Jane Austen

by Elizabeth Jenkins

New York

PELLEGRINI & CUDAHY

Book by Elizabeth Jenkins; Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949. 412 pgs.

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Copyright 1949 by Elizabeth Jenkins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in

writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

Manufactured in the United States of America at the American

Book--Stratford Press. Design and typography by Joseph Trautwein.

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I wish to acknowledge the kindness of the Clarendon Press in

allowing me to make use of Dr. Chapman's editions, Jane Austen's novels and letters.

Also of Sir F. D. Mackinnon in allowing me to quote his opinion, from his work
Grand Larceny
, on the trial of Mrs. Leigh Perrot.

Thanks are also due to Messrs. John Lane for permission to quote a letter of Captain Frank Austen from
Jane Austen and Her Sailor
Brothers
.

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THE EIGHTEENTH century was an age such as our imagination

can barely comprehend; weltering as we do in a slough of habitual ugliness, ranging from the dreary horrors of Victorian sham gothic to the more lively hideousness of modern jerry-building, with

advertisements defacing any space that might be left unoffendingly blank, and the tourist scattering his trail of chocolate paper, cigarette ends and film cartons, we catch sight every now and again of a house front, plain and graceful, with a fanlight like the half of a spider's web and a slip of iron balcony; among the florid or stark

disfigurements of a graveyard we discover a tombstone with elegant letters composing, in a single sentence, a well-turned epitaph.Among a bunch of furnishing fabrics, we come upon a traditional eighteenthcentury chintz, formal and exquisitely gay; a print shows us the vista of a London street, with two rows of blond, porticoed houses closing in a view of trees and fields. The ghost of that vanished loveliness haunts us in every memorial that survives the age: a house in its park, a teacup, the type and binding of a book.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey

Where wealth accumulates and men decay
.

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The words greet us from the lid of a china patch box, a pale, bright yellow, a trivial little object devoted to a silly purpose, but it is stamped with a sentiment from
The Deserted Village
. We find it almost impossible to realize that the fleeting vision with which our eyes are occasionally blessed was to the eighteenth-century man or woman the common sight of daily life; plain elegance,

uncompromising good taste, surrounded them with an almost

monotonous completeness.

But if we are in danger of breaking our hearts over this spirit of beauty which has vanished from the earth, it is our duty to remember that there existed with it, ignored or tolerated, a state of squalor and wretchedness which, to this relatively humane and hygienic age, is nearly as difficult to visualize as its heavenly obverse. The state of English prisons as revealed by Howard's survey published in 1777, the London slums, in which Dr. Johnson roughly computed that one thousand people starved to death every year, the conditions of the Army and Navy, on active service, and when thrown crippled and destitute, without pension and without charity, on a heedless world, the savage callousness of the officials entrusted with the

administration of Poor Relief, the manifold horrors, already

springing into existence, of the Industrial Revolution--all these things very wholesomely temper our regret, our feeling that, as Dr.

Johnson would have said: "It is a melancholy thing to be reserved to these times," and very nearly resign us to an age of mob mentality and mass production. Nonetheless, when we are considering that age, the last of those in English history which produced works of great art, we must consider too the texture of the daily experience of the ordinary seeing, hearing, feeling individual; vulgarity they had in plenty, but it was the vulgarity of Gilray and Rowlandson's cartoons,

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with their bulbous calves and hectic noses; ghastly realism, but in the medium of Hogarth
Gin Lane
and
The Rake's Progress
; the girl of today who can see life only in terms of the cinema had her

counterpart in the eighteenth century, and she spoke in the accents of Lydia Languish. Could there be drawn a more vivid, a more

compendious comparison?

That there was no cheap, sophisticated entertainment for the masses was part of a state of things in which thousands and thousands of people were less comfortable, less well dressed, less entertained, less informed than they are today; but it also meant that there was not a vast majority which by its very numbers imposed its ideas, its prepossessions and its tastes on the world in which the educated person must now exist; the lower middle class, as it is the most considerable among consumers, dictates the canons of a taste which, by its preponderating bulk, has corrupted and destroyed the

standards of language, of architecture, of entertainment and of literature, which once prevailed. This development has brought in its train a great increase in human happiness, and it has annihilated something so precious that its very absence has taken away from us the power to estimate its value. One may find an apt illustration of our gain and loss in the bear-ward who was Tony Lumpkin's

companion at The Three Pigeons: he led a dancing bear, something of which we hate to think, but the tunes to which it danced were Dr.

Arne "Water Parted" and Handel minuet from "Ariadne."

If it be permissible to dwell on the beauty of the eighteenth century without perpetually reminding oneself of its horrors, it is surely so in relation to life in the country. The countryside had then a twofold loveliness; not only were the roads unspoiled, often unpaved, it is true, but bordered with copse and meadow, orchard and stream, but such buildings

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as there were adorned the landscape instead of defacing it.

Hampshire, in the district about the village of Steventon, had, standing back among timbered meadows, houses of many ages, from the Elizabethan half-manor, half-farm-house of rosy, saffron brick, nestling in the shelter of its hill, to the gentleman's seat, a classical stone erection with concealed roof and stone-garlanded, pillared front, planned with an eye to views and crowning a gentle, tree-covered slope. Of the soil itself, Gilbert White said that it was composed of: "a kind of white land, neither chalk nor clay, neither fit for pasture nor for the plough."This white soil," he added, "produces the brightest hops."

