Jane Austen (44 page)

Admiral and Mrs. Croft strike, as it were, a major chord in the harmony of
Persuasion
. The Admiral himself, whom one always thinks of as standing at the window of the print shop in Milsom Street gazing in fascinated wonder at the artist's idea of the construction of a boat, is a figure so lovable that, with the

Musgroves, he does much to create the domestic warmth of the

story, that contrasts so effectively with the atmosphere of Sir Walter, Mrs. Clay and Mr. Elliot. One of his most heart-warming remarks is delivered apropos of his settling in at Kellynch; it depends of course for its peculiar felicity on the previous account of how Sir Walter, impoverished but haughty, arrogant and foolish, thought it the utmost condescension on his own part to let his house at all, and that any tenant was far too fortunate in being allowed to rent it on any terms. The Admiral, once he has taken away the number of full-length looking-glasses

- 345 -

out of Sir Walter's dressing room, finds himself very comfortable at Kellynch and says to Anne: "'Take it altogether, now that we have been into most of the houses hereabouts and can judge, there is not one that we like better than this. Pray say so, with my compliments.

He will be glad to hear it.'"

It is Mrs. Croft, however, who is really the more interesting of the two. Her devotion to her husband is complete, and she had the

strength of mind and body to be able to enter actively into the way of life his profession imposed upon her. In the drawing room at the Great House at Uppercross when Louisa and Henrietta are poring over the Navy List, hunting up the various ships in which Captain Wentworth had served, and Anne sits by, disregarded, Mrs. Croft vigorously repels her brother's statement that women had much

better not be taken on board a man-of-war because it is impossible to have them looked after properly, unless at the expense of the ship's efficiency. She details her experiences on board to the placid, wondering Mrs. Musgrove. "'I do assure you, ma'am, that nothing can exceed the accommodations of a man-of-war; I speak, you

know, of the higher rates. When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined, though any reasonable woman may be

perfectly happy in one of them; and I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship. While we were together, you know, there was nothing to be feared.'" . . . One of Jane Austen's means of enhancing probability is the extraordinary care--or perhaps the spontaneous insight--with which she manages a family relationship. This is one of the rarest attributes among novelists, but she has it in perfection. The Bennet family provide an excellent example of her skill in his respect; Jane Bennet inherits the mother's beauty and the mother's disposition

- 346 -

towards good humor, which in Mrs. Bennet had been soured by her having no strength of mind to act as a preservative; but Jane

combines this good humor with the father's strong cast of mind, though that particular mind in Mr. Bennet had deteriorated into selfishness and cynicism. Elizabeth, so far as she can be defined at all, is a bewitching combination in which the intellectualism of the father has a much greater part than in her sister, tempered by the volatile femininity which she inherited through the mother. Mary has the father's leaning towards academic interests, but the mother's folly has turned it in her case into vanity and pedantry. Kitty is a feeble edition of her mother, but without the health or beauty Mrs. Bennet had originally possessed. Lydia, bouncing and forward, self-centered and brainless, appears to be all the mother, but the father's capacity has made her a much more determined edition of Mrs. Bennet.

Isabella Knightley, with her valetudinarianism and her anxious affection, and her fondness for gruel, is as much Mr. Woodhouse's daughter as Emma was the child of Mrs. Woodhouse, of whom Mr.

Knightley said that in her mother Emma had lost the only person able to cope with her. One of the most striking cases of family likeness is that between Mrs. Croft and Captain Wentworth. There is the same capacity for affection, the same practical ability, amounting in the brother's case almost to genius. He was a man born to succeed in his profession; but the essential likeness is modified by the difference of sex. Mrs. Croft is calmer, though not less penetrating.

When the Admiral said that one of the Musgrove girls would make a good wife for Frederic because they were so agreeable: "'Very goodhumored, unaffected girls indeed,' said Mrs. Croft in a tone of calmer praise, such as made Anne suspect that her keener powers might not consider either of them as quite worthy of

- 347 -

her brother." But Captain Wentworth's criticisms, if not expressed, showed themselves in a satirical eye and a curling mouth; and

capable of strong feeling as Mrs. Croft was, and excellent as she would have been in giving practical assistance, she could scarcely have felt the impetuous, devoted sympathy showed by Captain

Wentworth to poor Captain Benwick when he had to be told that the girl he was coming home to marry had died in the course of his voyage. Captain Harville told Anne: "'I was at Plymouth, dreading to hear of him; he sent in letters, but the
Grappler
was under orders for Portsmouth. Then the news must follow him; but who was to tell it?

Not I. I would as soon have been run up to the yard arm. Nobody could do it but that good fellow' (pointing to Captain Wentworth).

'The
Laconia
had come into Plymouth the week before; no danger of her being sent to sea again. He stood his chance for the rest; wrote up for leave of absence, but without waiting the return, travelled night and day till he got to Portsmouth, rowed off to the
Grappler
that instant, and never left the poor fellow for a week. That's what he did, and nobody else could have saved poor James. You may think, Miss Elliot, whether he is dear to us!'" People with relations in the Royal Navy plume themselves a little on the idea that they can realize better than others the verisimilitude of this description of Captain Wentworth's behavior. The sympathy of men on active

service for each other has been always celebrated; but the bond uniting men at sea together is often something unique in human experience. Captain Wentworth had done his best with the peculiarly unprofitable Dick Musgrove; and the story is the same today, when officers apply themselves with energy to straightening out the matrimonial and other entanglements of their crew, sometimes

having to help and advise men actually older than themselves; while it is a thing

- 348 -

often said that no one can be kinder and more comforting to a

bereaved man than his shipmates.

