milsom Street and danced at the Assembly- 
 rooms in 1802-5, and it was in an atmosphere of 
 social affectation and busy idleness that she found 
 
 153 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 her powers unequal to any nobler performance 
 than the account of the husband-hunting and silly 
 young women who angle for Lord Osborne and 
 his friends. The futilities of The Watsons form 
 a remarkable interlude between Pride and Pre- 
 jzidice and Mansfield Park. 
 
 The rural society into which Jane Austen takes 
 us in all her novels marks a rapid development 
 from the manners of the preceding age. If we 
 regard the Squire Western of Fielding as repre- 
 sentative of a considerable class of the country 
 gentlemen of his time, we may wonder how it is 
 that no such rude disturber of the peace bursts in 
 among the Woodhouses and the Dashwoods. His 
 nearest relation in Jane's novels is Sir John 
 Middleton, and he, with all his noise and ignor- 
 ance, is a quiet, well-bred person in comparison 
 with the rude father of the delicious Sophia. 
 Even the less rubicund and animal squire of the 
 Hardcastle species is here unknown, and Squire 
 Allworthy himself would have been strange in the 
 drawing-rooms of Mansfield Park and Pemberley, 
 or the parlours of Longbourn and Hartfield. 
 There is less change to be seen in the "manners 
 and tone " of the women, especially the younger 
 
 154 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 women, than of the men. Sophia and Amelia 
 would have used a few expressions, perhaps, that 
 might have made Emma stare and cry " Good 
 God! " or the fine colour deepen on Elizabeth's 
 cheeks, and Marianne Dashwood would have con- 
 fided to Elinor her astonishment that such other- 
 wise attractive girls should be so ignorant of the 
 poets, and of the proper arrangement of natural 
 scenery. Had the girls become confidential on 
 further acquaintance, Sophia might have won- 
 dered why Elizabeth said so little about the 
 appearance of her lover, and so much about his 
 intelligence. But tTom Jones and Booth would 
 never have got on intimate terms with Knightley, 
 or Darcy, or Edward Ferrars, until these Austen 
 young men had drunk more port than anybody in 
 Jane's novels — with the exception of John Thorpe 
 as described by himself — could carry without 
 disaster. 
 
 There are no " heroes " among these honest \. 
 gentlemen of a hundred years ago. Wentworth i 
 has indeed won credit and fortune at sea. Ber- 
 tram and Knightley do nothing to entitle them to 
 the name, beyond marrying the heroine. Edward 
 Ferrars merely behaves properly in keeping faith 
 
 155 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 with Lucy as long as she wants him. Darcy is 
 heroic in taking Mrs. Bennet for a mother-in-law; 
 Henry Tilney makes fun of his chosen mate in a 
 way that would have cost him her heart in a more 
 conventional novel. "II y a des heros en mal 
 comme en bien," says Rochefoucauld, but of the 
 evil-doing kind there are none here, unless, 
 indeed, the effrontery with which, after jilting 
 Marianne for a rich wife, Willoughby comes to her 
 sister Elinor and asks for her sympathy for his 
 sad fate, or the coolness of Wickham in the pre- 
 sence of the people he has wronged may be 
 regarded as evidence of heroism. 
 
 It is to the wonderfully true presentation of the 
 hearts and minds of girls that these novels chiefly 
 owe their immense power of attraction even for 
 readers who miss the greater part of the humour. 
 Fanny Price and Elinor Dashwood are them- 
 selves but poorly endowed with humour, and 
 Catherine Morland only possesses it in the rudi- 
 mentary way of a lively school-girl. With how 
 much of understanding, how clearly and fully are 
 the hopes and fears, the innocent little plans of 
 Fanny and Catherine, the more mature and 
 reasoned ways of Elinor shown to us, without the 
 least apparent effort. 
 
 156 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 iThe trustful reader nurtured on the successful 
 fiction of our own time, especially that of the last 
 ten years, during which English novelists have 
 been able to indulge themselves and their public 
 by the introduction of incidents and types of 
 character which up to about the commencement of 
 that decade would have secured the ban of the 
 circulating libraries, has been led to believe that 
 sensual impulse plays as large a part in woman's 
 life as in man's. That such women as Lady 
 Bellaston in Tom Jones, Arabelle in Le Lys dans 
 la Vallee, or the Bellona of Richard Feverel exist, 
 and in great numbers, is certain, but they are not 
 representative of woman. Balzac, who was not 
 much restrained by any fear of the libraries, knew 
 that many faithless wives (so very common in 
 French fiction and drama, whatever they might be 
 in life) gave themselves to men their love for 
 whom contained much less of sensuality than of 
 other instincts. Esther, the unhappy Jewess of 
 Splendeurs et Miseres de Cozirtisanes, loves 
 Lucien with an affection far more chaste than that 
 which many a correct heroine is made to display 
 for the man with whom she goes to the altar in the 
 last chapter. The mistresses of famous men, as 
 known to us from memoirs and histories, have not 
 
 157 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 generally been of a sensual nature. Aspasia, most 
 distinguished of them all, was of the intellectual, 
 not the sensual, type. Strangely indelicate as 
 was Madame du Chatelet, her relations with Vol- 
 taire were based on affinity of literary taste and 
 critical appreciation much more than on physical 
 attraction. Even among the unintellectual women 
 who have figured among the grandes amour euses 
 of history, the passion of the woman does not in 
 most instances appear to have been of the coarser 
 kind. Louise de la Valliere is at least more 
 typical of w^omanhood than Barbara Villiers. 
 
 Emma Woodhouse, deeply distressed at the 
 supposed intention of Knightley to marry Harriet 
 Smith, feels that she cares not what may happen, 
 if he will but remain single all his life. " Could 
 she be secure of that, indeed, of his never marry- 
 ing at all, she beheved she should be perfectly 
 satisfied. Let him but continue the same Mr. 
 Knightley to her and her father, the same Mr. 
 Knightley to all the world; let Donwell and Hart- 
 field lose none of their precious intercourse of 
 friendship and confidence, and her peace would 
 be fully secured. Marriage, in fact, would not do 
 for her." Marriage, we know, " did for her " very 
 
 158 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 well, and not at all, so far as we have her story, 
 in the idiomatic sense in which the words are 
 commonly used. But in this healthy maiden, who 
 could regard with equanimity a future wherein 
 the man she liked best should never be more to 
 her than a dear friend who dropped in for tea or 
 supper, we have an effective illustration of the 
 relative insignificance of passion in Jane Austen's 
 view of life. 
 
 Emma Woodhouse has near relations in Elinor 
 Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, who, after the 
 marriage of Lucy Steele to Robert Ferrars had 
 cleared away the only barrier to their own avowals 
 of affection, "were neither of them quite enough 
 in love to think that three hundred and fifty 
 pounds a year would supply them with the com- 
 forts of life." Kitty and Lydia Bennet could 
 simultaneously adore all the officers of a militia 
 regiment, but there was nothing of the "all for | 
 love, and the world well lost " nonsense about 
 any of the agreeable women of Jane Austen's 
 creation. They were not to be captured by a 
 man's attractions of mind and person in the way 
 that Millamant was by Mirabell's, nor even by 
 the art of others, as Beatrice was won for Bene- 
 
 159 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 dick — and he for her. The names of Millamant 
 and Beatrice were in the ancestral tree of EHza- 
 beth Bennet, but her pulses beat more regularly 
 than theirs. 
 
 In the effect of Mary Crawford's charms on 
 Edmund Bertram we may see some pale sug- 
 gestion of such an awakening as that of Robert 
 Orange (in The School for Samts\ who, on meet- 
 ing with Brigit, " suddenly had found presented to 
 him a mind and a nature in such complete har- 
 mony with his own that it had seemed as though he 
 were the w^ords and she the music, of one song." 
 But it was only a "seeming" in Edmund's case, 
 and while we read Jane Austen our thoughts are 
 rarely allowed to flow into a " Romeo and Juliet " 
 channel for more than a few moments at a time. 
 
 jThe re-awakening of Wentworth's dormant love 
 for Anne Elliot would have afforded to most lady 
 novelists an opportunity for some fine, romantic 
 writing. Jane Austen allows herself no romance 
 in the matter. The sea air at Lyme has height- 
 ened Anne's colour, and a passing visitor — her 
 cousin, as it happens — is attracted by her appear- 
 ance. .Wentworth notices his glances of admira- 
 tion and is reminded that she is charming ! 
 
 1 60 Y 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 " When they came to the steps leading upwards 
 from the beach, a gentleman, at the same moment 
 preparing to come down, poHtely drew back and 
 stopped to give them way. They ascended and 
 passed him; and as they passed, Anne's face 
 caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree 
 of earnest admiration which she could not be in- 
 sensible of. She was looking remarkably well; 
 her very regular, very pretty features having the 
 bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine 
 wind which had been blowing on her complexion, 
 and by the animation of eye which it had also 
 produced. It was evident that the gentleman 
 (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her 
 exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round 
 at her instantly in a way which showed his noticing 
 of it. He gave her a momentary glance — a glance 
 of brightness which seemed to say, ' That man is 
 struck with you ' — and even I, at this moment, see 
 something like Anne Elliot again." 
 
 This scene may be deficient in the sentiment that 
 delights Catherine Morlands and Marianne Dash- 
 woods, but it is a bit of true observation of a 
 familiar phase of human folly. Archbishop Whate- 
 ly remarks that : " Authoresses . . . can scarcely 
 ever forget that they are authoresses. They seem 
 to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked 
 a female mind. Elles se feignent en buste, and 
 ^ i6i 
 
\ 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described 
 by some interloping male, like Richardson or 
 Marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen 
 half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own 
 conjectures the rest. Now from this fault Miss 
 Austin is free. Her heroines are what one knows 
 \/' women must be, though one never can get them 
 to acknowledge it." It is a striking proof of 
 the little that was known of Jane Austen by 
 her contemporaries that, even four years after her 
 death, neither Whately himself, nor the editor of 
 the Quarterly Review knew how to spell her name. 
 The criticism that the mind brought up on 
 modern fiction would be likely to make on the 
 girls of Jane Austen would be the reverse of 
 Whately's. It would be that her chief defect 
 in depicting woman's character was that she 
 almost invariably did force the reader to spin from 
 his own conjectures when the "mysteries of the 
 heart" were the subject of her pages. The truth 
 is divided, I think, between the Archbishop and 
 the supposed modern critic. Jane's heroines are 
 true women, admirably portrayed, but they only 
 represent a certain proportion of their sex. It 
 could never be suspected of Elizabeth, or Elinor, 
 
 162 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 or Anne, or Fanny that there was Southern blood 
 in her veins. There might have been a few drops 
 — no nfore— in Marianne's. The feehngs of the 
 author are reflected in her most attractive 
 characters. She might have married, again and 
 again, of that there can be small doubt ; and while 
 for herself she shared Dorothy Osborne's opinion 
 as to the essentials of conjugal happiness, I fancy 
 that she would also have agreed with Dorothy's 
 brother that "all passions have more of trouble 
 than satisfaction in them, and therefore they are 
 happiest that have least of them." That, indeed, 
 as we have already seen, was very much the fault 
 that Miss Bronte found in her as a novelist. 
 
 Anne Elliot comes nearer than any of her 
 fellow-heroines to Dorothy Osborne's ideal of the 
 changelessness of affection, the true union of 
 hearts, but, save for her involuntary tears at the 
 Musgroves', she kept her feelings under the most 
 perfect control, and never, we may be sure, tried 
 to beat her convictions into the heads of her silly 
 family, or even of her faithful friend Lady 
 Russell. 
 
 There were, we may fairly believe, not a few 
 
 who would like to have been Jane's chosen mate. 
 L 2 163 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 One such unhappy being seems, as we read, to 
 be the actor in the little bit of serious comedy 
 related, with lively exaggeration, in a letter written 
 when she was twenty-five years old. " Your un- 
 fortunate sister was betrayed last Thursday into 
 a situation of the utmost cruelty. I arrived at 
 Ashe Park before the party from Deane, and was 
 shut up in the drawing-room with Mr. Holder 
 alone for ten minutes. I had some thoughts of 
 insisting on the housekeeper or Mary Corbett 
 being sent for, and nothing could prevail on me 
 to move two steps from the door, on the lock of 
 which I kept one hand constantly fixed." 
 
 Elizabeth Bennet was not more uncomfortable 
 when her mother took Kitty up-stairs after break- 
 fast in order that Mr. Collins might have what 
 he called " The honour of a private audience " 
 with the elder girl. " Dear ma'am," Elizabeth 
 cried, " do not go. 1 beg you will not go. Mr. 
 Collins must excuse me. He can have nothing 
 to say to me that anybody need not hear. I am 
 going away myself." But her mother's, " Lizzy, 
 I insist upon your staying and hearing Mr. 
 Collins," compelled her to remain, with results 
 for which we must ever be grateful to Mrs. 
 
 164 
 
ETHICS AND OPTIMISM 
 
 Bennet. It is not clear, however, that Mr. 
 Holder was a suitor for Jane. We are left in 
 doubt both as to his hopes and his demerits. 
 
 There is a little matter connected with the 
 Quarterly' s two articles in praise of Jane which is 
 perhaps worth noting here. Gifford, who was 
 editor when both appeared, was so warm a sup- 
 porter of the Prince Regent that Hazlitt — one 
 of Gifford's " beasts " — ^wrote in an open letter to 
 him : " When you damn an author, one knows 
 that he is not a favourite at Carlton House.'* 
 Now the Prince is said to have been so fond of 
 Jane Austen's novels that he kept a set in each 
 of his residences, and it is unquestionable that, 
 in consequence of a suggestion that was " equiva- 
 lent to a command," she dedicated Emma to him. 
 "You will be pleased to hear," she wrote on 
 April I, 1816, to John Murray the First, who pub- 
 Hshed the book, "that I have received the 
 Prince's thanks for the handsome copy I sent him 
 of ' Emma.' Whatever he may think of my share 
 of the work, yours seems to have been quite 
 right." 
 
 In the same letter she expresses her disappoint- 
 ment at the " total omission of ' Mansfield Park 
 
 165 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 in the Quarterly' s review of her work in the pre- 
 ceding autumn. As to that review, it is a curious 
 fact that until Lockhart's "Life of Scott" 
 appeared, Whately, who wrote the 1821 article, 
 was credited with the authorship of the earlier 
 review, and it is still to be found against his name 
 in the British Museum catalogue, not from the 
 ignorance of the cataloguers, but because he 
 appears as author on the title-page of a reprint 
 of the article issued at Ahmedabad in 1889. 
 
 166 
 
V 
 
 THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 What has woman done? — "Nature's Salic law" — Women 
 deficient in satire — Some types in the novels — The 
 female snob — The valetudinarian — The fop — The too 
 agreeable man — " Personal size and mental sorrow " 
 — Knightley's opinion of Emma — Ashamed of rela- 
 tions — Mrs. Bennet — The clergy and their opinions — 
 Worldly life — Absence of dogma — Authors confused 
 with their creations. 
 