The village of Steventon itself was little more than a row of cottages, the important families of the neighborhood living at some distance on their various estates. The Rectory stood on one side of a lane, which had the breadth of a good road, but the weak places in whose unpaved surface were filled up by a man with some shovelfuls of stones whenever an unusual amount of company was expected at the houses beyond it. On one side of the lane stood a spacious barn, on the other, surrounded by meadows sprinkled with elm and chestnut trees, was the Rectory, a house with a flat façade and narrow roof, square sashed windows and a trellised porch; the ground in front had a wide, curving drive and to the right of it a plantation of elm, chestnut and fir. At the back, a bow window looked out onto a

garden where an alley of turf, bordered by strawberry beds, ended in a sundial; a terrace of turf, shaded by elm trees, ran between the garden and the open meadows, and led to a copse, visible from the house's upper windows.

The bow window belonged to the Rector's study. The Reverend

George Austen was a very handsome man with

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bright hazel eyes and finely curling hair, prematurely white; he was a distinguished classical scholar, and he was also acutely sensitive to the construction of an English sentence. He taught all his own children in their early years, and one of his sons till the latter became of university age, and he augmented his income by taking pupils into the house, three and four at a time until his own family grew too large for them to be accommodated. The Rector enjoyed a state of rational, almost ideal happiness. He lived the life of a scholar, devoting the greater portion of the time that was left over from his parish duties to his books, and at the same time he preserved a simplicity complete enough for perfect freedom yet compatible with every reasonable comfort. He had his strawberry beds, his elm walk, his home meadows, his position in a pleasant neighborhood as a much-respected country gentleman; but though he kept his carriage, the interior of the Rectory had in some respects the plainness of a cottage; the walls and ceiling were joined without any cornice, and some of the walls were whitewashed; the sunlight which struck

through the plantation or the fire and candlelight at night brought out nothing rich, merely the essentials of a living room in an age that made nothing crude or mean; chairs and a table, a pier glass, a glass-fronted cupboard with a gilt china tea service behind its panes. In a small front parlor to the right of the front door, Mrs. Austen with her aristocratic nose was usually to be found, darning the family

stockings whether visitors were there or no. She might, strong in the consciousness of her own, be "amusingly particular" about other people's noses, but with a growing family on her hands, she had no idea of giving in to fine ladyism, and people were welcome to call provided they did not expect her to put away the mending. She

always said that she was no beauty: her sister Jane was beautiful, but she

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was merely good-looking and sensible; but she had a distinguished air and a decisive, epigrammatic turn of speech. It was thought that she had perhaps inherited this from her uncle, Dr. Theophilus Leigh, the Master of Balliol, whose bon-mots were famous. When an

acquaintance was described as having been "egged on" to matrimony, Dr. Leigh had observed: "Let us hope the yoke will sit lightly on him."

Mrs. Austen's early married life, however she might bring to it a shrewd and intellectual mind, was domestic to the exclusion of every other interest; she bore four sons in little more than four years, and when she was not tied to her own house, on one occasion at least she went to London to nurse a sister-in-law in her confinement. The lady whom she nursed in town was Mrs. Walter, the wife of George

Austen's half-brother; to Mr. and Mrs. Walter some very amusing letters were written by their country relatives at Steventon, and in later years, a few containing little pieces of information about the younger daughter of the Rectory. Mrs. Austen much preferred her own country existence, and said of her stay in London: "'Tis a sad place. I would not live in it on any account, one has not time to do one's duty either to God or man.'" Of Mrs. Austen's first four children, the third, George, was subject to fits and was never able to live with the family, and the temperament of the Austens is

nowhere better shown than by the fact that, affectionate and

forthright as they were, beyond the statement of his death in 1827, not a single word in reference to him is discoverable in any of their printed memoirs and correspondence.

The three other little boys, James, Edward and Henry, were

splendidly healthy and high-spirited; then a daughter was born, called Cassandra after her mother. Like her brothers, she was put out to nurse for the first months, and when

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she was brought home, Mrs. Austen wrote and begged Mr. and Mrs.

Walter to pay a visit, saying: "I want to show you my Henry and my Cassy, who are both reckoned very fine children." Presently she wrote: "My little girl is almost ready to run away!" The child had an aquiline nose, and her eyes were black. Mrs. Austen did not say that she was pretty, but when the baby was two, she wrote to Mrs.

Walter: "My little girl talks all day long, and, in my opinion, is a very entertaining companion." By this time there was another boy, Francis, also doing well; as his mother said: "My last boy is very stout"; and again, their friends in London were expecting to hear of a confinement; until on December 17th, 1775, Mr. Austen wrote to Mrs. Walter:

"DEAR SISTER,

You have doubtless been for some time in expectation of hearing from Hampshire, and perhaps wondered a little we were in our old age grown such bad reckoners, but so it was, for Cassy certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago, however, last night the time came, and without a great deal of warning, everything was soon happily over. We have now another girl, a present

plaything for her sister Cassy, and a future companion. She is to be Jenny, and seems to me as if she would be as like Harry as Cassy is to Neddy. Your sister, thank God, is pure well after it."

Among so many brothers, it must have been a delight to little