Jane Austen (43 page)

Musgrove is tacitly understood to be engaged, is taken through the landscape of Somerset on an autumn day. "Anne's object was, not to be in the way of anybody; and where the narrow paths across the fields made many separations

- 337 -

necessary, to keep with her brother and sister. Her
pleasure
in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the fading year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness." The fateful expedition to Lyme Regis is undertaken in November; the weather is fine; still it is late autumn, and it gets dark so early they cannot go out again after dinner. The atmosphere of Lyme, under the short-lived brightness of a November day, and empty of its summer company, is a setting of strangest aptness for the events which there take place.

This interpretation of the beauty of autumn is particularly interesting, both from the period at which
Persuasion
was written and from the additional light it throws upon Jane Austen's sensitiveness to natural beauty. It was not until the eighteenth century had achieved a comparative immunity from winter's discomforts, that people were at leisure to see beauty in late autumn, as apart from the season of fruit and harvest, and in approaching darkness as well as in moon- and starlight. When these seasons of the day and year had once begun to be appreciated, they made a triumphant entry into poetry and art.

Although the autumnal atmosphere of
Persuasion
is true to a prevalent literary fashion, it is so exquisitely natural that it seems no more influenced by that fashion than is the season itself. The sad beauty of autumn heightens, like music, the emotional interest of the opening of the story. Jane Austen was sensitive to the beauty, even of winter, when autumn was over, and there was no hint of spring.

When Catherine Morland stepped out onto the lawn for an outside view of Northanger Abbey we are told that "the

- 338 -

steep woody hills rising behind to give it shelter were beautiful even in the leafless month of March"; but passages of
Persuasion
are charged with a feeling for natural beauty even where it is not a point to create a harmonious background; for instance, Jane Austen cannot even say that the party walked down to the sea without adding that they lingered to gaze at it "as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea who ever deserve to look on it at all." But the progress of the lovers' reconciliation, the theme of the book, soon leaves the sad beauty of the dying year behind it.
Persuasion
is the tenderest and most romantic of all Jane Austen's creations; but even in this story of ideal emotions the workings of probability, as viewed moreover by a mind singularly disillusioned and penetrating, are never subordinated to the claims of romantic beauty. Captain

Wentworth's love was not dead: that warmth lingered in its embers is proved by his behavior to her even in the terrible stiffness and estrangement of the opening chapters; but it required the admiration of another man to make him see the beauty which he had previously declared to have vanished; and jealousy of that other man to revive his love to a white heat. The profoundness of the character-drawing of this group of people has scarcely been equalled in English fiction.

It is not that Jane Austen possessed a more interesting mind or a more varied imagination than her successors; it is a foolish method of appreciation that exalts
Persuasion
at the expense of
Middlemarch
or of
Jane Eyre
. A supernatural power of creating character is not the only attraction of a novelist; it is not indisputably the first. The capacity violently to stir emotion, by what machinery soever, will always be valued by certain readers beyond any other; a novel of which the chief interest is the philosophical one of seeing its characters as puppets in the workings of fate will always,

- 339 -

to some people, have an interest superior to that whose first

achievement is that it gives the sensation of contact with an actual being; but in the power to work this miracle of bestowing life, Jane Austen stands supreme. Her method has this virtue, that whatever the restrictions of type and circumstance under which she practices it, when she has waved her hand and thrown her spell, it seems that the greater is, after all, included in the less; that limited as the circumstances are in which she shows her characters, for the time at which we read about them, their vicissitudes seem to cover a vast range of human experience. This is especially true of
Persuasion
; the story of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, so simply related, but so profoundly felt, sinks into the consciousness like a stone dropped into water, and spreads about itself widening and ever-widening rings of association, of imagination, of intuition. The remark that Jane Austen placed all her principal characters in one walk of life, that of the upper-middle-class, is always meaningless when offered as a criticism; but its futility is never more apparent than to the reader who has just turned the last pages of
Persuasion
.

The climax of the reconciliation is the most exciting passage in any of her works. In Mrs. Musgrove's sitting room at the White Hart, Anne and Captain Harville enter upon their argument as to the

relative constancy of men and women. Each of them is speaking

with an earnestness that makes them oblivious of their surroundings, Captain Harville because of his dead sister, and Anne from the knowledge of her own heart. "'We shall never agree upon this question,' Captain Harville was beginning to say, when a slight noise called their attention to Captain Wentworth's hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room. It was nothing more than that his pen had fallen down; but Anne was

- 340 -

startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed----" The scene that follows is very short, but it is weighted so deep with emotion, it seems as though poetry must start from it; but the characters are not figures seen through the enlarging mists of the Elizabethan stage.

They are a man and woman meeting in the crowded sitting room of a hotel. This agonizing bliss finds no relief in a flood of blank verse; it merely lays waste the powers of an ordinary human being.

"Before she was beyond the first stage of full sensation, Charles, Mary and Henrietta all came in. The absolute necessity of seeming like herself produced then an immediate struggle; but after a while she could do no more. She began not to understand a word they

said."