 It is a commonplace of those who refuse to 
 recognize the claims of woman to equal treatment 
 in spheres of activity where man has long held a 
 monopoly, to ask what great thing has woman 
 done in any walk of life ? One may talk in reply 
 of SapphOj of Joan of Arc, of George Sand, of 
 George Eliot, of Florence Nightingale, and two 
 or three others, and the retort, if the greatness of 
 these be admitted, is that they are the exceptions 
 that " prove " the rule. It is difficult, impossible 
 perhaps, to upset the man who denies that any- 
 thing of "the greatest" in art, or literature, or 
 science has been achieved by a woman. The list 
 
 169 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 of women who have left an abiding fame as poets, 
 or novelists, or painters is soon exhausted, and 
 there is not a name that can, without reserve, be 
 placed among the Rembrandts and Turners, the 
 Goethes and Miltons, the Newtons and Darwins 
 of mankind. Maybe this deficiency is largely due 
 to lack of opportunity. Since the gates were 
 partly opened to woman, within the lifetime of 
 those who are still not old, she has done enough 
 to change the opinions of many who held that 
 rocking the cradle was a sufficiently active share 
 in the ruling of the world for the sex that pro- 
 duced the Maid of Orleans and the Lady with 
 the Lamp. Such justly conspicuous success as 
 Madame Curie has attained in chemistry, or Mrs. 
 Garrett Anderson in medicine, or Mrs. Scharlieb 
 in surgery, has compelled the admission that even 
 if woman were by nature unfitted to reach the 
 highest levels of intellectual achievement, she at 
 least could not be excluded from the learned pro- 
 fessions on the ground of inadequate mental 
 equipment. 
 
 "Nature's old Salic law," said Huxley, "will 
 not be repealed, and no change of dynasty will 
 be effected." Jane Austen, at any rate, did not 
 
 170 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 desire to repeal it. She was among the most 
 feminine of the women writers who have left an 
 enduring reputation. It is something of a para- 
 dox, therefore, that the quality on which her fame 
 chiefly rests is one which is rare among women, 
 and in which most of those women who have 
 attained success in literature have been con- 
 spicuously lacking — satirical humour. Apart 
 from physical disabilities, want of humour is 
 woman's heaviest handicap in the conflict of 
 life. Humour is the principal ingredient of the 
 philosophic temperament. Woman has courage 
 in adversity, she can suffer intensely without com- 
 plaint, but she rarely possesses the power of 
 laughing at her own misfortunes. 
 
 It has been said, and the saying might not 
 easily be gainsaid, that none of the great jokes of 
 the world was made by a woman. There are 
 perhaps fifty great jokes — spoken jokes, of course, 
 are meant, not those generally humourless things 
 known as " practical jokes " — and the good stories 
 that are told and received as novelties are, save 
 in the rarest instances, merely new editions of 
 some wheeze which was already ancient when it 
 was told to a circle of mead-drinkers round a fire 
 
 171 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 the smoke whereof — or some of it — escaped 
 
 through the roof. It is, there is reason to beHeve, 
 
 no mere figure of speech that originally most of 
 
 the basic jokes were told round the galley fire of 
 
 the Ark during the long dark evenings after the 
 
 animals had been fed, the decks swept down, and 
 
 the women had retired to their quarters. Thus 
 
 may we account for the otherwise inexplicably 
 
 large proportion of sea-faring and animal tales 
 
 among the mirth-provoking yarns of man. A 
 
 woman might never make a joke, and yet have a 
 
 keen sense of humour, while, on the other hand, 
 
 she might make many jokes, and have no sense 
 
 of humour at all. Most of the jokes that have any 
 
 element of freshness are alive with fun, and not 
 
 with humour. Who is more humourless than the 
 
 notoriously funny man? 
 
 Jane iVusten is not often funny and seldom 
 
 makes jokes in her novels. Her humour is of the 
 
 essential kind, which is so nearly akin to wit that 
 
 t it is often almost identical with it. Wit and 
 
 humour, after all definitions, are brothers who 
 
 might be taken for one another by those who do 
 
 not notice that the one has colder hands than the 
 
 other. 
 
 172 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 If you want to laugh heartily you must not 
 trust to Jane's novels for a stimulant. Her char- 
 acters laugh but little among themselves, and 
 are the cause of intellectual joy rather than of 
 physical contractions in those who read about 
 them. 
 
 When, after a re-reading of the novels, we sit 
 and think over their delights, many are the admir- 
 able bits of character-drawing that come to mind. 
 After we have thought of the heroines, the " good " 
 people, in the common meaning of the word, do 
 not come back to us so readily as those who, if 
 not "bad," are decidedly faulty. The Westons, 
 the Gardiners, the Harvilles, the Crofts, Lady 
 Russell, the John Knightleys, we recall when we 
 jog our memories. After Elizabeth, and Emma, 
 and Anne, it is the appallingly tactless Mrs. 
 Bennet, the odiously snobbish Mrs. Elton, the 
 race-proud Lady Catherine, the entirely selfish 
 Mr. CoUins, the lazy and thoughtless Lady Ber- 
 tram, the mean and tyrannical Mrs. Norris, the 
 fatuous Sir Walter Elliot, these and their like, 
 who throng into view. No writer — not even 
 Thackeray — has realized the female snob more 
 knowingly than Jane Austen in Mrs. Elton, whose 
 
 i7i 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 constant reference of all matters of taste to the 
 standard presented by " Maple Grove " and the 
 " barouche-landau " renders her as diverting to 
 us as she was insufferable to Emma Woodhouse. 
 A woman like this, who is never betrayed into an 
 unselfish action or a noble aspiration, is happily 
 not a common object in real life, but there are 
 enough of Mrs. Elton's great-granddaughters 
 about the world to exculpate Jane from the charge 
 of undue exaggeration. Emma herself has been 
 called a snob, and only the other day was de- 
 scribed as "perpetually acting with bad taste." 
 But Emma's disdain for Robert Martin, and her 
 opinion of the degradation of marrying a gover- 
 ness, were due to prejudices of convention, which 
 thought — under Knightley's influence — dispelled. 
 Mrs. Elton was a snob at heart, who revelled in 
 her own vulgarity of instinct. 
 
 If the snob is portrayed to perfection in Mrs. 
 Elton, the valetudinarian is no less happily pre- 
 sented in Mr. Woodhouse — " My dear Emma, 
 suppose we all have a little gruel " — and for a 
 picture of an empty-headed, frivolous wife married 
 to a rational and bearish husband, the Palmers, 
 in Sense and Sensibility, have few equals. As for 
 
 174 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 Miss Bates, she is without a serious rival as an 
 inconsequential babbler, and though we may be, 
 and ought to be, as angry with Emma for her 
 rudeness at the Box Hill picnic as was Mr. 
 Knightley himself, we must admit that years of 
 Miss Bates's disjoined garrulity were some set-off 
 against that gross breach of charity and good 
 manners. Lady Catherine de Bourgh has been 
 placed by some critical readers among Jane ^ 
 Austen's obvious caricatures. Is she not an en- 
 tirely credible, if happily rare, type ? She is seen 
 in a strong light in her attempt to bully Elizabeth 
 into a promise not to marry Darcy — 
 
 '' ' With regard to the resentment of his family,' 
 says Elizabeth at last, ' or the indignation of the 
 world, if the former were excited by his marrying 
 me, it would not give me one moment's concern — 
 and the world in general would have too much 
 sense to join in the scorn.' 
 
 " ' And this is your real opinion ! ' replies Lady 
 Catherine. ' This is your final resolve ! Very 
 well. I shall now know how to act. Do not 
 imagine. Miss Bennet, that your ambition will 
 ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped 
 to find you reasonable; but, depend upon it, I 
 will carry my point.' 
 
 " In this manner Lady Catherine talked on till 
 
 175 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 they were at the door of the carriage, when, turning 
 hastily round, she added — 
 
 " * I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I 
 send no compliments to your mother. You de- 
 serve no such attention. I am most seriously 
 displeased.' 
 
 " Elizabeth made no answer, and without 
 attempting to persuade her ladyship to return 
 into the house, walked quietly into it herself." 
 
 Thus ends one of the great scenes of Jane 
 Austen, a bit of duologue which gives us the 
 natures and capacities of two remarkable people, 
 a charming, clear-headed, self-reliant girl, and a 
 blustering, stupidly proud old woman. 
 
 Sir Walter Elliot is the companion figure, more 
 highly-coloured, of Lady Catherine. This man, 
 a vain fop w^ho has not sense enough to govern 
 his own affairs, regards professional men as con- 
 temptible, if necessary, adjuncts of society, and, 
 at a time when only the splendid services of our 
 sailors had saved England from disaster he thus 
 babbles about the navy — 
 
 *' Yes ; it is in two points offensive to me, I have 
 two strong grounds of objection to it. First, as 
 being the means of bringing persons of obscure 
 
 176 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 birth into undue distinction, and raising men to 
 honours which their fathers and grandfathers 
 never dreamt of; and, secondly, as it cuts up a 
 man's youth and vigour most horribly; a sailor 
 grows old sooner than any other man. I have 
 observed it all my life. A man is in greater danger 
 in the navy of being insulted by the rise of one 
 whose father his father might have disdained to 
 speak to, and of becoming prematurely an object 
 of disgust himself, than in any other line. One 
 day last spring, in town, I was in company with 
 two men, striking instances of what I am talking 
 of, — Lord St. Ives, whose father we all know to 
 have been a country curate, without bread to eat : I 
 was to give place to Lord St. Ives, — and a certain 
 Admiral Baldwin, the most deplorable-looking 
 personage you can imagine; his face the colour 
 of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree ; 
 all lines and wrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, 
 and nothing but a dab of powder at top. ' In the 
 name of heaven, who is that old fellow?' said I 
 to a friend of mine who was standing near (Sir 
 Basil Morley). ' Old fellow ! ' cried Sir Basil, ' it 
 is Admiral Baldwin. What do you take his age 
 to be?' 'Sixty,' said I, * or perhaps sixty-two.' 
 ' Forty,' replied Sir Basil, * forty, and no more.' 
 Picture to yourselves my amazement : I shall not 
 easily forget Admiral Baldwin. I never saw quite 
 so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life 
 can do; but to a degree, I know it is the same 
 with them all : they are all knocked about, and 
 
 M 177 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 exposed to every climate, and every weather, till 
 they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are 
 not knocked on the head at once, before they 
 reach Admiral Baldwin's age." 
 
 ^ [There have been such fools as Sir Walter 
 Elliot, but as a type he is overdrawn. Jane loved 
 the navy so much that her anger with those who 
 disparaged it gave her pen speed and added 
 colour to the ink. 
 
 Anne's cousin William Elliot, whose attentions 
 to her help to revive Wentworth's affection, is 
 more closely studied by the author than any of 
 her "heroes." 
 
 " Everything united in him ; good understand- 
 ing, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, 
 and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of 
 family attachment and family honour, without 
 pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality 
 of a man of fortune, without display; he judged 
 for himself in everything essential, without defy- 
 ing public opinion in any point of worldly 
 decorum. He was steady, observant, moderate, 
 candid; never run away with by spirits or by sel- 
 fishness, which fancied itself strong feeling; and 
 yet, with a sensibility to what was amiable and 
 lovely, and a value for all the felicities of domestic 
 
 178 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 life, which characters of fancied enthusiasm and 
 violent agitation seldom really possess." 
 
 Anne, however, was not long in discovering grave 
 defects in this outwardly model person. She saw 
 that while he was 
 
 "rational, discreet, polished, he was not open. 
 There never was any burst of feeling, any warmth 
 of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of 
 others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfec- 
 tion. Her early impressions were incurable. She 
 prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager char- 
 acter beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm 
 did captivate her still. She felt that she could so 
 much more depend upon the sincerity of those 
 who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty 
 thing, than of those whose presence of mind never 
 varied, whose tongue never slipped. 
 
 " Mr. Elliotwas too generally agreeable. Various 
 as were the tempers in her father's house, he 
 pleased them all. He endured too well, stood 
 too well with everybody." 
 
 Those who accuse Jane Austen of hardness 
 have sometimes relied on her treatment of Mrs. 
 Musgrove's sorrow over her ne'er-do-well son, 
 long after his death, to support this charge. Anne 
 and Wentworth, whose mutual liking was just 
 
 M 2 I^Q 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 beginning to bloom again, were "actually on the 
 same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily 
 made room for him; they were divided only by 
 Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, 
 indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable, 
 substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature 
 to express good cheer and good humour than 
 tenderness and sentiment; and while the agita- 
 tions of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, 
 may be considered as very completely screened, 
 Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit 
 for the self-command with which he attended to 
 her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, 
 whom alive nobody had cared for." And then 
 the author stops in her narrative to observe that 
 " Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly 
 no necessary proportions. A large, bulky figure 
 has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the 
 most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair 
 or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, 
 which reason will patronize in vain — which taste 
 cannot tolerate — which ridicule will seize." 
 
 She thus bluntly expresses what almost every 
 satirist merely implies, but she underrates her own 
 powers. The ordinary writer might or might not 
 
 1 80 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 be able to describe the grief of "a large, bulky 
 figure " without offence to the ordinary " taste." 
 Genius could assuredly do this thing. Shake- 
 speare, with whom Whately, Macaulay and 
 Tennyson compared Jane Austen, made one of 
 his greatest characters " fat and scant of breath," 
 but when Hamlet says to his friend, " Thou 
 woulds't not think how ill all's here about my 
 heart," we do not find it "ridiculous" that this 
 "too, too solid flesh" should be joined with a 
 mind weighted with such poignant sorrow. In 
 any case, whether she mistrusted her own powers, 
 or wanted Mrs. Musgrove to be slightly ridiculous, 
 which seems more likely, Jane did not here strive 
 to achieve what vshe pointedly tells us it would 
 be beyond reason to expect. 
 
 The character of Emma is described with 
 unusual fulness, but the description is placed in 
 the mouth of George Knightley, her candid 
 admirer, who was perhaps not guiltless of the 
 fault which Fainall attributed to Mirabell, of 
 being "too discerning in the failings of his mis- 
 tress." Mrs. Weston (" Miss Taylor that was ") 
 has said that Emma means to read with Harriet 
 Smith — 
 
 i8i 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 " ' Emma has been meaning to read more ever 
 since she was twelve years old/ replies Mr. 
 Knightley. ' I have seen a great many lists of 
 her drawing-up, at various times, of books that 
 she meant to read regularly through — and very 
 good lists they were, very well chosen, and very 
 neatly arranged — sometimes alphabetically, and 
 sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew 
 up when only fourteen — I remember thinking it 
 did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved 
 it some time, and I dare say she may have made 
 out a very good list now. But I have done with 
 expecting any course of steady reading from 
 Emma. She will never submit to anything requir- 
 ing industry and patience, and a subjection of the 
 fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor 
 failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet 
 Smith will do nothing. You never could persuade 
 her to read half so much as you wished. You 
 know you could not.' 
 
