Jane Austen (26 page)

By such examples taught, I paint the cot

As Truth will paint it and as Bards will not
.

It is no doubt most unfair that Goldsmith's poem should read as freshly as when it was written, and the eminently respectable works of Crabbe be found to have withered beyond hope. But though he had not that touch that would have brought him as near to us as he was to his contemporaries, the content of his work is perfectly understandable, and those who assert that Jane Austen was narrow in her sympathies and lacking in humanity towards any but the

comfortable portion of mankind, might be interested to glance at a characteristic extract from the works of her favorite poet, such as his description of the Dying Pauper. No one would read this poem, or any of Crabbe's pictures of the Workhouse, or the Pauper Lunatic Asylum, of the fearful stories of Ellen Orford or Peter Grimes, for the charm of their highly finished detail, or indeed for anything

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except the interest of their subject matter. Stark realism of treatment, a ruthless exposing of every fictitious compliment paid to the romance of a humble life, which was an insult to those who knew its privations, were to Crabbe a matter of urgent moral duty. "Will you,"

he asks,

"praise the healthy, homely fare

Plenteous and plain, that happy peasants share?

O trifle not with wants you can not feel,

Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal,

Homely, not wholesome, plain, not plenteous, such

As you who praise would never deign to touch."

It is not difficult to see why Jane Austen liked to read Crabbe's work; such sound common sense and such an excellent heart, and a method which went out of its way to avoid false sentiment, never more mischievous than when indulged in by the well-to-do at the expense of the poor, appealed to her with particular force. We remember her biting allusion to Lady Catherine de Burgh's method of visiting her poor tenants "to scold them into peace and plenty" and that Emma Woodhouse, deficient as she was in self-knowledge and modesty, was yet tentative and respectful in her efforts to help the poor of Highbury, and that Anne Elliot, the only one of the Elliots really to suffer in leaving Kellynch, made a call at every one of the cottages in the neighborhood because she had heard that the villagers wanted a farewell visit. When old Betty Londe said that she missed Miss Cassandra Austen because the latter had seemed to call in on her so often, Jane took it as a rebuke to herself and determined to visit the old woman more regularly; she told Cassandra joyfully of Edward's having given them ten pounds to spend among the Chawton

cottagers. Her fondness for Crabbe springs from more than her

literary taste.

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BEFORE LEAVING Southampton Jane had made an effort to

secure the publication of
Northanger Abbey
. In a letter, calling herself Mrs. Ashton Denis, she recalled the transaction of six years ago and expressed her surprise that no attempt had been made to publish the novel; she could only suppose, she said, that the

publishers might have mislaid the script; if that were the case, she could provide them with a copy, though she would not be able to let them have it before August. She added: "Should no notice be taken of this address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work by applying elsewhere." Messrs. Crosby, in reply, denied that when they bought the manuscript they had undertaken to publish it at any particular time, and added that if the author or anyone else attempted to publish the work they should take

proceedings to stop the sale; they offered in conclusion to return the script on receipt of the £10 which had been paid for it.

To pay £10, which would be more nearly the value of £30 today, out of a very slender income, and for a work which it was always

possible might be published if she left it where it was, was not at present worthwhile, perhaps it was not even possible, to Jane

Austen; she left
Susan
to linger

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in Messrs. Crosby's cupboards for another four years; and in the meantime, when the visits had been gone through, her energies and interests were concentrated upon the new house at Chawton.

The cottage, whose last tenant had been Edward Austen's steward, had received many alterations to make it a pleasant dwelling-house.

It stands at the end of the village street, very near to what was once a large pond, opposite the crossroads which led to Gosport and

Winchester. It opens directly on to the street itself. This being so, it was thought more comfortable to have the big window to the left of the front door bricked up, and the left-hand parlor made to look out into the garden. The window of the right-hand parlor remained

overlooking the street as before, and very shortly after the family's settling in Mrs. Knight received an account of them "looking very comfortable at breakfast, from a gentleman who was travelling by their door in a post chaise."

