Jane Austen (46 page)

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But it does imply that he must have the strength of mind and the desire to work irrespective of the intoxication of popular success. It would scarcely be denied that the majority of successful writers have not this strength and this desire, and the popular writers of today are more severely handicapped than those of fifty years ago, because the machinery of publicity has become so highly organized. Of

publicity, we might say, what Burns said of adultery, that:

"It hardens all within, and petrifies the feeling."

The method of expression imposed upon Jane Austen, by

circumstance and personal choice, was one particularly liable to injury from the distortion of existence incurred by becoming a celebrity. If she had not been a genius, but merely a very talented writer, she would not, could not, have withstood the poison of success. Her persistent refusal to be known as an authoress, her anonymous publications, her distress at Henry Austen's revealing her identity, her gratitude to Captain Frank Austen for keeping it a secret, seem incomprehensible to many people of today. There was, it is true, an inducement to a woman writer then to preserve her anonymity which now barely exists. The female novelist and poet and writer of belles lettres was not then the accepted creature that she is today. In 1820 the gentle Charles Lamb was expressing the following views: he spoke of Mrs. Inchbald, the translator of
Lover's
Vows
, as "the only endurable clever woman he had ever known"; the others as "impudent, forward, unfeminine, unhealthy in their minds."

Of Letitia Landon he said: "If she belonged to me, I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think."

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At the same time, the prejudice against women writers was not

universal, as may be seen by the brilliant success of Fanny Burney, and the praise which Jane Austen received from men even during her lifetime. Had she wished to appear before the world as a novelist, and to taste in her own person the pleasures of celebrity, she could have done it. Not only could she have developed her acquaintance with Mr. Clarke, whom she had completely fascinated, and through him made her entrée into a very distinguished circle of literary society; it was her own positive refusal that prevented her doing so as it was. While she was with Henry in London on the occasion of her visit to Carlton House, Henry was approached by "a nobleman"

whose name, in repeating the anecdote, he did not give. This

gentleman was giving a party at his town house, at which Madame de Staël was to be present. Madame de Staël had said that she would very much like the opportunity of meeting Miss Jane Austen. The host was very anxious to meet her also. Would she therefore come to the party? She refused to do so without a moment's hesitation.

Considering Jane's fondness for parties and social amusements, and how gladly she would have gone in the ordinary way with Henry to escort her, her refusal is significant. It was not the company she demurred at; she would have been quite at ease, in her unassuming way; she would have been interested enough to see Madame de Staël if she could have done so as an onlooker. It was the fact of having to appear as an author that made her reject the idea instinctively; and the incident suggests how mistaken those writers are who, in

deploring her early death, say that had she lived longer she would have been able to emerge from her obscurity into a round of

lunching and dining with the great.

Her immediate sensation in recoiling from the position

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she would naturally have held was no doubt one of unaffected

modesty; she delighted to hear of praise, but she did not want to receive it in person; but whatever the conscious motive which led her to refuse to enter society as an authoress, she was actually obeying a profound instinct of self-preservation. The resolute determination never to relinquish the vantage ground of the ordinary human being had always possessed her. It accounted for her

otherwise extraordinary attitude to Cassandra. Caroline Austen remembered that when she asked her Aunt Jane to tell her anything or explain anything to her, her Aunt Jane, in giving the required explanation, always said that Aunt Cassandra knew much more

about the matter than she did, or could have explained it better. She invariably represented her sister as wiser, better informed, more important in every respect than she was herself; nor can one doubt that she really thought so. Affectation was as foreign to her as conceit. But it was not love and admiration only which guided her opinion; it was the need to take shelter behind another person, so that undue prominence and attention should not have to be supported by herself. Henry Austen said that nothing would have persuaded his sister, had she lived, to allow any of her novels to be published under her own name, and similarly, one feels nothing would have induced her to accept a position, even in her family, in which she had to support a well-defined attitude, or to be anything but the most natural and simple of human beings; such a position would have been abhorrent to her conscious mind, and it would have threatened that capacity of vision that was the inspiration of her art.

That, as a private individual, she was not of a retiring nature, is shown by the keen pleasure she took in social events, in the daily intercourse of family and friends. Her

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life and her work cannot really be described as in accord, because no external mode of life could suggest that extraordinary method which she practiced of selecting from a range of imaginative experience those details which are so profoundly significant that they carry with them depth upon depth of implication, and are yet displayed so artlessly that it is only the impact of the whole which leads one gradually to apprehend the adamantine solidity and strength of its construction. But from a superficial point of view her experience of life may be recognized as providing the texture of the backgrounds of her stories, and her acutely sensitive reactions to the social scene about her were what she guarded by her humility. She had the love of the children; her presence at Godmersham and Steventon could not but make a joyous stir; but, generally speaking, the scene did not alter because she came upon it; that was why she could see it with such undisturbed clarity. It is a favorite pastime to try to establish how much of it in actual detail she converted to her own use. The scarlet strawberries discovered at Chawton perhaps gave the idea of Mrs. Elton's strawberry party; the apricot detected on one of the trees, that of Mrs. Norris' acrimonious discussion with Dr. Grant.

The fact that she thought Charles Austen's children not in such "good order" as they ought to be and easily might be, is perhaps reflected in the behavior of little Walter Musgrove, who would climb on to his aunt's back as she was kneeling by his sick brother; an accident to the Austen's connection, Fanny Cage, who was taken to the White Hart and suffered dreadfully from the noise, may have had some share in the description of Louisa Musgrove's convalescence, in which she could not bear even the sudden shutting of a door. Jane Austen's desire to drive out in the phaeton of the somewhat

disreputable gentleman at Bath may have had some bearing on Cathe rine

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Morland's adventures with John Thorpe. The topaz cross, and the delights of having home a young midshipman brother who was

vigorously fond of dancing, had indubitably made their contributions to her work. But, in general, it was not the actual scene, just as it was not the precise locality, which informed her work; it was the

distillation of it produced by her imagination; and though it is fascinating to stand in Leatherhead church and read that Mr.

