Jane Austen (13 page)

resolution in its wearers. Muslin, spotted muslin, sarcenet, cambric, poplin and the softest possible cashmere, were already the usual materials of ladies' dress; and Jane, snug in her own woollen gown at the Rectory, yet felt obliged to say to Cassandra, moving in the superior elegance of Godmersham, "I hope you do not wear yours too often." She was going to a ball at the Ashford Assembly Rooms, and in preparing her dress, she said: "I took the liberty of asking your black velvet bonnet to lend me its cawl which it very readily did, and by which I have been enabled to give a considerable

improvement to the dignity of my cap." The headdresses drawn with evening gowns of the time are of very shallow, small crowns, worn far back on the head and fitting closely to it, with a frill, narrow over the brow and deepening to the back of the neck, and a small feather worn in the middle of the forehead, whose angle added to the

wearer's height. Jane's cap, which owing to her raid on Cassandra's bonnet now appeared to be of black lace, had a narrow silver ribbon twisted twice round it, and instead of the black feather, which Cassandra had advised, she put in a poppy-colored one, because it was smarter, and, she said: "Coquelicot is to be all the fashion this winter." She was so strongly impressed with this fact that when in her current story two girls met in the Pump Room, one was full of an extremely smart hat she had just seen in a shop window in Milsom Street--trimmed with coquelicot ribbon. She had also made herself a few caps to wear at home in the evening; they saved her "a world of torment as to hairdressing,

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which," she said, "at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up and out of sight and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering."

The ball, for which she spent the night with Catherine Bigg at Manydown, was a great success. Jane danced every one of the

twenty dances and felt that she could have gone on dancing for a week together. "My black cap," she said, "was openly admired by Mrs. Lefroy, and secretly I imagine by everybody else in the room."

"How do you spend your evenings?" she asked. "--I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her, and that Edward goes to sleep." The simple hours of the Rectory were different from the fashionable ones of Godmersham; the Rector's dinner was at half-past three, and was over before the Godmersham cloth was laid: "We drink tea at half-after six.--I am afraid you will despise us." After tea Mr. Austen read Cowper aloud and Jane listened when she was free.

Books were as ever the principal amusement at Steventon. A Mrs.

Martin was opening a circulating library in the neighborhood and wrote to Jane, requesting her to be one of the subscribers. Mrs.

Austen paid the subscription and Jane took it out in Cassandra's name. She was surprised and pleased to find that Mary was to be a subscriber also; she went on: "As an inducement to subscribe, Mrs.

Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature, etc. etc.--She might have spared this pretention to
our
family, who are great novel-readers and not ashamed of being so." A suggestion of what true novel-readers the Austens were, and how wholeheartedly they read, however much

they criticized, is afforded by the delightful glimpse of the Rev.

George Austen, reading
The Midnight Bell
in the parlor of the "Bull and George" on his

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way home from Godmersham.
The Midnight Bell
was one of a class of novels which no one could have been surprised at Mr. Austen's gravely disdaining to look at, if he had not been just the man to find great entertainment in them.

The reaction against the uncompromising, classical elegance of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the Romantic Revival, had already produced the interesting cult of picturesque beauty; but it had a smaller, more artificial, sensational offshoot in the Gothic Revival. The Augustans had looked back upon all pre-Reformation English history as something violent, savage and uncouth, now

happily lost in the dark backward and abysm of time. Their strongest term of reproach was to say that a person or a sentiment was

"positively Gothic." With the impulse natural to the human mind, the period that marked the highest reach of rational elegance in society saw at the same time the reaction towards the fascination of the mysterious past; and people who liked to live in white-paneled rooms lighted with crystal lusters, who admired china in the

delicious apple-green and rose color of Sèvres, who had their

carriages painted primrose color or vermilion, and their waistcoats sprigged with rosebuds, derived an agreeable titillation from reading about ruins infested with bats and screech owls, the nodding horror of forest boughs at nightfall, and the discomforts and perils of life in a haunted Gothic fortress. When Thomson wrote to congratulate his friend Mallet on the latter's poem,
The Excursion
, he quoted some of the passages which seemed to him especially deserving of praise.

"You paint ruin with a masterly hand.

Ghastly he sits, and views with steadfast glare The falling bust, the columns gray with moss.

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This is such an attitude as I can never enough admire and even be astonished at.

Save what the wind sighs and the wailing Owl Screams solitary--

Charmingly dreary!"

The charm of that emotion which Thomson enjoyed so avidly is far better explained by Horace Walpole, who, though not the earliest, was undoubtedly the most important and the most interesting of the pioneers of the Gothic Revival. He said: "One must have taste to be sensible of the beauties of Grecian architecture; one only wants passions to feel Gothic. . . . It is difficult for the noblest Grecian temple to convey half so many impressions to the mind as a

cathedral does of the best Gothic taste . . . the priests . . . exhausted their knowledge of the passions in composing edifices whose pomp, mechanism, vaults, tombs, painted windows, gloom and perspective infused such sensations of romantic devotion."