As one would expect from the fact that so profound an effect is achieved in so little space, the structure of
Persuasion
is flawless. It illustrates, for the last time, Jane Austen's own method of interaction of character (if she excused a desultory novel in other people on the grounds of spirit, she never permitted a desultory course to herself); but it shows this method developed to a further degree;
Persuasion
--

and it is perhaps this that accounts for the singular intensity of its effect--not only shows a group of people who all react upon each other; but a group of people who are all, from the angle at which their lives are viewed, illustrations of one theme, that of love. The variety of character interest is so great that it distracts attention from the structure, so that the heightening effect of that structure is felt before it is analyzed. The daily life, too, of the characters is conveyed with such variety of surface, such economy and brilliance, that in the case of many of them it is the surface which catches the eye rather than the underlying significance; the latter makes its contribution, unthought of and unseen, to the profoundly moving achievement of the whole. Nevetheless,

- 341 -

it will be realized that every one of the important characters, either singly or in pairs, though we see them as naval officers or country squires or adroit adventurers, the daughters of an aristocratic house or of a delightful, homely circle, each illustrates in his or her different manner some aspect of the central theme. We have the central story of Anne and Captain Wentworth, which is not only preeminent in romantic beauty, but is the connecting link of all the other stories; the courageous happy married life of his sister and brother-in-law, the Crofts; the flirtation of Captain Wentworth with the lively, healthy, excitable Louisa Musgrove; the shy, uncertain courtship of Henrietta Musgrove and Charles Hayter; the typical cat-and-dog marriage of Charles and Mary Musgrove, where selfishness and stupidity and good humor are so wonderfully blended; the self-centered, frigid matrimonial ambition of Elizabeth Elliot, the bereavement and desolation of Captain Benwick, which makes him, all unknown to himself, ready to fall in love again with the first sympathetic girl he meets; the domestic contentment of dear, goodnatured old Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove; the unscrupulous, cold-blooded passion of Mr. Elliot, the well-meaning but mistaken interference in Anne Elliot's love affair by Lady Russell; the ridiculous vanity of Sir Walter Elliot which nearly makes him the victim of the odious Mrs.

Clay. All these separate trains of interest converge upon the central love story, and the sum of the book is that we are enriched in our perception of the beauty of true and single-hearted love.

Variety of character is an essential feature of Jane Austen's art, but in
Persuasion
the characters strike one as being in stronger contrast than in any of the other novels. The characters of the hero and heroine are, it is true, always the complement of each other; there is not more difference between

- 342 -

the sensitive, enduring Anne and the practical, impetuous Captain Wentworth than between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, or Emma and

Mr. Knightley; but of the other characters one may say that the harmony produced from them is the harmony of strongest contrast.

There is the brilliant audacity of combining Louisa Musgrove with Captain Benwick, and the contrast of Anne's unsatisfactory home life with the glowing picture of the Musgroves' domestic circle. Jane Austen had drawn no family like the Musgroves before, and though her satiric spirit never sleeps, they bloom under its rigors. There is the scene at Uppercross into which Louisa walks before dinner, explaining that she has come on foot to leave room in the carriage for the harp. "'And I will tell you our reason,' she added, 'and all about it. I am come on to give you notice that papa and mama are out of spirits, especially mama; she is thinking so much of poor Richard!

And we agreed it would be best to have the harp, for it seems to amuse her more than the pianoforte.'" There is Mrs. Musgrove's constant, homely kindness to Anne, her sympathy with the happiness of young people, and the noble set piece on the occasion of Lady Russell's call in the Christmas holidays, when Mr. Musgrove talked in a raised voice, "but from the clamor of the children on his knees, generally in vain," while Mrs. Musgrove observed "with a happy glance round the room, that after all she had gone through, nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home."

Persuasion
contains the last addition to that gallery of portraits in which a commonplace woman is revealed in a satiric masterpiece.

Mary Musgrove's portrayal has not the vivacity of Mrs. Bennet's or Mrs. Norris' or Mrs. Elton's, but its comedy, though more subdued, is as marked; in photographic realism it equals theirs if it does not excel them, and the type of folly and disagreeableness

- 343 -

it represents is that most commonly to be found among any that Jane Austen has displayed. On meeting so perverse, egotistical and silly a woman, one is puzzled to know how she ever attracted a goodnatured man. The reply invariably is, when one is faced with an example of this temperament, exactly in the form of the explanation supplied by Jane Austen: that when such women are the center of attention, they are, or can be, exceedingly amiable. During an engagement or a honeymoon they have their lapses, but as the

exclusive object of their lovers' and their friends' attention, they manage to behave themselves very well. It is not until the ordinary wear and tear of married life begins that they show themselves in their true colors. Their outstanding characteristic is that they can never be brought to understand their own unreasonableness, and they manage to put aside all proofs of it without the smallest difficulty.

When Anne goes to stay with Mary, the latter is lying on the sofa and complaining of ill health.

"'Oh! Anne, I am so very unwell. It was quite unkind of you not to come on Thursday.'"

"'My dear Mary, recollect what a comfortable account you sent me of yourself! You wrote in the cheerfullest manner, and said you were perfectly well, and in no hurry for me; and that being the case, you must be aware that my wish would be to remain with Lady Russell to the last, and besides what I felt on her account, I have really been so busy, have had so much to do, that I could not very conveniently have left Kellynch sooner.'"

"'Dear me! what can
you
possibly have had to do?'"

"'A great many things, I assure you. More than I can recollect in a moment, but I can tell you some. I have been making a duplicate of the catalogue of my father's books and pictures. I have been several times in the garden with

- 344 -

Mackenzie, trying to understand, and make him understand, which of Elizabeth's plants are for Lady Russell. I have had all my own little concerns to arrange, books and music to divide, and all my trunks to repack, from not having understood in time what was

intended as to the wagons; and one thing I have had to do, Mary, of a more trying nature; going to almost every house in the parish, as a sort of take-leave. I was told that they wished it; but all these things took up a great deal of time.'"

"'Oh well!' and after a moment's pause, 'but you have never asked me one word about our dinner at the Pooles' yesterday.'"

In her serious conversation, Jane Austen sometimes departs from the exact intonation of daily speech to give that utterance of the soul which daily speech does not give. But in her comic utterances she does not vary an iota from the standard of absolute realism.