Persuasion
is, with all its naturalness and strength, so finished a work of art, that though Jane Austen never gave it the revision she was keeping it by her to perform, it seems at first blush as if even she could have done nothing more to it; but there are two passages in the work, nevertheless, which arouse criticism, and the reply to that criticism is, not that it is unfounded, but that the book is not before us in the form in which Jane Austen intended us to see it.

One of these concerns the narrative of Mrs. Smith, which, by

contrast with the rest, is undeniably bald and flat. It is a piece of machinery which has not been softened and illuminated into life.

The brilliantly spirited character of her writing as a whole impresses the reader irresistibly with the conviction that it came in all the first glow of creative energy and that its correctness of expression was due to the highly trained mind that formed a correct sentence

involuntarily. That she did, of course, make minor corrections very frequently in a first draft is proved for instance by the edition of
Sanditon
which the Clarendon Press published in 1925, and which shows, roughly, an average of half a dozen corrections to every page of manuscript; but in almost every case they are corrections which are made upon a sentence already complete. Even in a first draft, Jane Austen does not appear to have begun a paragraph, halted in it and then crossed it out to begin afresh. Her changes are in the nature of giving the final luster to what is already there. It would require alterations of a much more radical nature than these to bring up the story of Mrs. Smith to the level of Jane Austen's characteristic writing; and the improvements which we feel that she would almost certainly have made in it would have been obliged to have taken the form, not of a

- 349 -

word scratched out here and another inserted there, but a taking of material into the crucible of imagination, and bringing it out again as a living substance; nor, though the powers behind the operation were great, and the matured product of a lifetime, would the changes themselves have occupied much space; they might all have been

accomplished within that occupied by the episode in its present form.

Jane told Cassandra that she had lopped and cropped
Pride and
Prejudice
successfully; she said she hoped that when a great deal more of
Which is the Heroine?
had been written down, Anna would feel equal to scratching out some of what had already been done; and it seems likely that the revision of her work which occupied so much of her time was principally concerned, in the later works at least, in taking out rather than in putting in: for one thing, Henry Austen said of her--and if his testimony is to be disregarded, there seems no reason why anybody else's should be believed --that "in composition she was equally rapid and correct," but that she did rely very much on the impression she gained of her work when she read it over some time after it had been written, when "the charm of recent composition was dissolved." In his estimate of his sister's character as an author, he contrasted, as two opposing features of it, her

"invincible distrust of her own judgment" which made her unwilling to let anything be seen by the public until she had come to a settled conclusion about it herself, with the unhampered brilliance and rapidity with which she actually wrote. Now
Persuasion
was finished in the July of 1816; and even in March of the next year Jane was writing of the book to Fanny Knight as of "something ready for publication which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence."

Had it been "ready for publication" in the true sense of the

- 350 -

word, as apart from being merely finished, she would not have

envisaged a space of twenty months between its being finished and being offered to a publisher.

So much recollection is necessary before one comes to a

consideration of the startling passage about Dick Musgrove. Many years before, Jane Austen had been annoyed by the parade the

Debaries made about the death of their uncle, "of whom they
now
say" that they saw a great deal while they were in London; the attitude of Mrs. Musgrove to her son, who was "poor Richard" now that he was dead, but who had never been anything but "a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove" while he was living, struck her in the same way. Mrs. Musgrove's grief when she was reminded, by the introduction of Captain Wentworth to Uppercross, of the whole episode, "her poor son gone for ever and all the strength of his faults forgotten," had been greater "than what she had known on first hearing of his death." And on the evening of the famous party when the girls are scanning the Navy List, Mrs. Musgrove speaks to Captain Wentworth of Dick in such terms that Captain Wentworth's face assumes momentarily an expression which is too transient for anyone but Anne to catch; but "in another moment he was perfectly collected and serious, and almost instantly afterwards coming up to the sofa, on which she and Mrs. Musgrove were

sitting, took a place by the latter and entered into conversation with her, in a low voice, about her son, doing it with so much sympathy and natural grace, as showed the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parents' feelings." The behavior of Captain Wentworth is perfectly natural; he, in fact, appears in a much better light than Jane Austen on this occasion, who says that he should be "allowed some credit for the self-command with which he listened to her large fat

- 351 -

sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for." She goes on to say that "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." We are not disposed to be nearly so ruthless in our dissection of Mrs. Musgrove's reasons for grief; nor does it seem to us that affliction is more moving in a graceful person than in one of exceedingly comfortable appearance; on the contrary, it seems to most people more harrowing in someone of normally hearty and

cheerful exterior; that comment is, we feel, inadmissible in any case; and the whole episode forms admirable material to the people who feel uncomfortable in the presence of Jane Austen's skill. To those people such a passage can never be explained away; nor is it

reasonable to expect that it should, for with the notorious remark about Mrs. Hall of Sherborne, it is all they have to go upon; but to those who are interested in trying to reconcile its distastefulness with the general impression of Jane Austen's kindliness, sympathy, and good taste, it must be recalled that what threw her out at the start was the fact, which always upset her, of someone's affecting a serious sensation which they did not genuinely feel. She abhorred

rhapsodizing on religious topics; she consistently underrated her own feeling for music because she so much disliked an affectation of musical taste; her very strong feeling against hypocrisy and deceit (the suspicion of which damned Mr. Elliot long before his real unscrupulousness had been revealed) was another manifestation of the same instinct; and though Mrs. Musgrove is not charged with a shadow of either, she was indulging in sentimentality under the guise of a sacred feeling which, by the very nature of the case, she