 " ' I dare say,' replied Mrs. Weston, smiling, 
 ' that I thought so thejz; but since we have parted, 
 I can never remember Emma's omitting to do 
 anything I wished.' 
 
 " ' There is hardly any desiring to refresh such 
 a memory as that,' said Mr. Knightley, feelingly ; 
 and for a moment or two he had done. ' But I,' 
 he soon added, ' who have had no such charm 
 thrown over my senses, must still see, hear, and 
 remember. Emma is spoiled by being the clever- 
 est of her family. At ten years old she had the 
 
 182 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 misfortune of being able to answer questions 
 which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was 
 always quick and assured; Isabella slow and 
 diffident. And ever since she was twelve, Emma 
 has been mistress of the house and of you all. In 
 her mother she lost the only person able to cope 
 with her.' " 
 
 An unhappy condition of most of Jane's 
 heroines is that they are of necessity ashamed of 
 their nearest relations. Anne Elliot felt this 
 trouble keenly, when at length she and Wentworth 
 decided to take the happiness which she had re- 
 fused years before — 
 
 " Anne, satisfied at a very early period of Lady 
 Russell's meaning to love Captain Wentworth as 
 she ought, had no other alloy to the happiness of 
 her prospects than what arose from the conscious- 
 ness of having no relations to bestow on him 
 which a man of sense could value. There she 
 felt her own inferiority keenly. The dispropor- 
 tion in their fortune was nothing; it did not give 
 her a moment's regret; but to have no family to 
 receive and estimate him properly, nothing of 
 respectability, of harmony, of good will, to offer 
 in return for all the worth and all the prompt 
 welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, 
 was a source of as lively pain as her mind could 
 
 183 
 
 ly 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 well be sensible of under circumstances of other- 
 wise strong felicity." 
 
 One can readily understand her regret. Her 
 father was a fool, her elder sister Elizabeth a 
 slave of convention, with few rational ideas of her 
 own, and her younger sister a neurotic egotist, 
 who grudged to others the simplest pleasures 
 if she did not feel able or disposed to share 
 them. I 
 
 Fanny Price was ashamed of the slovenly 
 home at Portsmouth to which Henry Crawford so 
 inopportunely penetrated. Elizabeth Bennefs 
 mother was, of course, more nearly " impossible '' 
 even than Lady Catherine had so pointedly sug- 
 gested, for her defects were far worse than those 
 of obscure birth. This terrible woman, who kept 
 her elder daughters constantly on the rack by her 
 fatuous chatter, who always said the wrong thing, 
 who had no desire for her children's welfare but 
 to marry them to anybody, with money if possible, 
 or without it rather than not at all, made one of 
 her usual quick changes when she heard the 
 surprising news of Elizabeth's engagement to 
 Darcy — 
 
 184 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 " She began at length to recover, to fidget about 
 in her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and 
 bless herself. 
 
 *' ' Good gracious ! Lord bless me ! only think ! 
 dear me ! Mr. Darcy ! Who would have thought 
 it ! And it is really true ? Oh, my sweetest Lizzy ! 
 how rich and how great you will be ! What pin- 
 money, what jewels, what carriages you will have ! 
 Jane's is nothing to it — nothing at all. I am so 
 pleased — so happy ! Such a charming man ! — so 
 handsome ! so tall — Oh, my dear Lizzy ! pray 
 apologize for my having disliked him so much 
 before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear 
 Lizzy ! A house in town ! Everything that is 
 charming ! Three daughters married ! Ten 
 thousand a-year ! Oh, Lord ! what will become 
 of me? I shall go distracted.' 
 
 " This was enough to prove that her approbation 
 need not be doubted; and Elizabeth, rejoicing 
 that such an effusion was heard only by herself, 
 soon went away. But before she had been three 
 minutes in her own room, her mother followed her. 
 
 " ' My dearest child,' she cried, ' I can think of 
 nothing else ! Ten thousand a-year, and very 
 likely more ! 'Tis as good as a lord ! And a 
 special license. You must and shall be married 
 by a special license. But, my dearest love, tell 
 me what dish Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of, 
 that I may have it to-morrow.' 
 
 " This was a sad omen of what her mother's be- 
 haviour to the gentleman himself might be; and 
 
 185 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Elizabeth found that, though in the certain pos- 
 session of his warmest affection, and secure of 
 her relations' consent, there was still something to 
 be wished for." 
 
 Of Catherine Morland we are told that " her 
 whole family were plain matter-of-fact people, who 
 seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father at the 
 utmost being contented with a pun, and her mother 
 with a proverb." Having given us this little 
 afergu of Mr. and Mrs. Morland, the author, more 
 suo, adds the information : *' They were not in 
 the habit, therefore, of telling lies to increase their 
 importance, or of asserting at one moment what 
 thev would contradict the next." 
 
 If we seek in our memories for scenes of par- 
 ticular excellence we shall recall with renewed 
 pleasure the rehearsals [Mansfield Park), the 
 encounters between Elizabeth and Mr. Collins 
 and Elizabeth and Lady Catherine {Pride and 
 Prejudice), the second and last proposal of 
 Wentworth to Anne Elliot {Persuasion), the picnic 
 at Box Hill and the dance at the " Crown " 
 {Emma). In all of these the spontaneity of the 
 narrative, the vitality of the talk and the vividness 
 with which the circumstances are realized with 
 
 i86 
 
L-- 
 
 THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 the smallest amount of description show the 
 author's art in its most delightful vein. 
 
 It is often in little touches, generally satirical, 
 that Jane Austen reveals the characters of her 
 people. Lady Middleton, whose "reserve was a 
 mere calmness of manner with which sense had 
 nothing to do"-; Mary Bennet, whom, when her 
 sisters visited her, "they found, as usual, deep in 
 the study of thorough bass and human nature, 
 and had some new extracts to admire, and some 
 new observations of threadbare morality to listen 
 to"; the gushing Louisa Musgrove, who declared 
 that if she loved a man as Mrs. Croft loved the 
 Admiral, she " would always be with him, nothing- 
 should ever separate " them, and that she " would 
 rather be overturned by him, than driven safely 
 by anybody else " ; Mr. Allen, a country gentle- 
 man of fortune who " did not care about the 
 garden, and never went into it"; and General 
 Tilney, poring over pamphlets when he ought to 
 be in bed, blinding his eyes " for the good of 
 others " who would never benefit in the least by 
 his exertions; the heartless and humbugging 
 Mrs. Norris, whose plentiful talk about helping 
 her poor, child-burdened sister ended in her 
 
 187 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 "writing the letters " while others sent substantial 
 assistance — these, and many other entertaining 
 people live for us largely from such casual peeps 
 into their natures and sentiments. 
 
 Jane Austen rarely describes a man or woman 
 as possessing qualities which are not justified by 
 the evidence she offers. Almost the only notable 
 exceptions are Mrs. Dashwood, of whom we are 
 told that "a man could not very well be in love 
 with either of her daughters, without extending 
 the passion to her," but who does not herself give 
 us any reason to regard her as other than an- 
 affectionate, well-meaning, and injudicious person, 
 and Captain Wentworth, who is stated to have 
 been witty, but who usually manages to restrain 
 his wit when we happen to meet him. 
 
 The many parsons of the novels are at once 
 too steady and too prosperous to be in accord with 
 either of the types of eighteenth-century clergy 
 most frequently conveyed by the literature of 
 their period. They may not have done much for 
 their parishioners beyond preaching to them once 
 or twice a week, and sending them soup occasion- 
 ally, but they set them good examples by con- 
 ducting themselves decently and soberly. Of 
 
 i88 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 their " views " we know little. Indeed, few 
 things are more remarkable in these novels, in 
 the light of later fiction, than that almost complete 
 absence of any reference to dogmatic religion to 
 which attention has already been drawn. You 
 may hunt through them all and hardly find two 
 definite statements that, except to see what the 
 vicar's bride was like, any of the characters went 
 to church. We know that the parsons preached, 
 but whether there was any one to hear their 
 sermons we are usually left in doubt. In fact, 
 as Dr. Whately puts it, the author's religion is 
 "not at all obtrusive." His favourable view of 
 Jane Austen's influence may be contrasted with 
 Robert Hall's of Maria Edgeworth's : " In point 
 of tendency I should class her books among the 
 most irreligious I ever read. . . . She does not 
 attack religion nor inveigh against it, but makes 
 it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue 
 without it." 
 
 It has frequently been said that the atmosphere 
 of Jane Austen's books is " Church of England," 
 and this is in a sense true. She assumes that 
 the squires of whom she writes are adherents of 
 Church and State, much as a provincial clergy- 
 
 189 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 man wrote quite recently in his Parish Magazine : 
 " It is generally taken for granted that Church is 
 the only possible religion for an English gentle- 
 man." We meet with no Romish priests or 
 Methodist preachers, not so much as a member 
 of the Society of Friends, but, on the other hand, 
 we meet with no one who talks against faith. It 
 was a period when the Church itself had become 
 apathetic, when pluralists abounded, and when 
 many rectors lived comfortably on their great 
 tithes, far from the parishes w^hich they left to 
 the care of curates who were often worse off than 
 gamekeepers. A young man went into the 
 Church, if there was a good living to be had, just 
 as he went to the Bar if his uncle was a flourishing 
 attorney, or into the navy if his friends had 
 influence with the Board of Admiralty. Many 
 parsons, if they were well-to-do and fond of 
 society, did not even wear any distinctive dress. 
 One meets vicars and curates to-day, in summer- 
 time, wearing green ties and grey tweed suits, 
 and even a bishop has been known to abandon 
 his episcopal uniform when he was away on a 
 holiday. But, to take an instance from the 
 novels, Catherine Morland, who has met Henry 
 
 190 
 
^^^"THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 Tilney at a dance in Bath, and meets him again 
 at the Pump-room or elsewhere, does not know 
 he is a clergyman until she is told. The Church 
 was merely a profession for most of those who 
 entered it. " Did Henry's income depend solely 
 on his living," says General Tilney, "he would 
 not be well provided for. Perhaps it may seem 
 odd, that with only two younger children, I should 
 think any profession necessary to him; and cer- 
 tainly there are moments when we could all wish 
 him disengaged from every tie of business." 
 The most conscientious clergyman in the Austen 
 Comedy is Edmund Bertram, who really seems 
 to have wished to do his duty, and thereby 
 damaged his chance of marrying Mary Crawford. 
 The scanty reference to the observances of 
 religion in the novels bears on the worldly life of 
 the age, as we know it from those who were of 
 it and saw it at its centre of activity, London 
 society. Doctor Warner, George Selwyn's chap- 
 lain, who attracted large congregations by his 
 eloquent preaching, and who was an avowed 
 sceptic away from church, who toadied the rich 
 and noble, and told stories that delighted the 
 Duke of Queensberry, was no rare type of the 
 
 191 
 
w 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 clergy of his time, and we may be pretty certain 
 that Jane Austen's Mr. Collins (who was not at 
 all likely to tell an improper story himself) would 
 have found it very difficult to believe that so 
 exalted a personage as " Old Q." was unfit for 
 the society of clergymen. 
 
 Jane frankly admitted that she knew too little 
 of literature, philosophy, and science, to allow 
 her adequately to draw the character of a scholarly 
 and serious parson. " The comic side of the 
 character I might be equal to, but not the good, 
 the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's con- 
 versation must at times be on subjects of science 
 and philosophy of which I know nothing, or at 
 least occasionally abundant in quotations and 
 allusions which a woman who, like me, knows 
 only her own mother tongue, and has read little 
 in that, would be totally without the power of 
 giving." According to her brother and her 
 nephew, Jane was better educated than she here 
 makes out, knowing French, and a good deal of 
 Italian. Whether we believe her or not about 
 her literary and linguistic limitations, we can have 
 small doubt that she knew very little indeed about 
 science and philosophy, in spite of being so much 
 
 192 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 of a philosopher. In those days, when Cuvier 
 was bringing his genius in palaeontology to bear 
 on the recovery of lost types, and preparing a 
 way for Darwin, whose own grandfather was 
 bravely aiding in the clearance of paths in 
 hitherto trackless jungles of prejudice and obscur- 
 antism, science was scarcely regarded as a decent 
 subject of conversation before ladies in country 
 drawing-rooms, and it never obtrudes itself at 
 Hartfield or at Mansfield Park. 
 
 If we may read through every word of Jane's 
 novels without discovering any expression of dog- 
 matic belief, we may equally find no direct 
 evidence, unless in that one story of Elinor and 
 Willoughby, of acceptance of the chilly Deism 
 which had eaten so deeply into the intellects both 
 of laymen and clergy. The unrest, both moral 
 and physical, which had spread from Paris, from 
 Holland, and from Switzerland over the whole 
 of Western Europe at that time, finds little 
 place for its fidgeting in the families to whom we 
 are here introduced. People, with the rare excep- 
 tions of a Wickham or a Willoughby, are born, 
 live, and die, in peace with the world and in 
 general harmony with their environments. 
 
 N 193 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Admirable as Jane Austen's pictures of country 
 life in house and garden are, they are not to be 
 accepted as literal transcripts. She was, before 
 all else, an artist, and the more an artist is devoted 
 to finicking reproduction of exact details the 
 further is he removed from art. Almost every 
 author, if he writes with sincerity, must draw his 
 own moral portrait in his best work. In a literal 
 sense there is no reason to suppose that novelists 
 often give us studies of themselves in any degree 
 comparable with the self-portraits of Rembrandt, 
 Velasquez, Madame Vigee le Brun or the moderns 
 in the Uffizi Gallery. Sometimes, of course, as in 
 Villette and Delphine, an author reports episodes 
 in his life almost as they happened, and it is 
 certain, save in the rarest cases, that something 
 of an author's mental processes is reproduced in 
 all his creatures, " bad " as well as " good," 
 though he is more likely to show his own tempera- 
 ment and experience in a prominent and sympa- 
 thetic character than in any other. Very few 
 writers follow the example of Milton, of whom 
 Coleridge declared "his Satan, his Adam, his 
 ^ Raphael, almost all his Eve, are all John Milton." 
 The common mistake, a mistake so obvious that 
 
 194 
 
THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 we may wonder at its continuance, is such a close 
 identification of the author with any one of his 
 creations. Thus, because "Vivian Grey is 
 DisraeH himself," Disraeli is to be credited with 
 the strange experiences of that uneasy hero 
 among foreign politicians and card-sharpers; and 
 because *' Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte," Char- 
 lotte Bronte must at least have wished to unite 
 herself with a wild man whose wife had gone 
 mad. There were no doubt readers of Goethe's 
 Faust who, ignoring the legend, thought the 
 author had bargained with Mephisto and, it "goes 
 without saying " (Marianne Dashwood is not with- 
 in hearing), that " Hamlet is Shakespeare." Such 
 arbitrary reasoning may account for the general 
 confusion of Frankenstein with the creature that 
 he made. 
 