The nearness to the Winchester road meant that the cottage was perpetually alive to the stimulating noise of wheels and hoofs, and James' daughter Caroline remembered how comforting it was, when she stayed as a small child with her grandmother, "to have the awful stillness of night frequently broken by the sound of passing

carriages, which seemed sometimes even to shake the bed." Her grandmother, too, Caroline thought, enjoyed the cheerful bustle of frequent traffic. Mrs. Austen, from the time of her arrival at Chawton, had completely given over the affairs of the household to Cassandra and Jane; the latter made breakfast every day at nine, and looked after the stores of tea, sugar and wine; Cassandra saw to everything else. Mrs. Austen herself was very energetic in the garden, however; and not merely in delicately clipping and pruning; she put on "a round green smock like a laborer's" and dug the potatoes.

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Within doors, she employed herself in devising and making a

splendid patchwork quilt; she had also taken to knitting gloves, and found the work quite absorbing.

The left-hand parlor was the larger of the two, and Jane's piano stood there; but in the right-hand one, which was the common sitting room, was kept her mahogany writing desk. She had, says her

nephew, no separate study to retire to; there was no dressing room here as there had been at Steventon in which she worked with no one near her but her "other self." She wrote now in a living room overlooking the road, in which any caller immediately perceived her to be at home, where the children from Steventon were constantly walking in. Her sole protections against the world were a door which creaked, whose hinges she asked might remain unattended to

because they gave her warning that somebody was coming, and the blotting paper under which she slipped her small sheets of

exquisitely written manuscript when a visitor was shown in. The many long spells of quiet when the others had walked out, her

mother was in the garden and she had the room to herself; or when the domestic party was assembled, sewing and reading, with nothing but the soft stir of utterly familiar sounds and no tones but the low, infrequent ones of beloved, familiar voices--these were the

conditions in which she created
Mansfield Park
,
Emma
and
Persuasion
. They seem inadequate, it is true; the important novelists of today, who have their agents and their secretaries, whose

establishments are run entirely for their own convenience and who give out that they must never in any circumstances be disturbed while they are at work--these have, in every respect, a superior régime to that of Jane Austen's unprofessional existence--but their books are not so good.

Hers were not conditions in which any but a mind of

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exceptional strength could have exerted itself to full advantage; but the shaping spirit of imagination that created human beings, whole and entire, was a force too powerful to be thrown out of gear by having to break off in a conversation or a paragraph because a child wanted to talk to her. When James' Edward, in his Winchester

holidays, or the young lady Anna, or the four-year-old Caroline, or one of the tribe of Godmersham cousins, on a visit to the great house opposite, came into the right-hand parlor of the cottage, they remembered afterwards that their Aunt Jane had frequently been writing at her desk before, at their entrance, she turned to greet them with her gay, affectionate manner. Their remorse, afterwards, for the mischief they might have done was intense; it could not be

otherwise, when they considered that they had interrupted her in
Mansfield Park
, or
Emma
or
Persuasion
; but they did no injury; she put the sheet under the blotting paper with a smile.

It is of this period that the children's recollections of her were the strongest. For a couple of years Fanny and Anna had known and

loved her, though their closest intercourse with her was yet to come; but now the little Caroline began to know her, too. Caroline had of course seen Aunt Jane the previous year when she had come with them in the carriage to Godmersham. The Godmersham visit had not been a very happy one for Caroline, who, as her Aunt Jane saw, had been overpowered by her blooming, noisy cousins; but at Steventon and Chawton, where everything was quieter, she began to learn how delightful her Aunt Jane was. She said in later years: "As a very little girl, I was always creeping up to Aunt Jane, and following her whenever I could, in the house and out of it." Mary was afraid that Caroline might be a nuisance, and told her privately that "she must not be

