Jane Austen (8 page)

opening the folding doors between the drawing room and the

morning room; the windows of the latter looked out onto the lawn, on one side of which was a great yew hedge. The yews, black under the brilliant moon of winter, and the gravel that crackled and glistened under carriage wheels, were exchanged as the guests

jumped out of their carriages and ran into the house, for the warmth of high-piled fires, the magic radiance of candlelight, the tuning up of violins and the welcoming, gracious gaiety of Mrs. Lefroy. Jane in her rosecolored silk dress had a reason besides her love of dancing for being excited; whether Tom Lefroy saw her first on the stairs or in the hall or in one of the halves of the ballroom; how soon they danced together, how much Mrs. Lefroy, in the midst of her cares as hostess, had leisure to keep an eye on them, can never now be

known. Tom Lefroy lived to

- 58 -

be Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and as an exceedingly old man he said that he had once been in love with the great Jane Austen; "but it was a boy's love," he added.

It has sometimes been noticed that the most disconsolate widowers make the speediest remarriages, and James Austen's was a case in point. His second choice was Mary Lloyd. Eliza de Feuillide did not hesitate to point out for the benefit of her correspondents that Mary was neither handsome nor rich, but she admitted her to be sensible and goodhumored, and added: "Jane seems much pleased with the match, and it is natural she should, having long known and liked the lady." Mrs. Austen's pleasure was great; she wrote to Mary in the warmest terms. "Had the selection been mine, you, my dear Mary, are the person I should have chosen for James' wife, Anna's mother and my daughter, being as certain as I can be of anything in this uncertain world, that you will greatly increase and promote the happiness of each of the three. . . . I look forward to you as a real comfort to me in my old age when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire and Jane the Lord knows where."

The Shropshire living for Thomas Fowle was looked upon almost as a certainty, but it was not yet vacant, and in the meantime, Lord Craven, anxious to do something for his cousin, took him as chaplain to his own regiment, which had been ordered to the West Indies. The parting between Thomas Fowle and Cassandra was in one sense not so painful as it would be today, despite the fact that sea voyages then were so lengthy and posts uncertain; for lovers unless very much favored by circumstances were frequently as much cut off from each other within the confines of England as they would feel today if they were in separate countries. Long absences, still longer engagements, might be avoided, but they had often to be borne; but such a nature as Cassandra's

- 59 -

looked forward to the future and, however irksome she found the present, she would not let her friends feel depressed on her account.

Mrs. Austen had no idea of what Jane's destination was to be, and Jane at present had a preoccupation quite other than marriage.
First
Impressions
was finished in 1797, her twenty-second year. Before its actual publication sixteen years later she renamed it
Pride and
Prejudice
, and she rewrote it to such an extent that it is impossible to say how little or how much of the final story was found in the original. But now that it was finished in its first form she did what she had always done with her writings, and showed it to her father.

Whatever it was that met the Reverend George Austen's eye in the three volumes of exquisitely regular and legible handwriting, he thought very well of it. He was prepared to be pleased, naturally; she had afforded him too much amusement from childhood for him not to have a high expectation of it now; but he was not the sort of man to be blinded by fatherly partiality, and he would have been very chary of anything's being published, even anonymously, that was not likely to do her justice. As it was, he had no hesitation in thinking that it should be offered to a publisher; he wrote to Cadell, saying: "I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprising 3 vols., about the length of Miss Burney's
Evelina
." His letter indicated that if Messrs. Cadell thought well of the novel, it could be published at the author's own expense (in other words, at his), and he ended by saying: "Should you give any encouragement, I will send you the work."

Messrs. Cadell declined to inspect the work, by return of post.

Though they acted stupidly and carelessly, and, for themselves, most unfortunately, they acted altogether in the interests of English literature. However good
First Impressions

- 60 -

may have been, and however readily they themselves might have

offered to publish it had they taken the trouble of reading it, it cannot be supposed to have been more than a sketch or foretaste of the brilliant perfection of
Pride and Prejudice
, which had behind it sixteen maturing years in the mind of an unequalled artist, and came forth at last not only with the solid excellence it had acquired in the process, but with as much shining in it of the morn and liquid dew of youth as if it had been the author's earliest work.

But at the moment of receiving a disappointment one cannot comfort oneself with feeling that sixteen years hence it may turn out to have been all for the best. It is impossible that she should not have been disappointed, though it is characteristic of her and of her family that there is no record of her saying so. What is most striking in the affair is the influence she allowed it to have over her. After all, her novel had not been condemned; it had never been looked at. The only

person who had read it and was competent to criticize it was the Rev.

George Austen, and he had thought it good. No one whose first

object in life was to attract the public notice would have been satisfied with such a rebuff as that; even a timid author might have persevered at least until he found a publisher who would go so far as to tell him that his work was useless. Such was not Jane Austen's way; when, after her death, Henry tried to give some account of his famous sister's manner of work, he said that "though in composition she was equally rapid and correct" she had "an invincible distrust of her own judgment." It is as if when she had the pen in her hand she reigned undisputed; but when daily life returned upon her she was no more bold and unerring, but modest, reflective, attentive to anything that might be said. But had she merely

- 61 -

accepted in silence Cadell's refusal to read her novel, however unusual, it would not have been of particular significance; the latter, it is true, prevented her doing anything further with
First
Impressions
, but to herself it made no difference at all. The novel had been refused in November of 1797; before the year was out she was deeply engrossed in a second one. She called it
Sense and
Sensibility
.

The year 1797 had brought disappointment to both sisters, but had Jane's been severer than it was, she would have despised herself if it had caused her more than a passing pang, when Cassandra's was so heavy. In the preceding February, Thomas Fowle had caught the

yellow fever in San Domingo, and was dead.