 Among the widest traps, indeed, for those who 
 love to see a roman a clef in every novel, is this 
 identification of the author with one or other of 
 his characters. Some people have convinced 
 themselves that Cassandra and Jane Austen were 
 the originals of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. 
 Such an idea could only be held by those who 
 
 had not seen Jane's letters. Marianne, senti- 
 N2 195 
 
 /' 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 mental, romantic, disagreeable in a quite serious 
 way, and usually inattentive "to the forms of 
 general civility," could not be Jane, and as cer- 
 tainly not Cassandra as we know her, and while 
 Elinor, the patient, long-suffering girl, might in 
 some ways represent either of the Austen sisters, 
 she is very far from being a portrait. 
 
 Yet if neither Elinor Dashwood nor Marianne 
 is to be described as a likeness of Jane, the elder 
 sister in her philosophical submission to what she 
 believed to be the loss of her lover, and the 
 younger in her literary tastes and her impatience 
 with people who talk without thinking may fairly 
 be regarded as in part reflecting the author's 
 personality. None of her heroines is Jane, but 
 there is much of her also in Elizabeth Bennet 
 and Emma Woodhouse, and a good deal in Anne 
 Elliot, though she admitted that Anne was too 
 nearly perfect to be altogether after her heart. 
 The simple little souls of Fanny Price and 
 Catherine Morland, so dependent on the direct 
 assistance of others in the formation of their feel- 
 ings, are in very small degree expressions of the 
 author's temperament. We may, I think, regard 
 Emma Woodhouse as the nearest approach to a 
 
 196 
 
u 
 
 THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST 
 
 portrait of the artist who painted her, but 
 ** nearest " is a relative superlative. Many people 
 do not care for Emma. A strong expression of 
 recent disapproval was quoted a few pages back. 
 Jane Austen anticipated objections. " I am 
 going," she said, when she was beginning the 
 book, " to take a heroine whom no one but myself 
 will much like." 
 
 Whether or not we may see in Emma a good 
 deal of Jane herself, we may fairly be certain that 
 none of her characters is an intentional copy of 
 any one in the circle of her friends and acquaint- 
 ances. She herself declared her opinion, which 
 tallies with all that we know of her, that the 
 introduction of living people as actors in a work 
 of imagination is a breach of good manners, and 
 that, propriety apart, she was too proud of her 
 characters to admit that they were " only Mrs. A. 
 or Colonel B." How far she made use of indi- 
 viduals in the composition of such strongly- 
 marked figures as Mrs. Elton, Mr. Collins and' 
 Sir Walter Elliot, we cannot, of course, know. 
 The point, for what it is worth, could have been 
 better elucidated if Miss Austen's circle had been 
 less far removed from the world wherein the 
 
 197 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Wraxalls, the Gronows and the Grevilles listen 
 and watch. ,We know that, whatever the degree 
 of simiHtude, DisraeU's Rigby offers a recogniz- 
 able likeness to Croker, Dickens's Boythorn to 
 Landor, Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston to Brax- 
 field. Accepting Jane Austen's denial of the 
 deliberate introduction of real persons in her 
 novels, we cannot tell how many of her Hamp- 
 shire acquaintances served intellectually for her 
 pictures of country society as the maidens of 
 Crotona served physically for the picture of 
 Helen by Zeuxis. We may be certain that, all 
 unconsciously, they gave her of their best, each 
 according to his means. 
 
 198 
 
VI 
 PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
VI 
 
 PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 The novelist and her characters — Her sense of their 
 reality — Accessories rarely described — Her ideas on 
 dress — Her own millinery and gowns — Thin clothes 
 and consumption — Domestic economy — Jane as house- 
 keeper — '* A very clever essay " — Mr. Collins at Long- 
 bourn — The gipsies at Highbury — Topography of 
 Jane Austen — Hampshire — Lyme Regis — Godmersham 
 — Bath — London. 
 
 On an earlier page a contrast between Balzac and 
 Jane Austen has been suggested. One character- 
 istic they had in common was the sense of the 
 reality of their own creations. Madame de Sur- 
 ville, the sister of Balzac, has recorded how, when 
 the affairs of the family were being discussed, he 
 would say, "Ah, yes, but do you know to whom 
 Felix de Vandenesse is engaged? One of the 
 Grandville girls. It is an excellent marriage for 
 him." Further than this an author's sense of the 
 actuality of his own imaginings could hardly go, 
 unless, indeed, like one modern author — if the 
 
 20I 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 story is true, as it probably is not — he were io 
 invite the figments of his brain to lunch ! 
 
 Jane Austen was not quite so much obsessed by 
 her inventions, though she spoke of the very 
 novels themselves as personal entities. Pride and 
 Prejudice was "my own darling child," and of 
 Sense and Sensibiliiy she writes, when it is pass- 
 ing through the press : " No, indeed, I am never 
 too busy to think of S. and S. I can no more 
 forget it than a mother can forget her sucking 
 child; and I am much obliged to you for your 
 inquiries." As for the characters, she loved to 
 talk of them as living people, and was so fond of 
 Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, that, as she wrote 
 to Cassandra, she did not know how she should be 
 " able to tolerate " those who did not like her. 
 
 She used to tell her nieces what happened to her 
 imaginary people after the novels were ended, 
 how Mary Bennet married her uncle's clerk, or her 
 sister Kitty a clergyman, and how Mrs. Robert 
 Ferrars's sister " never caught the doctor." One 
 of the most delightful of her letters, as evidence 
 of her happiness in her work, and of her half- 
 serious consciousness of the reality of her crea- 
 tions, was written after a round of London picture 
 
 202 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 galleries. The portraits she looked for were not 
 those of Knights, or Austens, or Leighs, but of 
 beautiful women out of her own novels. They 
 might be labelled Lady this or Mrs. that, but she 
 should recognize them if they were portraits of 
 her darling Elizabeth or her dearest Anne. She 
 was disappointed. It is true that at the Gallery 
 in Spring Gardens she found " a small portrait of 
 Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her," and, more- 
 over, " she is dressed in a white gown, with green 
 ornaments, which convinces me of what I had 
 always supposed, that green was a favourite colour 
 with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow." 
 For it was "Mrs. D." — the beloved Elizabeth 
 Darcy {nee Bennet), whose face her creator and 
 devoted admirer looked forward to seeing on some 
 fashionable portrait-painter's canvas. Alas ! at 
 none of the shows was the desired picture to be 
 found. " I can only imagine," writes the dis- 
 appointed "friend," soothing her regrets with a 
 reflection natural to her mind, "that Mr. D. prizes 
 any picture of her too much to like it should be 
 exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he 
 would have that sort of feeling — that mixture of 
 love, pride, and delicacy." 
 
 203 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Thus we can see that Jane knew exactly what 
 her heroines were like, even if in their case, as in 
 that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left 
 to fill in details of colour and feature very much 
 as he chooses. She was far more particular in 
 describing the personal appearance of real people, 
 and in her letters the handsome and the ugly are 
 as clearly differentiated as the lively and the dull. 
 " I never saw so plain a family *' — she declares 
 after calling on some people named Fagg — " five 
 sisters so very plain ! They are as plain as the 
 Foresters, or the Franfraddops, or the Seagraves, 
 or the Rivers, excluding Sophy. Miss Sally Fagg 
 has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good 
 looks of the family." Sometimes she attributed 
 the blame for ill-looks to a definite part of the 
 genealogical tree. " I wish she was not so very 
 Palmery," she says of one of her nieces, "but it 
 seems stronger than ever. I never knew a wife's 
 family features have such undue influence." The 
 Mrs. Palmer of Sense and Sensibility was not 
 of that family. She was as pretty as she was 
 foolish. 
 
 Even if it be true that Jane Austen only painted 
 the life which she found immediately around her, 
 
 204 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 and that she would almost as soon have attempted 
 to depict the interior of a Thibetan lamassary as 
 of an English country-house of the kind Disraeli 
 loved to paint, yet do her characters "typify 
 nothing? " If Mrs. Elton, and Sir John Middle- 
 ton, and Mary Musgrove are not types, then I do 
 not see why Sir Charles Grandison, or Mrs. ^ 
 Proudie, or Mr. TuUiver should be regarded as 
 types. Perhaps they should not, but then, what 
 are types? Most of Jane Austen's people may be 
 common; there may be, in the flesh, a hundred 
 Lady Russells for one Lady Camper, and five 
 hundred John Willoughbys for one Willoughby 
 Patterne. That is only to say that humanity is 
 richer in one type than in another. 
 
 Jane was a realist, though Realism, in the sense 
 in which we apply the term in the criticism of ^ 
 living writers, has little place in her novels. She 
 assumes that her readers — the men and women of 
 her own age — are neither blind nor unaccustomed 
 to the ordinary resources of contemporary civiliza- 
 tion. When her characters dine, they may usually, 
 for all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a common 
 dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after 
 the manner of the nomads of the Asiatic Steppes^ 
 
 205 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 they may drink out of gourds like the Bushmen, 
 while, after the custom of the Romans, they recline 
 on raised couches in the attitude of Madame 
 Recamier. We know that they sat round solid 
 mahogany or oaken tables, covered with damask 
 cloths during the meat and pudding service, that 
 the silver was polished, and the glass bright, even 
 though the supply of plates was perhaps not 
 always equal to the number of courses; we have 
 little doubt as to the kind of chairs whereon the 
 diners sat, and we may wish we had more of them 
 in our own dining-rooms. 
 
 As to the costumes of the men and women who 
 sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress them 
 as we like, and there is little doubt that many a 
 modern reader has mentally pictured Darcy wear- 
 ing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, Charles Mus- 
 grove in a golfing-cap and loose knickerbockers, 
 and Mr. Collins or Mr. Elton in a stiff "round- 
 about" collar of the kind usually worn by the 
 Anglican clergy of to-day. For the ladies, the 
 whirligig of time has brought back the modes of 
 a century ago. In spite of the cry for the equality 
 of the sexes, there are, as the Lord Chancellor and 
 other eminent authorities have laid down, marked 
 
 206 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 distinctions between the ways of women and of 
 men. One of such distinctions may be found in 
 the fact that the fashions of feminine dress move 
 in a (very irregular and therefore theoretically 
 impossible) circle, while those of masculine dress 
 rarely cross the same point twice. ,Thus while, 
 during the last few years, we have seen our sisters 
 and aunts affecting " modes " that were in vogue 
 in the periods of the Renaissance, the Directory, 
 and the Empire, we have never seen our brothers 
 and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the 
 courtiers either of Frangois premier or of the First 
 Consul. A woman need not despair of wearing, 
 without being followed by a crowd, almost any 
 costume of any period of woman's history. A man 
 need not look for the day when he may walk in the 
 parks in the garb of Raleigh or of Burke without 
 attracting more attention than will be agreeable 
 to the modesty of any one but an actor-manager 
 or the European agent of some American world- 
 industry. The Misses Bertram, of Mansfield 
 Park, might go shopping in Regent Street to-day 
 without any one remarking that their dress, or their 
 coiffure, was seriously out of date. But we only 
 know how they dressed because we know the date 
 
 207 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 of their birth, not because the author of a bit of 
 their life-history has told us. 
 
 Who that has ever read Weir of H ermiston can 
 forget the description of the heroine as she first 
 appeared to Archie in the kirk? It was in the 
 very year (1814) in which Fanny Price's story was 
 related, and of Mary Crawford, if not of Fanny, 
 a tale of town finery as bright as that of Kirstie 
 might have been told. We know how alluring 
 Kirstie looked to Archie in her " frock of straw- 
 coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom 
 and short at the ankle," and " drawn up so as to 
 mould the contour of both breasts, and in the 
 nook between . . . surely in a very enviable 
 position, trembled the nosegay of primroses." Of 
 some such charming pictures we get at least the 
 preliminary sketches in Jane Austen's letters, but 
 the finished works are never shown in the novels, 
 and we may dress the pretty heroines to our own 
 fancy so long as we keep to the style of their 
 period, or, if our imaginations are feeble and our 
 knowledge of Regency costume deficient, Mr. 
 Brock will do the work for us in the more delight- 
 ful of his coloured drawings, or Mr. Hugh Thom- 
 son in his lively illustrations in pen and ink* 
 
 208 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 This point — that the material factors of man- 
 ners and habits are little noted by Jane Austen — 
 will strike many readers, at first sight, as of quite 
 trivial importance. But it is largely the reason 
 why her novels have so modern an external air 
 compared with those, let us say, of Scott, or even 
 of Balzac, who only began to write when her short 
 career was ending. If Jane Austen had described 
 the conditions of life at Hartfield or Kellynch 
 with the particularity with which Balzac describes 
 the Grandets' house at Saumur, and the Guenics* 
 at Guerande, or had given us such full accounts 
 of the villagers on the estate of the Bertrams of 
 Mansfield Park as Scott gave us of the smugglers 
 and gipsies on the lands of the Bertrams of 
 Ellangowan, we should see more clearly the 
 changes that a hundred years have wrought in 
 the habits of the English country. 
 
 Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to the 
 cut and colour of her own clothing, however little 
 she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. But 
 when we read of " Jane Austen frocks " for brides- 
 maids in the accounts of modern weddings, they 
 are copied from the illustrations of Mr. Thomson 
 or Mr. Brock, or else are so-called merely because 
 o 209 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 they are of the period of her novels, which is much 
 the same thing. With the general subject of dress 
 she deals as a novelist, we may almost say once 
 for all, in a single paragraph of N orthanger 
 Abbey. The occasion was the dance at Bath 
 which was to prove so momentous an event in 
 Catherine's life. 
 
 "What gown and what head-dress she should 
 wear on the occasion became her chief concern. 
 She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all times 
 a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude 
 about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine 
 knew all this very well; her great-aunt had read 
 her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas 
 before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on 
 Wednesday night debating between her spotted 
 and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the 
 shortness of the time prevented her buying a new 
 one for the evening. This would have been an 
 error in judgment, great though not uncommon, 
 from which one of the other sex rather than her 
 own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might 
 have warned her; for man only can be aware of 
 the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It 
 would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies 
 could they be made to understand how little the 
 heart of man is affected by what is costly or new 
 in their attire ; how little it is biassed by the texture 
 
 2IO 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar 
 tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the 
 mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own 
 satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the 
 more, no woman will like her the better, for it. 
 Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, 
 and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will 
 be most endearing to the latter." 
 