Walpole, in his half-serious, wholly fashionable Gothic enthusiasm, had his house at Strawberry Hill furnished and adapted to suggest as many medieval features as possible without interfering with the comforts, or even the modern elegance, of a man of taste; his roof showed Gothic battlements, and his conservatory was so like an oratory that the French Ambassador took off his hat on coming into it. At the same time there was a vast china basin with goldfish swimming in it, and in the hall suits of plate armor stood side by side with cabinets of exquisite blue porcelain. The mania spread fast; where small Grecian temples and neoclassical statues had once been disposed in telling positions about the grounds, the best people now erected Gothic summer

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houses with small leaded panes and Gothic ruins carefully

constructed of cobbles and cement. The heyday of the revival in which whole country houses were built in sham Gothic did not, of course, mature until towards the middle of the next century; its opening years showed only the rather charming and amusing touches which were added to without seriously injuring the excellent

simplicity of eighteenthcentury taste.

Walpole's Gothic fervor showed itself in another manner, by which he had an infinitely wider influence on the taste and amusement of the general public, than by anything he did among his fashionable friends in the privacy of Strawberry Hill. He wrote the first historical novelette exploiting the mystery and terror of the Middle Ages.
The
Castle of Otranto
, in which the eeriness the civilized mind feels in the presence of dark spiral staircases, secret passages, dungeons and imperfect lighting is combined with a supernatural element, was at once the perfect expression of the fashion and its pioneer. Gothic romances, such as
Emmeline
,
the Orphan of the Castle
, and
Ethelinde
, or
the
Recluse of the Lake
, were purveyed in their now-forgotten scores to the novel-reading public, who began to derive from their pages something of the pleasure that minds of a different stamp were finding in Percy
Reliques of English Poetry
and a study of medieval architecture. In 1794, when Jane Austen was nineteen, there appeared the most famous of them all, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe
Mysteries of Udolpho
.

This book enjoyed a widespread popularity which, compounding for the necessary differences between our time and its own, it is easy to understand. Compared with
The Old English Baron
, or indeed with
Otranto
, it is a novel of serious merit; it is thrilling, mysterious, subtly terrifying, and, at its climaxes, absolutely ghastly. Its weaknesses to

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the modern mind are almost all attributable to its unwieldy length.

The tendency in the development of our own "thriller" has been, since the days of Poe, to cut down by degrees all unnecessary

flourishes until nothing interferes with the rapid movement of the narrative; and it would take far more skill than Mrs. Radcliffe possessed to sustain our interest over so much space. With her original readers, it was an object to have their pleasure and suspense prolonged to the last limit of possibility; with us, who have neither time, patience, nor credulity, and who know as much (or as little) about the Middle Ages as we do of any other period of history, and on whom, therefore, her incantations will not work, her methods are fatal to her success. Nevertheless when the book is read from

curiosity rather than spontaneous desire for a story, it is most rewarding. One cannot believe in any of the characters, who are indeed little more than names; nor does Mrs. Radcliffe give one that inexpressible sensation of interest and awe that one feels in roaming over a ruined abbey by oneself. Her medievalism is precisely that of the illustrations which show a heroine in modish, nymph-like garb with laced sandals and hair unbound, wandering along some Gothic battlements, with a cross and beads hanging round her neck to

suggest the historical atmosphere. But she can create and maintain the genuine note of terror, and the episodes of the figure who was seen walking up the avenue, checkered with moonlight and the

wavering shadows of the trees, the hand that suddenly raised the counterpane in the great four-poster bed in the long-shut-up

apartment where the lady of the castle had died, and the celebrated incident of discovering the worm-eaten corpse behind the Black Veil, are, in their contexts, most effective.

Another element in Mrs. Radcliffe's popularity with the general reader of the time was that she drew excellent word

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pictures of the scenery of the South of France and the Italian Alps, and thus gave something for readers like Henry and Eleanor Tilney to enjoy, even if these passages were skipped by Isabella Thorpe.

When we remember that
Udolpho
was to the seventeennineties what the railway bookstall thriller is to us, a short example of its style provides a comment beyond the power of whole volumes of social history to express.

"Towards the close of day the road wound into a deep valley.

Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, and exhibited the

Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of retiring summits rising over each other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur than any that Emily had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the tops of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the

valley; but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendor upon the towers and battlements of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendor of these illumined objects was heightened by the contrasted shade which involved the valley below."

"'There,' said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, 'is Udolpho.'"

The wild success of this novel gave a new impetus to the Gothic romance, or tale of terror, and by 1798 Isabella Thorpe, having started off her friend with
Udolpho
, could supply her with a list of others when she should be ready for them:

"
'Castle of Wolfenbach
,
Clermont
,
Mysterious Warnings,

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Necromancer of the Black Forest
,
Midnight Bell
,
Orphan of the
Rhine and Horrid Mysteries
. These,' said Isabella, 'will last us some time.'"

"'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?'"

"'Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.'"

Among the crowd of Gothic novels was the unusual contribution of

"Monk"
Lewis.
The Monk
differed from its fellows in being not only lurid but lewd, and it was one of the few titles John Thorpe could remember with any certainty.

It is simpler to refer to the story Jane Austen was now writing as
Northanger Abbey
, and to its heroine as Catherine Morland, but Jane originally called her Susan, and meant her name to be the title of the book. As Jane changed the name shortly before her death, Henry was obliged, in posthumously publishing it, to choose another title, and decided upon
Northanger Abbey
. Though the novel was not completed till 1803, the importance it gives to the effect of

sensational literature on those who don't know any better relates it closely to the couple of years before Jane Austen left Steventon. One may believe that many tales of terror found their way from Mrs.

Martin's library to the Rectory, and were enjoyed by everyone from the Rev. George Austen downward.

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IN JANUARY of the New Year Cassandra was still at Godmersham,