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troublesome to her aunt," but the attraction was irresistible. Caroline explained it in the words: "She seemed to love you, and you loved her in return." That was the earliest charm; then when Caroline was old enough to understand them, came "delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland." One is not surprised to hear that Aunt Jane's fairies "had all characters of their own." The same entertainment had been produced for Anna long ago in the dressing room at Steventon, and she spoke for herself, for Caroline and the younger Godmersham Austens, when she said that the "long, circumstantial stories" were

"begged for on all possible and impossible occasions." Another pastime at which Aunt Jane excelled was dressing up and

pretending. When the children in the cottage played at this, Aunt Jane provided clothes out of her own wardrobe, and she was the visitor in the make-believe house. An occasion that stuck in

Caroline's memory was when Aunt Jane, pretending that Caroline and her cousins, Frank's Mary Jane and Charles' Cassy, were grown up, invented a conversation between the three ladies on the day after a ball.

Edward Austen Leigh wrote down a description of her appearance at the time of which he first became conscious of it, in the years beginning with the family's removal from Southampton. He thought her "very attractive." She was tall and slender; her face was rounded, with a clear brunette complexion and bright hazel eyes. Caroline said that her Aunt Jane's was the first face she remembered thinking of as pretty. She was not so handsome as Cassandra, but her face had "a peculiar charm of its own to the eye of most beholders." Her curly brown hair escaped all round her forehead, but from the time of her coming to live at Chawton she always wore a cap, except when her nieces had her in London and forbade it, obliging her to have her hair all "curled out"

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and bound with a ribbon, which was something against her better judgment, but to which she was partially reconciled by their saying how charming it looked. Edward said that in the Chawton period, which began when she was thirty-four, though she was always

dressed with beautiful care, she had given up being fashionable; and he thought he remembered that people in general said she was too young and attractive to be so regardless of making the most of herself.

One characteristic that impressed them all was the wonderful

regularity of any of her handiwork. Her handwriting, controlled and flawless as the cutting on a gem, remains for us to see; but the family remembered how deftly her letters were always folded. "In those days there was an art in folding and sealing. No adhesive envelopes made all easy. Some people's letters always looked loose and untidy; but her paper was sure to take the right folds, and her sealing wax to drop into the right place." She sewed exquisitely, with such regular stitches "as might almost have put a sewing machine to shame." A great deal of her sewing was done on garments for the poor, but she usually had a piece of embroidery at hand that she might take up if visitors were there; satinstitch was her especial forte; on one occasion she sent Fanny an embroidered strip; and there still exists a large muslin scarf bordered with her handiwork. She was the deftest of any at games requiring dexterity of hand, such as spillikins or cup and ball. She amazed Edward by what she could do with the latter; sometimes she caught the ivory ball upon its point over a hundred times in succession.

She seems to have had, besides a dislike for much expression of religious enthusiasm, a dislike for anything bordering on an

affectation of enthusiasm for music. Today such an affectation is almost unknown; the majority of people who do not care for music do not imagine that they make

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themselves more interesting by pretending that they do; but when diversions were relatively few, and, while general information was scanty, the standard of accomplishments was high, there was a

temptation to pretend to musical fervor which is quite outside our experience. A vivid illustration of this is supplied by Mrs. Elton.

Jane frequently, in private life, displayed a determination not to show more pleasure in music than she actually felt. In Bath she had said of a public concert in Sydney Gardens that happily the gardens were large enough for her to get out of earshot of the strains; and though we might take that as a not unjust reflection on the orchestra, she said of a singer in town, "that she gave
me
no pleasure is no reflection upon her, nor I hope upon myself, being what nature made me on that article." She did not think a defective appreciation of music was an unsympathetic trait in a heroine; at a party, Elinor Dashwood who "was neither musical nor affecting to be so," "made no scruple of turning away her eye from the grand pianoforte when it suited her, and unrestrained by the presence even of a harp and a violoncello, would fix them at pleasure on any other object in the room." Yet her own genuine fondness for music was considerable.