 If we regard these as the author's considered 
 opinions, expressed with a characteristic touch of 
 malice, we shall probably agree that she is, on the 
 whole, right. Were women to make a note, every 
 time a man describes one of them as *'well 
 dressed," of what the subject of the remark was 
 wearing, they would, I believe, find an overwhelm- 
 ing preponderance of votes in favour of well- 
 fitting, plain, if not actually " tailor-made " 
 costumes for the daytime, and simple though not 
 conventual frocks for the evening, as compared 
 with all the highly decorated *' confections," 
 covered with what one may call "applied art," 
 whereon women spend so large a proportion of 
 their allowances. 
 
 The letters to Cassandra make up to some 
 extent for the deficiencies of the novels in a 
 02 211 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 matter so attractive to the author's admirers 
 among her own sex, though the particulars given 
 are almost always incomplete ; that is to say, they 
 depend on information which Cassandra pos- 
 sessed, but which is denied to us. Such a case is 
 presented when we read : " Elizabeth has given 
 me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a 
 pretty style of hat too. It is something like 
 Eliza's, only, instead of being all straw, half of it 
 is narrow purple ribbon. I flatter myself, how- 
 ever, that you can understand very little of it from 
 this description. Heaven forbid that I should 
 ever offer such encouragement to explanations as 
 to give a clear one on any occasion myself ! But 
 I must write no more of this." The tantalizing 
 thing is that while we know that this pretty hat 
 was something like Eliza's, we have no idea what 
 Eliza's was like, beyond the untrimmed fact that 
 it was " all straw." 
 
 Then Cassandra is told by Jane, " I believe I 
 shall make my new gown like my robe, but the 
 back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and 
 will seven yards enable me to copy it in that 
 respect ? " Alas ! that we cannot discover how the 
 robe was made, except that " the back was all in a 
 
 212 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 piece with the tail." Often, of course, the news 
 about dress is mixed up with other news, as when 
 Jane writes :" At Nackington . . . Miss Fletcher 
 and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of 
 the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is 
 pretty enough, though it does not become her com- 
 plexion. . . ." Once Jane's account of her own 
 necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed 
 by a sentence which not only contains evidence of 
 her close acquaintance with Fielding's greatest 
 novel, but also reminds us of Mr. Tom Lefroy. 
 " You say nothing of the silk stockings ; I flatter 
 myself, therefore, that Charles has not purchased 
 any, as I cannot very well afford to pay for them ; 
 all my money is spent in buying white gloves and 
 pink persian. . . . After I had written the above, 
 we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his 
 cousin George. The latter is really very well- 
 behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one 
 fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove — 
 it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. 
 He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and 
 therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I 
 imagine, which he did when he was wounded." 
 Many of her references to dress are of the 
 
 213 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 partly serious, partly humorous kind which came 
 naturally from her pen. " Flowers are very much 
 worn," she writes from Bath in the summer of 
 1799, " and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth 
 has a bunch of strawberries and I have seen 
 grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. There are like- 
 wise almonds and raisins, French plums, and 
 tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen 
 any of them in hats." She had, in the Southamp- 
 ton days, a spotted muslin which she meant to 
 wear out, in spite of its durability. "You will 
 exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feeble- 
 ness, which, with a little care, may come to some- 
 thing." Then she has some "bombazins" with 
 trains, which " I cannot reconcile myself to giving 
 up as morning gowns; they are so very sweet by 
 candlelight. I would rather sacrifice my blue one 
 ... in short I do not know and I do not care." 
 
 A peep into the economy of Steventon parson- 
 age is now and again offered. In 1796, "We are 
 very busy making Edward's shirts, and I am 
 proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the 
 party. They say that there are a prodigious 
 number of birds hereabouts this year, so that 
 
 perhaps / may kill a few." 
 
 214 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Another bit of work that the want of the riches 
 of Kent forced upon the poorer folks of Hamp- 
 shire is shown to us when Jane writes : " I bought 
 some Japan ink and next week shall begin my 
 operations on my hat, on which you know my 
 principal hopes of happiness depend." In this 
 case there is no difficulty of interpretation. Now- 
 a-days there are simple " dips " wherewith young 
 ladies whose allowances are small or who in any 
 case wish to make the most of their money can 
 change old straw hats into new, soiled white into 
 black, or green, or heliotrope. It was not so a 
 century ago, and when Jane wanted to turn her 
 old white straw hat into a new black one, she must 
 needs Japan it. 
 
 ** I have read the ' Corsair,' mended my petti- 
 coat, and have nothing else to do," she writes from 
 London in 1814, and on another day about the 
 same time she informs her sister : " I have de- 
 termined to trim my lilac sarsenet with black 
 satin ribbon, just as my China crape is, six- 
 penny width at the bottom, threepenny or four- 
 penny at top." An even closer glimpse of Jane 
 in her home is afforded by a letter in which she 
 
 says — 
 
 215 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 " I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I 
 hope you do not wear yours too often. I have 
 made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings 
 since I came home, and they save me a world of 
 torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives 
 me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for 
 my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, 
 and my short hair curls well enough to want no 
 papering." 
 
 Such references may remind us of Henry Til- 
 ney's astonishment that Catherine did not keep a 
 journal of her doings. *' How are your absent 
 cousins to understand the tenor of your life . . . ? 
 How are your various dresses to be remembered, 
 and the particular state of your complexion and 
 curl of your hair to be described, in all their 
 diversities, without having constant recourse to a 
 journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant 
 of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me." 
 
 Jane Austen was not reduced, as was her own 
 Mrs. Hurst, to playing with her bracelets and rings 
 when there were no games or dances in progress. 
 On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennet, she 
 took up some needlework, and amused herself by 
 listening to the general conversation, and entering 
 into it when opportunity offered. Like everything 
 
 216 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 done by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is 
 admirable, and her embroidery would be treasured 
 by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no 
 such charming associations attached to it. There 
 is a musUn scarf adorned by her needle which, to 
 her true lovers, might seem a more precious relic 
 than even her mahogany desk itself. 
 
 One little " interior " sketched by Jane, after a 
 visit to a young wife who had just been blessed 
 with a baby, is so illustrative of her own neat 
 habits, and her ideas of the material needs of 
 happiness, that, intimate as it is, it merits quota- 
 tion : " Mary does not manage matters in such a 
 way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is 
 not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no 
 dressing-gown to sit up in ; her curtains are all too 
 thin, and things are not in that comfort and style 
 about her which are necessary to make such a 
 situation an enviable one." 
 
 We have seen on an earlier page that Jane 
 Austen provided warm garments for the village 
 poor. On one occasion we know where she bought 
 her flannel. In an entry (made at Basingstoke) 
 which might form the text for a dissertation on 
 prejudice and economy, she notes that : " I gave 
 
 217 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 2s. ^d. 2l yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is 
 not very good, but it is so disgraceful and con- 
 temptible an article in itself that its being com- 
 paratively good or bad is of little importance." 
 Why this contempt for what, in spite of all 
 patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise, is 
 still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless 
 and necessary of materials ? Marianne Dashwood 
 included the wearing of a flannel waistcoat by 
 Colonel Brandon among the several defects which 
 made it impossible that she should ever be his 
 wife, and when, for reasons not all unconnected 
 with the " happy ending " of the novel, she agreed 
 at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that 
 this gallant officer had " sought the constitutional 
 safeguard " of the much-despised garment. To 
 Jane Austen and Marianne Dashwood flannel, it 
 seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as 
 celluloid collars and cuffs are to most people of 
 our own day. 
 
 The ravages of consumption, as the Baron de 
 
 Frenilly reflects in his recently published memoirs, 
 
 would have been far less terrible in those times if 
 
 women had been less hostile to warm dresses and 
 
 ^annel petticoats. Fresh air and thick boots were 
 
 .218 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 also to seek. The women could not walk ten 
 yards on a wet day without the water coming 
 through the thin soles of their dainty little shoes. 
 Miss Bates was quite exceptional in wearing shoes 
 with reasonable soles. 
 
 One more sumptuary extract must be quoted; 
 it comes from a letter from London in 1814 : " My 
 poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has 
 been promised to be done several times. What 
 wicked people dyers are. They begin with dip- 
 ping their own souls in scarlet sin." The last 
 sentence brings its writer for the moment very 
 near to modern fiction, a considerable proportion 
 of which is mainly occupied with the vivid repre- 
 sentation of the process in question as applied to 
 the world in general. 
 
 After clothes, the table. Out of the works of 
 some novelists you might draw up menus, or at 
 least bills-of-fare, for a month. People who dwell 
 in a bracing air, and take a great deal of exercise, 
 could live very comfortably on a small selection 
 from the dishes served up in the novels of 
 Dickens, and those who like an even more simple 
 cuisine could rely quite confidently on the meals 
 described by Dumas pere. There is plenty of 
 
 219 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 substantial fare, of course, in the Waverley novels, 
 and as for the works of Harrison Ainsworth, they 
 groan under the sirloins and haunches that were 
 provided in those imaginary ages when in Merry 
 England the spits were always turning in every 
 castle and hall. The people of Jane Austen ate 
 quite as much as was good for them. They had 
 breakfast, lunch — or noonshine — dinner, supper, 
 and tea, and everybody — always excepting Mr. 
 Woodhouse and those whose spirits were tem- 
 porarily depressed — came with an appetite to 
 every meal, for all we know of the matter. No 
 dinner is particularly described, but those who 
 want to know what people ate and drank at the 
 end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify 
 their appetite from the references which inevitably 
 occur. Except that there were not quite so many 
 dishes on the table at once the meals differed little 
 from that to which Swift introduces us in his 
 dialogue betw^een the company at Lady Smart's 
 table. The Smarts, by the way, dined at three, 
 which in Jane Austen's time was still about the 
 hour for the small country-houses, though in the 
 big houses it was five, marking the gradual 
 advance from the ten o'clock in the morning of the 
 
 220 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 twelfth century to the eight o'clock in the evening 
 or later of the twentieth. 
 
 Plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, 
 beef and veal, chickens, game in season, sweet- 
 breads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet pud- 
 dings, apple-tarts, jellies and custards were the 
 ordinary food of the well-to-do. Port and Bur- 
 gundy were their principal drinks, but probably the 
 port was not usually such as is chiefly sold now-a- 
 days. It was less fortified, nearer to the natural 
 wine, which is itself more like a Burgundy than 
 the port of modern commerce. Wine of any sort 
 is scarcely mentioned in Jane Austen's works. One 
 of the few exceptions I can recall is that — of 
 unnamed species — offered to Mrs. and Miss Bates 
 at the Woodhouses', which the host advised them 
 to mix freely with water, advice they successfully 
 managed to avoid taking, thanks to the good 
 offices of Emma. Jane Austen herself seems to 
 have been fond of wine. In her thirty-eighth year 
 she writes : " As I must leave off being young, I 
 find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon, 
 for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can 
 drink as much wine as I like." On a much earlier 
 occasion, when she was herself under chaperon- 
 
 221 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 age, she had written : " I believe I drank too much 
 wine last night at Hurstbourne. I know not how 
 else to account for the shaking of my hands to- 
 day. You will kindly make allowance therefore 
 for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it 
 to this venial error." With our full knowledge of 
 Jane's habit of playful exaggeration we may be 
 certain that her " too much " was nothing to shake 
 our heads over, and that the " error " was indeed 
 " venial." 
 
 Jane gives us sufficient evidence of the sim- 
 plicity with which the Austens' own table was 
 furnished. From Steventon parsonage, in 1798, 
 she thus refers to one of the doctor's professional 
 visits to her mother. " Mr. Lyford was here yes- 
 terday; he came while we were at dinner, and 
 partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not 
 ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for 
 we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pud- 
 ding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to 
 throw out a rash, but she will do neither." 
 
 Years later, from Chawton, she writes that : 
 " Captain Foote dined with us on Friday, and I 
 fear will not soon venture again, for the strength 
 of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, under- 
 done even for James." 
 
 222 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Jane herself did the housekeeping when her 
 mother was indisposed and Cassandra away, and 
 she prided herself on her success, though she 
 detested the necessity of great economy. Her 
 ideas on the eternal servant question are not, we 
 may be sure, quite faithfully expressed when she 
 writes : " My mother looks forward with as much 
 certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids ; 
 my father is the only one not in the secret. We 
 plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy 
 housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who 
 is to undertake the double office of husband to the 
 former, and sweetheart to the latter. No children, 
 of course, to be allowed on either side." The 
 simple life of the parsonage is more accurately 
 reflected in a comparison between the house of the 
 Austens and that of the Knights at Godmersham. 
 " We dine now at half-past three, and have done 
 dinner, I suppose, before you begin. We drink 
 tea at half-past six. I am afraid you will despise 
 us. My father reads Cowper to us in the morning, 
 to which I listen when I can. How do you spend 
 your evenings.^ I guess that Elizabeth works, 
 that you read to her, and that Edward goes to 
 sleep." Jane declares that she " always takes care 
 to provide such things as please (her) own 
 
 223 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 appetite," which she considers "the chief merit 
 in housekeeping." Ragout of veal and haricot 
 mutton seem to have been specially attractive to 
 her. 
 
 Picnics we hear of — one in particular, of course, 
 at Box Hill — and the Middletons were always 
 getting them up. Cold pies and cold chickens, 
 and no doubt cold punch, were provided in plenty 
 on those happy occasions. 
 
 French cookery was not so much appreciated 
 in England in those days as it had been twenty or 
 thirty years earlier, before the Revolution. ,The 
 bread of our then hostile neighbours across the 
 Channel was, however, not infrequently copied in 
 the bakehouse, as was the Boulanger dance in the 
 ball-room. Mrs. Morland reproached Catherine 
 for talking so much at breakfast about the French 
 bread at Northanger, but the poor little girl who 
 had been so shamefully treated by General Tilney, 
 and sadly missed the attentions of his younger 
 son, replied that she did not care about the 
 bread, and it was all the same to her what she 
 ate. Mrs. Morland could only attribute the 
 girl's obvious unhappiness to the contrast afforded 
 by their humble parsonage to the glories of 
 
 224 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 the Tilney mansion. " There is a very clever 
 essay in one of the books up-stairs, upon much 
 such a subject," says this anxious mother, '* about 
 young girls that have been spoilt for home by 
 great acquaintance — The Mirror, I think. I will 
 look it out for you some day or other, because I 
 am sure it will do you good." Catherine tried to 
 be cheerful, but presently relapsed into languor 
 and weariness ; and Mrs. Morland went off to seek 
 for the "very clever essay." As Henry Tilney 
 arrived before she returned with it, its efficacy as 
 a prophylactic for listlessness and discontent was 
 never put to the test. I will take the risk of induc- 
 ing the " listlessness and discontent " of the 
 present reader by devoting a page to this moral 
 souvenir of Jane Austen's infancy and of her own 
 literary diversions. 
 