Eliza said: "This is a very severe stroke to the whole family, and particularly to poor Cassandra, for whom I feel more than I can express. . . . Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution and propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation." This is not Jane's language, but one can recognize beneath it the warmth of sympathy and distress, and the loving admiration, increased tenfold, of the strength of mind that was controlled in grief and not morose but silent.

Thomas Fowle had left his betrothed a thousand pounds. Lord

Craven was greatly distressed, and said had he known that Fowle was an engaged man, he would never have taken him abroad; a

tragic consequence of discretion.

- 62 -

THE METHOD in which Jane Austen first three novels were

produced makes it a matter of uncertainty to decide the order in which they should be considered. The schoolgirl's sketch,
Elinor and
Marianne
, was followed by the youthful but mature
First
Impressions
;
First Impressions
by
Elinor and Marianne
rewritten as
Sense and Sensibility
;
Sense and Sensibility
by
Northanger Abbey
; then, after an interval of eight years,
Sense and Sensibility
was

"prepared for the press," and immediately after that
First
Impressions
was arranged for publication and renamed
Pride and
Prejudice
.

Our ignorance as to how much rewriting was involved in this

preparation for the press, must make any method of arranging the first three novels on a chronological plan a question of personal opinion. A good case could be made out for placing
Northanger
Abbey
at the head of the list, as the earliest example of a completed work; for though, with
Persuasion
, it was actually published the last of all the finished works, we know that it had not been retouched to any extent because the preface apologizes to readers of 1817 for anything that may seem out of date in a story written in 1803. Of the other two, one cannot but feel that, whatever

- 63 -

its origins,
Pride and Prejudice
is the product of the time at which the author published it; spontaneous, topical, inspired no less by present enthusiasm than by earnest craftsmanship, and that it is
Sense and Sensibility
that, even more than
Northanger Abbey
, represents the early work. It was obviously prepared for the press when Jane Austen's powers were approaching their zenith, and there is one indication at least of later workmanship. In La Belle

Assemblêe for March 1810, on the page headed Remarkable

Occurrences, Deaths and Marriages, the following announcements occur under "Hampshire": "At Ringwood, William Dyke Esquire of Vernham to Miss Elizabeth Steele of Ashmondsworth. At Cheriton, the Rev. John Courtney to Miss Ferrers, only daughter of the Rev.

Edmond Ferrers." But in spite of this indication of the source of two of the names in it, it seems possible to suggest that not the book's failings only, but, more important, its background and its

atmosphere, relate it to the earliest period of her novel-writing.

Henry said that his sister had been, from a very early age, familiar with
Gilpin on the Picturesque
. The term "picturesque beauty" has been defined as beauty capable of being formed into pictures, and the cult of the picturesque in England reached its most ardent phase in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was natural that the Rule of Taste should extend itself to landscape no less than to architecture. Those artists whose works were deemed models of the picturesque belonged in fact to a previous era; they were, notably, Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Claude Lorraine, and the savage

abruptness of effect in the first, and the beautifully arranged landscapes of the last, with their indigo distances and bold masses of foliage, so frequently touched with the gilded bronze of approaching autumn, provide an

- 64 -

immediate illustration of the general conception of the term. When Thomson poem,
The Seasons
, with its detailed descriptions of landscape in the varied changes of the year, became known to the public, he was hailed as the Claude of poets; the enthusiasm

extended itself from admiring a picturesque rendering of landscape to looking at an actual scene and deciding on its capacity for being formed into a picture, and the connoisseur had to assist him a

"Claude glass," a little appliance, something like the viewfinder of a camera, which reflected the scenery in a manner that brought out the picturesque values.

Much will the mirror teach, or evening grey

When o'er her ample span some twilight ray

Obscurely gleams; here Art shall best perceive

On distant parts what fainter lines to give.

This appreciation of picturesque beauty, celebrated in poetry and paint, greatly influenced landscape gardening. The formal laying out of gardens on a grand scale, such as one may see at the Palace of Versailles, yielded, among the fashionable landowners of the mid-eighteenth century, to a series of systems, each practiced by the improvers of the day, of which the common feature was an ordered wildness, and in each of which landscape was disposed with the aim of achieving an emotional effect in the spectator. Of one of the earliest improvers it was said: "When the united plumage of an ancient wood extended wide its undulating canopy, and stood

venerable in darkness, Kent thinned the foremost ranks, and left but so many detached and scattered trees as softened the approach of gloom and blended the chequered light with the thus lengthened shadows of the

- 65 -

remaining columns." The dramatic contrast of light and shade, chiaroscuro, was an inseparable adjunct to the picturesque.

The best known of the improvers of estates, "Capability" Brown, so called because he was accustomed to say: "I perceive that your estate has great capabilities," was noted for his abhorrence of a straight line. Avenues of chestnut, oak and beech, under whose branches their owners had ridden off to the Civil Wars, caused Capability to shake his head. He thinned them out, until they became clumps of trees, irregularly disposed, and he aimed at the illusion of a sweep of grass coming from the horizon up to the windows of the dining

room. For the paling, which had hitherto divided the garden from the park, he substituted a ditch, invisible till one was almost in it, and called a ha-ha! from the exclamations of surprise it so frequently provoked. The flower beds beloved of the Elizabethans, their red and white rose-bushes and beds of lavender, the tulips whose parti-colored, glossy ranks the seventeenth century had delighted to rear, were banished from a tasteful scheme and relegated to a rose garden hidden in yew hedges or a walled enclosure for cut flowers,