Knightley rebuilt the pulpit, it is a kind of amusement to which it is easy to attach too much value, and which is apt to obstruct the approach to a true understanding of Jane Austen's genius. The

attempt to reconstruct something of biographical significance from those characters who form the chief part of each novel not only underrates the power of Jane Austen's achievement, it also overlooks the tendency in the mind of the imaginative person to create a compensation for what is not there; not in the crude sense of what is described as "wish fulfillment," by which Jane Austen would be presumed to be writing a story of successful love because her own had been unsuccessful; but in the sense that the eye, where it has been dazzled by a primary color, on being turned away from it, sees the complementary color for a moment. People who pride

themselves upon a knowledge of psychological matters are

frequently very eager to infer from the presence of certain types in a novel the presence of those types in the author's experience. They would show themselves better informed if they argued from it a condition exactly the reverse.

The idea that Jane Austen preyed, as it were, upon society to find material for her books, was not only repudiated by herself, when she said she was too proud of her gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Captain B.--it was strenuously denied by her relations.

Caroline Austen

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said there was no one of whom it was so little reasonable to be afraid as of her Aunt Jane; and the stillness she often maintained in her latest years, though it was sometimes ascribed by people who had, against her will, heard that she was a novelist, to a taking of mental notes, was owing, said her family, to the fact that, with all her pleasantness, she was a little reserved and shy before strangers.

But Miss Mitford, in her
Recollections of a Literary Life
, expressed a different view. Miss Mitford said, that her mother had said, that when she had lived in the neighborhood of Steventon before her marriage, Jane Austen had been "the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly" Mrs. Mitford ever remembered. The portrait, allowing for Miss Mitford's spite, is an attractive one, though some doubts are cast upon its reliability by Mr. Edward Austen Leigh where he says in his memoir that Mrs. Mitford had married in 1785, when Jane was ten years old, and that Mrs. Mitford had actually left Ashe, of which parish her father Dr. Russell was the Rector, in 1783, and therefore her acquaintance with the Austen family had ceased when Jane was seven. But Miss Mitford went on to say: "A friend of mine who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of

'single blessedness' that ever existed, and that, till
Pride and
Prejudice
showed what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen. The case is very different now. She is still a poker, but a poker of whom everybody is afraid. It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable . . . a wit, a delineator of character who does not talk, is terrific indeed."

The latter description of Jane Austen, she said, it is true, might not be correct, because though the lady from whom

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she had it was "truth itself," she was a relation of the gentleman who was suing Edward Knight for the Chawton property, and as such

would be disagreeable to Jane Austen's family and probably treated by them with reserve; but Miss Mitford goes on to say, in explaining the legal complication which had given rise to the suit--"You must have remarked how much her stories hinge upon entailed estates--

doubtless she had learned to dislike entails." Miss Mitford is not to be blamed for not knowing that
Pride and Prejudice
as a story was composed in 1797; or even for not realizing that it was published in 1813, a year before the lawsuit in question arose. It is the statement that Jane Austen's stories "hinge so much upon entails" that, coming from someone who professed to know something of what she was

talking about, and having, moreover, a respectable literary reputation to support, causes some degree of astonishment. In
Sense and
Sensibility
the inheriting of a property by the male descendants, to the exclusion of the female, is the only apology for an entail in the story; and of all her six novels,
Pride and Prejudice
is the only one which mentions an entail or could be said to "hinge upon it."

This portion of Miss Mitford's comment may be judged by

ourselves; the other was not only indignantly denied by her relations, but the editor of Miss Mitford's Recollections felt obliged to enter his protest against it. The Rev. G. L. L'Estrange added a footnote to this anecdote, saying it was only fair to add that every other account of Jane Austen, from any source whatever, spoke of her as being graceful, elegant and shy. Miss Mitford says a few lines further on:

"I do not think Walter Scott did write
Guy Mannering
."

The fact that Jane's nieces and nephews, whose dearest recollections of her dated from the last years of her life, suggested that she was, though pleasantly ready to talk, somewhat

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shy before strangers, and that the lady who was truth itself, meeting her after 1814, saw something in her manner which she was able to describe as stiffness and taciturnity, suggests at least that a change had come over her, that she was not well. By the end of 1815 she knew that she was not, though no one outside Chawton Cottage

knew it.

That she was not a satiric poker, if it were worthwhile seriously to debate the question, would, one feels, be sufficiently shown by a consideration of her work. Her style, and most especially that of the four latest works, has the liveliness and spontaneity of conversation.

It is strikingly correct though not invariably so. On the first page of
Emma
we read that Emma was the youngest of Mr. Woodhouse's two daughters; we quite frequently meet with a clause followed by a subject not its own; as in the end of the tenth chapter of
Persuasion
, where we read of Mrs. Croft, that "by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself, they happily passed the danger," but the errors are few, and they are all the faults of conversation; apart from its evocative power, which can scarcely be appreciated unless the work be read as a whole, her writing is a remarkable blend of correctness with the spontaneous intimate tone of conversation. In one sense her task was easier than it would be now. The novelist of today, even when writing of the educated class, runs a great risk, if he makes his characters speak correctly, of making them sound unnatural; in 1815, incorrect speech in a novel as supposed to be uttered by educated people would have drawn a broadside of contumely and derision