 The "very clever essay" is dated March 6, 
 1779, and is in the form of a letter from John 
 Homespun, a "plain country gentleman, with a 
 small fortune and a large family," two of whose 
 daughters had been allowed — his opposition hav- 
 ing been overcome — to spend the Christmas holi- 
 days with a "great lady" whom they had met at 
 the house of a relation. They went with sparkling 
 p 225 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 eyes and rosy cheeks, they came back with 
 " cheeks as white as a curd, and eyes as dead as 
 the beads in the face of a baby." Their father 
 sees no reason to wonder at the change when he 
 hears the girls, with new-found affectations of 
 speech and manner, describe the habits of their 
 new friends. 
 
 " Instead of rising at seven, breakfasting at 
 nine, dining at three, supping at eight, and getting 
 to bed by ten, as was their custom at home, my 
 girls lay till twelve, breakfasted at one, dined at 
 six, supped at eleven, and were never in bed till 
 three in the morning. Their shapes had under- 
 gone as much alteration as their faces. From 
 their bosoms (necks they called them), which 
 were squeezed up to their throats, their waists 
 tapered down to a very extraordinary smallness; 
 they resembled the upper half of an hour-glass. 
 At this, also, I marvelled; but it was the only 
 
 shape worn at . Nor is their behaviour less 
 
 changed than their garb. Instead of joining in 
 the good-humoured cheerfulness we used to have 
 among us before, my two fine young ladies check 
 every approach to mirth, by calling it vulgar. One 
 of them chid their brother the other day for laugh- 
 ing, and told him it was monstrously ill-bred. . . . 
 Would you believe it, sir, my daughter Elizabeth 
 (since her visit she is offended if we call her 
 
 226 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Betty) said it was fanatical to find fault with card- 
 playing on Sunday; and her sister Sophia gravely 
 asked my son-in-law, the clergyman, if he had not 
 some doubts of the soul's immortality ? " 
 
 Mr. Homespun declares that the moral plague 
 among the worldly rich should be dealt with by 
 Government "as much as the distemper among 
 the horned cattle!^ 
 
 Happily Catherine Morland had not caught this 
 particular disease of all — it was only the plague 
 of love that troubled her innocent soul, and the 
 medicine was provided without the interference of 
 a Government inspector. 
 
 From such a deliberate departure from the 
 straight path I come back to the subject of the 
 economy of accessories in Jane Austen's novels. 
 iWhen the French bread at Northanger led me 
 astray, I was writing about domestic economy, 
 costumes and cookery. Why should the dresses 
 be described or the dishes be named. ^ We are 
 concerned with the sayings and doings of squires 
 and parsons and their wives and daughters, not 
 with the achievements of cooks and milliners. 
 This would be quite a fair criticism, but it is none 
 P2 227 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 the less certain that an author who tells you what 
 people eat and drink and wear does enable you to 
 realize more fully the contrast between the present 
 and the period with which the novel is concerned. 
 That is our business, however, not his. He is an 
 artist, not an historian. There is a common prac- 
 tice on the stage of " furbishing up " old plays by 
 cutting out obsolete references and introducing 
 topical touches. The comedies of Robertson may 
 be *' freshened " considerably to meet the taste of 
 thoughtless play-goers, by giving Captain Haw- 
 trey a motor-car and Jack Poyntz a magazine- 
 rifle. The " moral " of these present pages is 
 merely this, that with a few such slight changes 
 as making post-chaise read motor and coach read 
 train, and retarding the dinner from three or five 
 to eight or half-past, cutting out the occasional 
 "elegants," and otherwise changing a word here 
 and there in the dialogue, long scenes from 
 any one of Jane Austen's novels could be acted 
 without material alteration, in the costume of to- 
 day, with no serious offence to the unities. The 
 absence of physical detail in her narrative is no 
 artistic defect. Mr. Collins's first evening at Long- 
 bourn, for instance, is so vividly represented that 
 
 228 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 we gain the impression of having been in the room, 
 though of its size and shape, and furniture, or of 
 the appearance and costume of its occupants, we 
 are told Httle or nothing — 
 
 " Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully an- 
 swered. His cousin was as absurd as he had 
 hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest 
 enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the 
 most resolute composure of countenance, and 
 except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, 
 requiring no partner in his pleasure. 
 
 " By tea-time, however, the dose had been 
 enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad to take his 
 guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea 
 was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the 
 ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book 
 was produced; but on beholding it (for every- 
 thing announced it to be from a circulating 
 library), he started back, and begging pardon, 
 protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared 
 at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were 
 produced, and after some deliberation he chose 
 Fordyce's Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened 
 the volume, and before he had, with very mono- 
 tonous solemnity, read three pages she interrupted 
 him with — 
 
 Do you know, mamma, that my Uncle Phillips 
 talks of turning away Richard; and if he does. 
 Colonel Forster will hire him? My aunt told me 
 
 229 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 so herself on ^Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton 
 to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when 
 Mr. Denny comes back from town.' 
 
 " Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold 
 her tongue; but Mr. Collins, much offended, laid 
 aside his book, and said — 
 
 " ' I have often observed how little young ladies 
 are interested by books of a serious stamp, though 
 written solely for their benefit. It amazes me, I 
 confess; for certainly, there can be nothing so 
 advantageous to them as instruction. But I will 
 no longer importune my young cousin.' 
 
 " Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself 
 as his antagonist at backgammon. Mr. Bennet 
 accepted the challenge, observing that he acted 
 very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling 
 amusements." 
 
 The mephistophelian delight of the father in 
 the unconscious absurdity of his sententious guest, 
 the rudeness of the younger daughters, and the 
 attempts of the elder girls to enforce the observ- 
 ance of ordinary good manners, could not well be 
 realized with finer effect, and no description of 
 accessories would heighten it. 
 
 It is not only material accessories and neces- 
 saries, furniture, dress, and so on that are slighted 
 by Jane Austen. Incidents that are of positive 
 
 230 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 value to her plan are not allowed to linger a 
 moment after they have served the turn. The 
 adventure of Harriet Smith (in Emma) with the 
 gipsies, ending in her rescue by Frank Churchill, 
 fills just half a page. It would have filled a chap- 
 ter in a novel by Scott or Dickens. One possible 
 reason for this brevity is clear enough. The 
 author knew little about gipsies, they were to her 
 merely low rufhans and drabs, horse-stealers and 
 pilferers, and of their fascination for the student 
 of character she had no idea at all. There were 
 hundreds and hundreds of genuine Romany about 
 the country in those days. Borrow was not yet at 
 work, and few people had taken the trouble to 
 discover what manner of mind the " Egyptians " 
 possessed, and how they spent their time when 
 they were not robbing henroosts or swindling 
 housemaids. Scott felt something of the mysteri- 
 ous charm of this ancient and nomadic race, but he 
 was romantic, and romance, in Jane Austen's way 
 of thinking, was very nearly a synonym for 
 absurdity. So it is, therefore, that the gipsies in 
 the Highbury lane appear for half a page, speak 
 no word that is reported, and then vanish from 
 our ken. The author implies that they hurried 
 
 231 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 away to avoid prosecution. Perhaps she was 
 almost as glad to see the last of them as were the 
 inhabitants of Highbury. Thus is a fine oppor- 
 tunity for a " picturesque " scene thrown away. 
 Undeveloped as it is, the adventure stands abso- 
 lutely alone in the novels as the sole occasion 
 whereon any of the characters has reason to fear 
 violence at the hands of ill-disposed persons. It 
 was only in imagination that Catherine Morland 
 was carried off by masked men, though a spirited 
 illustration of Mr. Hugh Thomson's did once 
 mislead a too hurried critic into regarding the 
 affair as an event in the heroine's life. 
 
 There are, in fact, very few digressions in 
 these books. Fielding "digressed" by whole 
 chapters at a time, Sterne's digressions filled more 
 space than his tale in his one "novel." Jane 
 Austen keeps to the road, and leaves the by-lanes 
 unexplored. It is a pleasant road, old, and bor- 
 dered here and there with attractive-looking 
 houses into which we may enter by her kindly 
 introduction, but if we wish to go off to that 
 hamlet on the right, or that coppice on the left, 
 we must go alone. She will sit on a stile till we 
 return to pursue the direct route. It is to her 
 
 232 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 effort to avoid all but the essential factors in 
 achieving her object that the general absence of 
 landscape and topographical detail of all kinds 
 in her work is to be attributed. In the case of a 
 Dickens, a Balzac, a Hardy or a Meredith, you 
 can constantly identify the places where the scenes 
 are laid. In Lincoln's Inn Fields you can watch 
 Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows; at Rochester you 
 can see the very room where Mr. Pickwick slept; 
 at Nemours you can gaze at the house where The 
 Minoret-Levraults (in Ursule Miroziet) lived; at 
 Woolbridge you can find the manor house where 
 the unhappy Tess passed her bridal night. Down 
 in Surrey you can take a photograph of the Cross- 
 ways House which was almost the whole fortune 
 of Diana, at Seaford you can see the " Elba 
 Hall " of The House on the Beach sheltering 
 beneath the downs, and as in these instances so 
 in scores of others. But in connection with the 
 Austen novels, save for the London streets and 
 squares, there are only Bath and Lyme Regis and 
 Portsmouth where one can truly feel sure that 
 such or such an incident in one or other novel 
 " occurred " on this very spot. 
 
 If, however, there is no special "Jane Austen 
 
 233 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 country " to be traced out by the diligent seeker 
 for visible associations, there are scattered spots 
 where her presence is still to be felt. At Steven- 
 ton, where the earlier works were produced, the 
 house of the Austens no longer stands, having 
 given place long since to a rectory on the other 
 side of the valley, more convenient and comfort- 
 able than that wherein the father wrote his 
 sermons and the daughter her novels — sermons 
 and novels which at the time seemed equally 
 likely to achieve enduring fame. Only the well 
 and the pump remain to mark the site. The 
 surroundings are not all new — how should they be 
 in a thinly populated parish? There are still 
 farms and cottages that were old before Jane was 
 born. (The church is in better trim, but, externally 
 at least, it is much the same. t 
 
 Probably with scenery as with men and women 
 Jane Austen did not usually draw from models, 
 and when she did, she gave the models their 
 own names. The one real bit of description of 
 a place named in her work is the account of 
 the environs of Lyme Regis, which is so obviously 
 written from personal interest that some of her 
 biographers have supposed that her own experi- 
 
 234 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 ences during her visits there had included a 
 Captain Wentworth or at least a Captain Benwick. 
 
 "A very strange stranger it must be/' she 
 writes, " who does not see charms in the immediate 
 environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it 
 better. The scenes in its neighbourhood. Char- 
 mouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps 
 of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, 
 backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low 
 rock among the sands make it the happiest spot 
 for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in 
 unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of 
 the cheerful village of Up Lyme ; and, above all, 
 Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic 
 rocks, where the scattered forest trees and 
 orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many 
 a generation must have passed away since the first 
 partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for 
 such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so 
 lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any 
 of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of 
 Wight — these places must be visited, and visited 
 again, to make the worth of Lyme understood." 
 
 This was quite an exceptional digression from 
 the thoughts and conversation of Jane Austen's 
 characters. One of those letters which Leslie 
 Stephen and others have thought so "trivial," but 
 
 235 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 which are so characteristic in their spirit, was 
 written from Lyme by Jane to Cassandra, on 
 September 14, 1804 — 
 
 "I continue quite well; in proof of which 
 I have bathed again this morning. ... I 
 endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, 
 and be useful and keep things in order. I detect 
 dirt in the water decanters, as fast as I can, 
 and keep everything as it was under your 
 administration. . . . The ball last night was 
 pleasant. . . . Nobody asked me for the two first 
 dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Craw- 
 ford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have 
 danced with Mr. Granville ... or with a new 
 odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for 
 some time, and at last, without any introduction, 
 asked me if I meant to dance again." 
 
 It is impossible to leave Lyme Regis without 
 recalling how Tennyson, when he was shown "the 
 place where the Duke of Monmouth was sup- 
 posed to have landed, cried : " Don't talk to me 
 of the Duke of Monmouth ! Show me the exact 
 spot where Louisa Musgrove fell ! " 
 
 Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined 
 to Steventon, Godmersham, Chawton, Southamp- 
 ton, Bath, and their neighbourhood. It is not a 
 
 236 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 day's walk or an hour's motoring from Steven- 
 ton to Chawton, where, after the long interval 
 of comparative inactivity, the later novels were 
 *'born." At Chawton, according to one of her 
 later biographers, the " cottage " where she lived 
 and worked has disappeared. -This is happily 
 not true. It is true that it is now turned to 
 other uses than that of sheltering a parson's 
 widow and her daughters. It has been divided 
 internally, and now forms a couple of labourers' 
 cottages and a village club, where tired toilers 
 who have never read a line of the books that were 
 written under that roof discuss the merits and 
 defects of the tobacco tax and the Old Age 
 Pensions Act. Chawton House itself shows little 
 structural change, and the park is scarcely altered 
 since Jane walked across from the Cottage to take 
 tea with her relations at the great house. 
 
 At either of these villages, Steventon the birth- 
 place of Jane herself and of Pride and Prejudice 
 and Mansfield Park, and Chawton where Persua- 
 sion and Emfna came into being, you may find 
 scenes which you will associate with this or that 
 story or incident, but nowhere are you likely to 
 feel the influence of locality more strongly in 
 
 237. 
 
{ 
 
 K 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 connection with either author or novels than at 
 Godmersham, the home of her brother Edward, 
 where, until long after her death, her relations 
 dwelt amid their own broad acres. [The place, 
 with other property, came to Edward Austen 
 from Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had adopted him, 
 and whose name he ultimately took. ,There is no 
 more typically English seat in the typically Eng- 
 lish county of Kent. [The small sylvan village, 
 the old church above the Stour river, offer no 
 special attractions for tourists, and Godmersham 
 House itself is one of the plainest even among 
 the country seats of the early Georgian age. Its 
 one external charm is its unpretentiousness. It 
 has not even the huge classic portico on which so 
 many of the country houses of its period depend 
 for " impressiveness.'' Plain, commodious, well- 
 placed, the house is lovely for us only in that it 
 sheltered for many a week, from year to year, the 
 author of Pride and Prejudice. It is just such a 
 house as Sir John Middleton filled with visitors 
 at all seasons, or Mr. Darcy showed to his future 
 bride and her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner. 
 
 If the house itself is without external beauty, 
 the park surrounding it is delightful. The 
 
 238 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 sparkling river flows through the midst of great 
 elms and oaks beneath which mingled herds 
 of deer, sheep, and oxen browse in the peace- 
 ful security of the golden age. As you sit on 
 the low wall of the lichen-covered bridge you 
 see nothing that can have changed in character 
 since Jane Austen sat there and thought over 
 the doings of her dear heroines. One can 
 almost hear the rumble of the barouche that 
 brought her mother and herself from the coach 
 at Ashford to the Hall at Godmersham, and if 
 that high-hung carriage were suddenly to turn 
 the corner beside the big elm near the gate one 
 would scarcely be astonished. ,This park and this 
 house, this river, the old trees, the thatched cot- 
 tages, the lanes and brooks all speak of the days 
 when Bingley came for Jane Bennet, and Henry 
 Tilney for Catherine Morland. If there is any- 
 thing in the influence of place, Godmersham was 
 part author of the novels. ,The spirit of Jane 
 Austen abides in the delicious air of this quiet and 
 unspoilt valley, where, when the wind blows 
 strongly from the south-east, the salt of the sea- 
 breeze mingles with the perfumes of the grass and 
 the wood smoke as pleasantly as the Attic wit of 
 
 239 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 Jane Austen mingles with the sweetness of her 
 heroines and the thousand delights of her 
 dialogue. 
 
 These are the chief country scenes of Jane's 
 life. As to the towns, we know more or less of 
 her associations with Bath, Southampton, and 
 Winchester, as well as London. At Bath she 
 used to stay in early youth with her uncle and 
 aunt, and she lived there for four years with her 
 parents. The fruits of her experience there may 
 be enjoyed in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion^ 
 though her lack of the topographical instinct is 
 suggested by the absence of evident interest in 
 the buildings of Bath. We learn as much about 
 the place from the Pickwick Papers, which merely 
 touch there on their way, or from the allusions of 
 the characters in The Rivals, where the events are 
 of a few days, as we do from chapters that cover 
 long periods of residence in one of the most 
 beautiful, and still, in spite of the disproportionate 
 and architecturally discordant hotel, the least 
 injured cities of England. Souvenirs of the 
 personal association of Jane Austen with Bath are 
 almost as plentiful as those of Johnson with Fleet 
 Street. The house in Sydney Place where the 
 
 240 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Austens lived during most of the time between 
 Mr. Austen's resignation and his death is the only 
 one that bears a tablet to Jane's memory. But 
 in Queen Square, whence several of her letters 
 are dated, in Gay Street, in the Green Park, in 
 the Paragon, the rooms she occupied with her 
 relations at one time or another remain very much 
 as they were in her day, and externally the 
 buildings are unaltered, one and all being built 
 of the local stone which gives so notable a 
 character to the Georgian architecture of the city. 
 In Camden Place where the Elliots rented "the 
 best house," in Pulteney Street where Catherine 
 stayed with the Aliens, in Westgate Buildings 
 where Anne cheered Mrs. Smith's lonely days, 
 there has been little change since N orthanger 
 Abbey and Persuasion were written. There is 
 probably no town in the world associated with the 
 work of a famous person of even so near a period 
 which has altered less in appearance than Bath 
 since 1805, 
 
 At Southampton the mother and daughters 
 
 lived, after the father's death, in a house in that 
 
 secluded part of the town which stands between 
 
 the High Street and the old walls above the 
 
 Q 541 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 "Water." There is a bit of those walls which 
 abuts on the spot w^here the Austens' house stood, 
 and it is one of the places where we may feel con- 
 fident that we are walking where Jane often 
 walked, and gazing out over a scene which was 
 familiar to her in almost all save the funnels of 
 the steam yachts and the distant view of the train 
 on its way to Bournemouth or to London. 
 
 In London itself there are many spots that 
 will always recall Jane Austen to her devoted 
 friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street 
 (Covent Garden), in Hans Place, in Cork Street, 
 we know that she herself stayed. Many of the 
 characters in Sense and Sensibility — the only 
 novel in which we hear much of London — are 
 associated with familiar streets. Edward Ferrars 
 stayed in Pall Mall, the Steele girls in Bartlett's 
 Buildings, Mrs. Jennings in Berkeley Street, the 
 John Dashwoods in Harley Street. ,The Gardi- 
 ners {Pride and Prejudice) lived in Gracechurch 
 Street. 
 
 The day has not yet come when public bodies 
 could be sufficiently affected by imaginative litera- 
 ture to place memorials on the houses where 
 fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. 
 
 242 
 
PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL 
 
 In Paris the memorial to Charlet is an admirable 
 group of a grenadier and a gamin — typical 
 characters from his work, and a musketeer guards 
 the monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that 
 any sculptor should be commissioned to give us 
 life-size figures of Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and 
 Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen. 
 But when next the London County Council con- 
 templates the placing of plaques on the former 
 residences of departed worthies they might con- 
 sider whether — of course with the consent of the 
 freeholder and the leaseholder — her name might 
 not be placed on the house in Henrietta Street, 
 once her brother Henry's home, where so many of 
 her letters were written. She tells of the con- 
 venient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort 
 of herself and her nieces, and from its door she 
 went to the neighbouring church, or the theatres, 
 which were within a few minutes' walk. It is not 
 likely that any political prejudice would cause 
 even the most advanced Progressive on the 
 Council to object to the name of so very mild a 
 iTory being thus honoured. As to the more prob- 
 able objection that she did not " reside " there, but 
 was only a visitor, one may plead that as there is 
 Q2 243 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling 
 the " residence " of Mrs. Siddons, and that a tablet 
 proclaims that Turner " lived " in a house built 
 thirty years after his death, there would be no 
 great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a 
 house in which Jane Austen did undoubtedly 
 write, and sleep, and talk. [The front was 
 cemented in the middle of the last century, and 
 the ground-floor is now used for business pur- 
 poses, but otherwise the house is little changed 
 since the Austens were there. 
 
 244 
 
VII 
 INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE 
 
VII 
 
 INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE 
 
 Jane Austen's genius Ignored — Negative and positive 
 instances — The literary orchard — Jane's influence in 
 EngHsh literature. 
 
 The author of a book bearing the title Great Eng- 
 lish Novelists, pubHshed just ninety-one years after 
 Jane Austen's death, does not include her in his 
 selection. He deals with eleven authors — Defoe, 
 Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Scott, 
 Lytton, Disraeli, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith. 
 The very fact that he stops short at eleven, in- 
 stead of making a round dozen, suggests that he 
 really could not think of any other novelist worthy 
 to be credited with greatness. It will be observed 
 that all the team are men. Without quibbling as 
 to whether they are all " English," or all "great," 
 or even all " novelists " in the ordinary sense of 
 the word, we may legitimately suppose that the 
 author is one of those to whom Jane Austen makes 
 
 247 
 
JA:NE AUSTEN 
 
 no strong appeal. The peculiarity of her position 
 among English novelists could not well be more 
 pointedly emphasized than in the fact that while 
 Macaulay placed her next to Shakespeare as a 
 painter of character-studies, a critic should be 
 found — and he is by no means isolated — who can 
 choose eleven great representatives of English 
 fiction without adding her as a twelfth. In the 
 same week in which the book just referred to was 
 published, came a portfolio of twelve photo- 
 gravures entitled Britain^ s Gredl: Authors, Scott, 
 Thackeray, Dickens, of course, were among them, 
 and of right, but not Jane Austen. ^ 
 
 Perhaps even more suggestive is the statemenf 
 of a clever woman-writer the other day that Jane 
 Austen's novels are merely "memorials," books 
 which no gentleman's (or lady's) library should be 
 without, but which are for show rather than for use. 
 
 Her name may never be among those that are 
 painted round the reading-rooms of National 
 Libraries, nor included by many school-children 
 in examination lists of eminent authors. Hers is 
 too delicate a product to attract the man or woman 
 " in the street." There is a bouquet about it that 
 is lost on the palate which enjoys the "strong" 
 
 248 
 
INFLUENCE IN LITERATURE 
 
 fiction of the material phase through which 
 humanity is now passing — passing perhaps more 
 briefly than most of us imagine. 
 
 It has been the endeavour of this book to show 
 Jane Austen as she Hves in her writings, and to 
 suggest some at least of the many directions in 
 which those writings may be explored, and thus, 
 if so may be, to bring new members into the 
 large but comparatively restricted circle wherein 
 she is regarded, not always as the first of English 
 novelists, but at least as second to none in the 
 quality of her work. Sappho enjoys undying fame 
 with only a few fragments of verse still to her 
 credit, Omar for his one poem transformed by 
 another mind, Boccaccio for a volume of short 
 stories, Boswell for one biography, Thomas h. 
 Kempis for one devotional manual. Sparsity of 
 performance, it is evident, is no bar to enduring 
 fame. Jane Austen's work, indeed, was not sparse. 
 There are, undoubtedly, novelists who have passed 
 the record of Balzac with his forty novels and 
 scores of short stories, but their books for the most 
 part suggest the interminable succession of poplars 
 along so many a high road of France. Some of 
 the trees have more foliage than others, some are 
 
 249 
 
JANE AUSTEN 
 
 more green or more blue in tone, a little more 
 tortuous, or robust, but in spite of all trivial differ- 
 ences plus fa change -plus c' est la metne chose. 
 If this arboreal parallel may be pursued, may we 
 not compare the work of Jane Austen with a group 
 of apple-trees in a sunny corner of some vast 
 orchard? There are eight Austen trees in the 
 literary orchard. Two of them are stunted and 
 bear a poor crop of a sort little better than crab- 
 apples. The other six are of several kinds, but 
 all of fine quality and producing delicious fruit of 
 varying sweetness. Countless thousands of novels 
 have been published since Jane Austen's were 
 given to the world, and many of them have been 
 unseemly, and of evil influence. But the taste of 
 countless writers and readers has been sweetened 
 by the fruit of her delightful mind, of the pass- 
 ing of whose fragrant harvest through English 
 literature it is not too much to say, as Jane her- 
 self said of Anne Elliot's walk through Bath : 
 " It was almost enough to spread purification and 
 perfume all the way." 
 
 250 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 1811. Sense and Sensibility. [Completed in 1798. 
 Commenced many years earlier in the form of 
 letters, under the title Elinor and Marianne.] 
 
 18 1 3. Pride and Prejudice. [Completed in 1797. Origin- 
 
 ally entitled (in MS.) First Impressions.] 
 
 1814. Mansfield Park. [Written in 1811-14.] 
 
 1816. Emma. [Written in 1811-16.] 
 
 1818. Northanger Ahhey and Persuasion. [Northanger 
 Abbey (mostly written in 1798) was sold to a 
 Bath bookseller for ;£'io in 1803. He laid it 
 aside, and it was bought back by Henry Austen, 
 at the same price , after Sense and Sensibility 
 and Pride and Prejudice had appeared. Per- 
 suasion, as originally completed (in 1816) had 
 only eleven chapters, but the author was not 
 satisfied with Chapter X, and replaced it by the 
 present Chapters X and XI. The cancelled 
 chapter is included in Mr. Austen Leigh's 
 memoir. It brings about the re-engagement of 
 Anne and Wentworth in a different, and certainly 
 less admirable, manner.] 
 
 251 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 1871. Lady Susan, the WatsonSy and some extracts from 
 the novel on which Jane was at work until four 
 months before her death. [These are all in- 
 cluded in Mr. Austen Leigh's book. The MS. 
 of Lady Susan, written before Jane was of age, 
 was given by Cassandra Austen to her niece 
 Fanny (Lady Knatchbull), who consented to its 
 publication. As for the incomplete novel known 
 as The Watsons, written about 1802, Jane was 
 not responsible for the naming of it, and had 
 laid it aside several years before Mansfield Park 
 was written. The work from which she was 
 compelled by illness to cease in March 1817 had 
 not, in the twelve chapters we possess, reached a 
 point when its plan could be foretold with reason- 
 able confidence.] 
 
 1884. Letters of Jane Austen, edited by her great-nephew, 
 the first Lord Brabourne. [These, which, with 
 few exceptions were addressed to Cassandra 
 Austen, belonged to Lady Knatchbull, to whom 
 some of them were written. Many of Jane's 
 letters were destroyed by Cassandra as being too 
 private to pass into other hands.] 
 Mr. J. E. Austen Leigh's Memoir of his aunt is 
 not only to be highly valued for its biographical 
 details, but for its many anecdotes of Jane 
 Austen, and for the letters which fill a good 
 many gaps in the other published correspondence. 
 252 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Those to whom the subject of the present volume 
 is fresh, and who care to pursue it, are advised 
 to read the ** introductions " contributed to 
 recent editions of Jane Austen's novels by various 
 critics, particularly Mr. Austin Dobson, Pro- 
 fessor Saintsbury, and Mr. E. V. Lucas, as well 
 as the Life contributed by Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 to the Great Writers series. 
 
 [The dates given on the left hand are those of 
 publication.] 
 
 253 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, Oscar, on Jane Austen, 89 
 Addison, Joseph, 55 
 "Allen, Mr.," 187 
 
 *' , Mrs.," 100 
 
 Alphonsine, 61 
 
 Anderson, Mrs. Garrett, 170 
 
 Antiquary ^ The, 51 
 
 Apothecaries, 114 
 
 Arc, Joan of, 169 
 
 Aspasia, 158 
 
 Austen, Cassandra, 31, 63, 79, icx), 
 
 212 
 , Edward {see Knight), 41, 
 
 214, 223, 238 
 , The Rev. George, 152, 223, 
 
 241 
 
 , Henry, 22, 243, 251 
 
 -, Jane, freshness of her work. 
 
 14 ; her aim, 18, 68 ; at home, 
 22 ; her nature, 24-30 ; views on 
 love, 32 ; her admirers, 35-37, 
 163 ; her limited appeal, 43 ; on 
 novels, 50-54 ; favourite authors, 
 56-60 ; criticism of niece's work, 
 63-64 ; limitations of subject, 
 16-19, 65, 112, 192, 204; 
 literary style, 66-70, 82-85 J 
 choice of names, 74 ; in London, 
 76, 242 ; views of life, 41, 87, 
 217 ; as humourist, 89, 171-172 ; 
 a "forbidding" writer, 89; Mr. 
 Goldwin Smith on her novels, 91 ; 
 contrasted with Peacock, 92-94 ; 
 her letters, 23, 31, 99, 121, 
 211-223 ; declines to meet 
 Madame de Stael, 109 ; her 
 charities, 116-117; at balls and 
 dances, 123-128 ; Dr. Whately 
 on her work, 135, 161, 181, 189 ; 
 views of marriage, 106, 138-140; 
 influenced by current philosophy, 
 143-149 ; her fine taste, 152 ; 
 her opinion oi Lady Susan, 152 ; 
 
 her heroines, 21, 32-33, 138-163 ; 
 their relations, 183 ; her avoid- 
 ance of dogmatism, 149, 193 ; 
 love for her own creations, 202 ; 
 economy of description, 205, 
 227, 231 ; on dress, 210-219 ; 
 food, 219-224; places — Bath, 
 152, 214, 240 ; Chawton, 22, 
 I53> 237 ; Godmersham, 41, 
 223, 238 ; London, 76, 242 ; 
 Lyme Regis, 160, 234-236 ; 
 Southampton, 241 ; Steventon, 
 22, 153, 214, 234; her literary 
 influence, 247-250 
 Austen, Mrs., 25, 29, 222, 223 
 
 Balzac, 17, 108, 201, 209, 233 
 "Barton," 102 
 
 "Bates, Miss," 175, 219, 221 
 Bath, 152, 153, 214, 240 
 Batilliat, Marcel, 57 
 Bazin, Rene, 57 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 108 
 "Bellaston, Lady," 157 
 "Bellona" [Richard FevereT), 157 
 "Bennet, Elizabeth," 79, 93, 203, 
 216 
 
 " , Jane," 42, 203 
 
 " , Lydia," 43, 141, 229 
 
 " , Mr.," Z2, 90, ^29 
 
 " , Mrs.," 72, 90, 100 
 
 " Bertram, Edmund," 40, 70, 155 
 
 " , Lady," 131 
 
 *' , Maria," 18, 83 
 
 " , Sir Thomas," 64, 130 
 
 "Bingleys, The," 115, 129 
 Bond, John, 116 
 Boswell, James, 58 
 Boulangeries (dance), 129 
 "Bourgh, Lady Catherine de," 
 
 118, 175 . 
 Box Hill, picnic at, 175 
 
 Brabourne, Lord, 252 
 
 255 
 
INDEX 
 
 "Brandon, Colonel," 141-144 
 Brock, C. E., 209 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 19, 85, 195 
 Burney, Frances, 49, 53, 60, 86, 88 
 
 , Sarah, 61 
 
 Byron, Lord, I2I 
 
 Cage, Mrs., 100 
 
 CalprenMe, 55 
 
 Cambridge Observer, 83 
 
 " Camper, Lady," 205 
 
 Cayidide, 147 
 
 Carlton House, 65, 165 
 
 " Chainmail, Mr.," 93 
 
 Charlet, 243 
 
 ChStelet, Madame du, 102, 158 
 
 Chawton, 22, 153, 237 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 78 
 
 Church of England, 1 89-1 91 
 
 "Churchill, Frank," 37, 104, 127, 
 
 231 
 Chute, William, 37 
 Cibber, CoUey, 77 
 Clandesti?ie Marriage, *i*j 
 Clarentine, 61 
 Clarissa, 50 
 *' Clay, Mrs.," 18 
 Coleridge, 19, 194 
 *' Coles, The," 129 
 "Collins, Mr.," 71, 93, 164, 192, 
 
 229 
 Colonies, American, 13 
 Connoisseur, The, 56 
 Consumption, 218 
 Cork Street, 77 
 " Cormon, Rose," 18 
 Corsair, The, 215 
 "Courcy, Reginald de," 150 
 Cowper, William, 29, 57, 223 
 Crabbe, George, 56 
 "Crawford, Henry," 18, 83 
 
 ** Mary," 40, 160 
 
 Critic, an American, 45 
 Croker, John Wilson, 198 
 Crotchet Castle, 93 
 Curie, Madame, 170 
 Cuvier, 193 
 
 *• Dalrymples, The," 119 
 "Darcy, Fitzwilliam," 33, 42,93, 
 118, 203 
 
 " , Georgiana," G^ 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus, 193 
 
 Dashwood, Elin6r," 18, 43, 141- 
 148 
 
 , Marianne," 79, 141 
 
 -, Mrs.," 188 
 
 Deism, 193 
 Dickens, 219, 233 
 Digweed, James, 114, 123 
 Disraeli, Isaac, 108 
 Dobson, Austin, 253 
 Dodsley, Robert, 59-60 
 "Dotheboys Hall," 92 
 Dovvton, William, 77 
 Dress, 210-219 
 "Dudley, Arabelle," 157 
 Duff, Sir M. E. Grant, 148 
 Dumas /(^r^, 219, 243 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria, 53, 60, 76, 148, 
 
 189 
 Eliot, George, 85, 169 
 "Elliot, Anne," 33, 93, 125, 163, 250 
 
 " , Sir Walter," 118, 176 
 
 " , William, 160, 178 
 
 "Elliott, Kirstie,"2o8 
 "Elton, Mr.," 104 
 
 " , Mrs.," 173, 205 
 
 Emma, 80, 231, 237, 251 
 Eugenie Grandet, 108 
 "Evelina," 99, 139 
 "Eyre, Jane," 16, 195 
 
 "Fagin," 92 
 
 " Fairfax, Jane," 38, 129 
 
 " Ferrars, Edward," 155 
 
 " , Lucy," 82 
 
 " Feverel, Lucy," 35 
 
 " , Richard," 35 
 
 "Ffolliot, Dr.," 93 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 14, 154 
 
 "Fischer, Lisbeth," 16 
 
 Food, 219-224 
 
 France, Anatole, 149 
 
 Fr^nilly, Baron de, on dress, 218 
 
 Gait, John, 76 
 "Gardiners, The," 140, 242 
 Garrick, 59-60 
 Genlis, Madame de, 61 
 George IH, on genius, 49 
 Gifford, William, 165 
 Gipsies, 231 
 
 "Gobseck, Esther van," 157 
 Godmersham, 41, 223, 238 
 
 56 
 
INDEX 
 
 "Grandet, Pere," i6 
 
 "Grandison, Sir Charles," 205 
 Great English Novelists^ 247 
 Giiliiver's Travels, 94 
 Gtiy Mannering, 51 
 
 Hall, Robert, on Miss Edgeworth, 
 
 189 
 "Hamlet," 181 
 Hardy, Thomas, 233 
 Hazlitt, William, 165 
 Headlong Hall, 94 
 Henrietta Street, 242 
 " Homespun, Mr.," 225 
 Hope, Anthony, 44 
 House on the Beach, The, 115 
 " Hurst, Mrs.," 216 
 Huxley, Thomas, 170 
 Hypocrite, The, 77 
 
 Ida of Athens, 62 
 Idler, The, 56 
 
 "Jennings, Mrs.," 102, 138, 142' 
 
 "Jingle, Alfred," 75 
 Johnson, Samuel, 56, 58 
 "Jones, Tom," 155, 213 
 Jonson, Ben, 86 
 
 Kean, Edmund, 77 
 
 "Kew, Lady," 16 
 
 Knatchbull, Lady, see Knight, 
 
 Fanny 
 Knight, Edward (Austen), 41, 214, 
 
 223, 238 
 
 , Fanny, 40, 104, 252 
 
 "Knightley, George," 70, 155, 181 
 
 Lady Susan, 87, 137, 149-152, 252 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 13 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 13, 198 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 147 
 
 Langton, Bennet, 58 
 
 La Terre qtii 7)ieu7't, 57 
 
 La VendSe aux Genets, 57 
 
 Lefroy, Thomas, 35-36, 213 
 
 Leigh, J. E. Austen, 23, 251, 252 
 
 Letters of Jatie Austen, 252 
 
 Lewes, G. H., 85 
 
 Liston, John, 77 
 
 Lloyd, Martha, d"] 
 
 Lockhart, William, his "Life of 
 
 Scott," 166 
 Lombroso, 147 
 
 R 
 
 London, 76, 242 
 
 Lotmger, The, 56 
 
 Love, Jane Austen's views on, 32 
 
 "Lucas, Charlotte," 139 
 
 ^ E, v., 253 
 
 " — '—, Sir' William," 114-115 
 Lyford, John, 123 
 Lyme Regis, 160, 234-236 
 Lys dans la Valine, Le, 157 
 
 Macaulay, 49, 68, 181 
 Mackintosh, Sir James, 122 
 " Manerville, Natalie de," 19 
 Mansfield Park, 44, 137, 165, 186, 
 
 237, 251 
 Margiana, 61 
 Marriage, 106, 138 
 Martin, Mrs. , her library, 60 
 
 " , Robert," 113 
 
 " Mascarille," 78 
 
 Mathews, Charles, 77 
 
 "McQueedy, Mr.," 93 
 
 Melincourt, 94 
 
 Meredith, George, 69, 115, 233 
 
 "Middleton, Lady," 187 
 
 " , Sir John," 79, 102, 119, 
 
 205 
 "Milestone, Mr.," 93 
 " Millamant," 159 
 Milton, 21, 194 
 "Mirabell," 159 
 Mirror, The, 225 
 Mitford, Mrs., 104 
 " Morland, Catherine," 18, 34, 80. 
 
 81, 88, 91, 99, 216, 224, 227 
 
 " , Mr. and Mrs.," 186 
 
 Murray, John, "The First," 165 
 " Musgrove, Louisa," 187, 236 
 
 Names, 74 
 
 "Nanny," 113 
 
 Napoleon on Madame de Stael, 45 
 
 " Nature's Salic Law," 170 
 
 " Newcome, Colonel," 75 
 
 Nightingale, Florence, 169 
 
 Nightmare Abbey, 94, 121 
 
 "Norris, Mrs.," 187 
 
 Northanger Abbey, 44, 53, 87, 1 51, 
 
 210, 240, 251 
 " Nostalgic de I'lnfini," 14S 
 Novel, "Plan of," 95 
 
 , suggestion for, 65 
 
 Novelists, defence of, 53 
 
INDEX 
 
 Novels, 50, 60-62 
 , French, 55, 57 
 
 O'Neill, Miss, 77 
 
 "Orange, Robert," 160 
 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverely The, 
 
 157 
 Osborne, Dorothy, 31, 33. 55. 163 
 -, Lord," 113 
 
 -, Mr., on passions, 163 
 
 Owenson, Miss, 62 
 
 Pamela, 50 
 
 " Patterne, Sir Willoughby," 205 
 
 Peacock, Thomas Love, 92-94 
 
 "Pecksniff," 16 
 
 " Pemberley," 42 
 
 Persuasion, 125, 137, 151, 186,237, 
 
 240, 251 
 Phelps, W. L., 34 
 Pickwick Papers, 240 
 Picnics, 175, 224 
 "Pierrette," 18 
 Plutocrats, 41 
 Plymley Letters, 78 
 " Pons, Sylvain," 75 
 Portsmouth, 66, 184, 233 
 Poverty, 40 
 
 Powlett, Charles, 36, lOI 
 Precieuses ridicules, 78 
 "Price, Fanny," 18, 34, 184 
 Pride and Prejudice, 44, 62, 85, 
 
 M9, 136, 186, 237, 251 
 Property, landed, 41-42 
 "Proudie, Mrs.," 205 
 
 Quarterly Review, 135, 162, 165 
 Queensberry, Duke of, 191 
 Quentin Durward, 139 
 " Quilp," 16 
 
 RadclifFe, Mrs., 50, 52, 60, 86 
 
 Rambler, The, 56 
 
 " Ravenswood Tower," 92 
 
 Realism, 205 
 
 Regent, The, 153, 165 
 
 Religion, 189 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 59 
 
 " , Mrs.," 112 
 
 Richardson, Samuel, 50, 59, 60 
 
 "Rigby, Mr.," 198 
 
 Rivals, The, 153 
 
 " Rochefide, Beatrix de," 19 
 
 " Rushworth, Maria," 18 
 
 " Rushworth, Mr.," 83 
 
 " Russell, Lady," 163, 183, 205 
 
 Saintsbury, George, 90, 141, 253 
 
 Sand, George, 108, 169 
 
 Sappho, 249 
 
 Saxe-Coburg family, 65 
 
 Scharlieb, Mrs., 170 
 
 School for Saifits, The, 160 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 16, 42, 51, 67, 
 
 76, 209 
 
 , Life of, 166 
 
 Scuderi, IMademoiselle de, 55 
 
 " Scythrop," 93 
 
 "Sedley, Jos," 92 
 
 Self-control, 61 
 
 Selwyn, George, 191 
 
 Sense and Sensibility, 44, 62, 82, 
 
 136, 143, 202, 242 
 Shakespeare, 84-85, 181 
 Shelley, 121 
 Sheridan, 130, 153 
 "Shirley," 92 
 Sir Charles Grandison, 50 
 Smith, Goldwin, 91, 253 
 -, Harriet," 103, 231 
 
 , James, 13 
 
 , Sydney, 78 
 
 Socialists, 4: 
 Sondes, Lady, 106 
 Southampton, 241 
 Spectator, The, 53-55 
 Stael, Madame de, 45, 109-111 
 Steele, Richard, 55 
 Stephen, Leslie, 235 
 Stephens, Miss, 77 
 Steventon, 22, 153, 214, 234 
 "Steyne, Lord," 16 
 Surville, Madame de, 201 
 Swift, Jonathan, 149, 220 
 
 Tamaris, 108 
 Tartnffe, 77 
 Tatler, The, 56 
 Temple, Sir William, 33, 55 
 Tennyson, 26, 236 
 Thackeray, 16, 28, 94 
 Theatricals at the Bertrams', 131 
 Thomson, Hugh, 209, 232 
 "Thorpe, John," 51 
 "Tilney, General," 187, 224 
 
 -, Henry," 18, 70, 80, 88, 91, 
 
 93, 216, 224, 225 
 
 258 
 
INDEX 
 
 "Tinman, Martin," 115 
 Tom Jones, 157 
 "Tulliver, Mr.," 205 
 Turner, J. M. W., 13 
 
 ** Uppercross," dancing at, 125 
 
 Valliere, Louise de la, 158 
 
 ** Vandenesse, Felix de," 201 
 
 •' Vautrin,"92 
 
 Vendee, La, 57 
 
 Veneiia, 121 
 
 Ventilation, Mr. Woodhouse on, 
 
 127 
 "Vernon, Lady Susan," 106 
 Verrall, A. W., on text of Jane 
 
 Austen's novels, 83 
 Village, The, 56 
 Villiers, Barbara, 158 
 Voltaire, 147, 158 
 
 Waltz, 1 29-1 3 1 
 Warner, Dr., 191 
 
 Watsons, The, 87, 137, 152, 252 
 
 Waver ley, 51, 52 
 
 Weir of Hermiston, 208 
 
 " Wentworth, Frederick," 125, 155, 
 
 188, 251 
 *' Western, Sophia," 142, 155 
 
 " , Squire," 154 
 
 "Weston, Mr.," 115 
 
 " , Mrs.," 84, 103, 181 
 
 Whately, Archbishop, 135, 161, 
 
 181, 189 
 "Wickham," 141 
 *• Williams, Miss," 143 
 "Willoughby, John," 18, 79, 141- 
 
 146 
 Wine, 221 
 "Woodhouse, Emma," 33, 37, 64, 
 
 93, 103, 181, 221 
 
 " , Mr.," 172, 174, 221 
 
 World, The, 56 
 Wyndham, Mr., 104 
 
 Zola, 66 
 
 THE END 
 
 259 
 
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