Jane Austen (9 page)

vegetables and fruit. In the case of one client, Capability Brown was able to realize his highest conception of the improver's art; he was permitted to excavate a deep depression and to sink in it the stables and all the offices, so that no excrescence marred the outline of the house amidst its verdure. Brown and his successor Repton were of course principally called in to improve a seat already in existence, but when a new mansion was built, care was taken that where

possible it should crown rising ground, so as to command the finest view available.

The enthusiasm for picturesque beauty, as it implied a rearranging of one's own landscape, was of course confined

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to land-owners, but appreciation of picturesque scenery as a pleasure for the private person was both crystallized and further stimulated by the works of Thomas Gilpin, a clergyman whose taste and capacity made him a leader of one of the most fashionable passions of the day, and who spent everything he made by his writings on this select subject, on improving the conditions of the poor in his parish.

Between 1792 and 1798 he published five works,
Observations
on five separate districts of the western part of England, including the coastal scenery of Hampshire, "chiefly relative to Picturesque Beauty." Within the same period he produced shorter works on similar topics, such as
Picturesque Beauty
,
Picturesque Landscape
and
Sketching Landscape
. When Henry Austen referred to Gilpin on the Picturesque, he may have meant a collection of extracts of which the sources only have survived, or it may have been his way of mentioning the subject of Gilpin's works as a whole, but one passage of Gilpin's at least seems ascribable as the origin of a remark in the
History of England
. Gilpin said: "England exceeds most countries in the Variety of its picturesque beauty," for the following reasons: the prevalence of hedgerows, the predominance of oaks, the frequency of parks, its vaporous atmosphere, and the large number of its Gothic ruins; as the perpetrator of which, said the History, Henry VIII had been of great use to the English landscape.

Gilpin's observations on Forest Scenery are plainly glanced at in
Sense and Sensibility
. "How many forests have we, wherein you shall have for one living tree, two evilthriving rotten and dying trees.

What rottenness! What hollowness! What dead arms! Withered tops!

Curtailed trunks! What loads of moss! Dropping boughs and dying branches shall you see everywhere!" But in the student of the picturesque such a spectacle would arouse not feelings

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of chagrin at the sight of fine timber going to waste, but the romantic agitation of a mind attuned to sensibility. "When the dreary heath is spread before the eye, and ideas of wildness and desolation are required, what more suitable accompaniment can be imagined than the blasted oak, ragged, scathed and leafless, shooting its peeled white branches athwart the gathering blackness of some rising

storm?"

There was actually in the Austens' neighborhood a feature which would have delighted a connoisseur of the picturesque, but it is mentioned, not by Gilpin, but by Gilbert White. He speaks of "two rocky, hollow lanes, the one to Alton, the other to the forest. . . .

These roads . . . are by the traffic of ages and the fretting of water, worn down through the first stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second; so that they look more like watercourses than roads; and are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet below the level of the fields: and after floods and in frosts exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata and from the torrents rushing down their broken sides; and especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, hanging in all the fanciful shapes of frostwork. These rugged, gloomy scenes

affright the ladies when they peep down into them from the paths above and make timid horsemen shudder while they ride along

them."

The fervent enthusiasm for picturesque beauty might no doubt be ascribed to the reaction against the unyielding canons of aesthetic propriety and common sense which governed the century as a whole, and this reaction showed itself again in the cultivation of Sensibility.

The maintenance of feeling at a high pitch as a matter of duty to oneself often outran the genuine emotion, but the genuine emotion was

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often there. When "Perdita" Robinson wrote an account of her seduction and subsequent desertion by the Prince Regent, she

appealed to that Being "Who formed my sensitive and perpetually aching heart." One does not doubt that her heart ached sorely, but, then, nothing was more fashionable than a heartache.

So widespread among the cultivated portion of society was this mania for Sensibility, that when Hannah More wrote her
Strictures
on the Modern System of Female Education
with a view of the
principles and conduct among women of rank and fortune
, she devoted a long chapter to this quality and its dangerous abuse.

Speaking of girls who were enthusiastic by nature, she said:

"Through this natural warmth which they have been justly told is so pleasing, but which perhaps they have not been told will be

continually exposing them to peril and to suffering, their joys and sorrows are excessive. Of this extreme irritability . . . the uneducated learn to boast, as if it were a decided indication of superiority of soul, instead of laboring to restrain it. . . . It is misfortune enough to be born more liable to suffer and to sin, from this conformity of mind; it is too much to nourish the evil by unrestrained indulgence, it is still worse to be proud of so misleading a quality." The
Strictures
, which had reached nine editions by 1801, did not come before they were needed. As early as 1775 the evil had been noticed, and it ran through every walk of feminine society, from the impertinent Lydia Languish who had sent to the circulating library for
The Tears of
Sensibility
to the girl whose epitaph in Dorchester Abbey says that:

"When nerves were too delicately spun to bear the Rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet with in this transitory world, Nature gave way; she sank and died a martyr to Excessive Sensibility."

In the brilliant lines of Sheridan no less than in the

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solemn harangues of Hannah More, we can only regard fashionable sensibility as something with the preserved appeal to our interests of an object in a museum. It is in
Sense and Sensibility
that we understand what it meant to a person in real life.

There is a peculiar loveliness in
Sense and Sensibility
. The book's shortcomings are obvious; the language is often stilted, and of the two heroines, the author's confessed favorite is not likely to be the favorite of anybody else. Even today it gives some surprise that Elinor Dashwood, who is meant to be not only admirable but

charming, should be so constantly finding fault with her delightful mother and telling her what she ought to do; but these blemishes do not affect the romantic beauty of the work. With its too rational heroine and the immature stiffness of some of its expression, it is like a blossoming landscape under a hoar frost. The heart of the book, the core of light by which the rest is illuminated, is the calamitous love affair of a selfish loose-liver and a girl of seventeen, ardent, inexperienced, and trained to believe that caution or even common discretion are an offense against true feeling. The

characters of Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby are in one sense among the most deeply interesting Jane Austen ever produced; they show a mingling of more serious evil with good than she afterwards attempted in any full length character study. Marianne is more disastrously mistaken in her attitude to life than any of the other heroines, yet her essential, her passionate virtue, is one of the endearing things about her, and Willoughby, who for two-thirds of the book arouses the reader's detestation as a brutal scoundrel, is shown by a wonderful transition, whose suddenness is equalled only by its complete convincingness, to be actually an object of

sympathy. It is, if one may adopt the language of the picturesque,

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a moral chiaroscuro, unique among her works and carried through with a ruthless logic, an unwavering pursuit of probability, even to the point of Marianne's ultimate happy marriage with Colonel

Brandon, who had fallen in love with her at first sight, but whom she had declared to be, as a man of thirty-six, too far removed from youth, the period of acute feeling, to inspire any emotion but a respectful sympathy.

To turn for a moment to those parts of the book immediately

recognizable as characteristic of Jane Austen, we find them,

naturally enough, in the comic relief. The serious conversations in
Sense and Sensibility
, however excellent in matter, are frequently more suggestive of a particularly well written letter than actual speech, but the conversation of any character, comic, disagreeable or odd, is astounding. One aspect of her work is shown as truly in the comic portions of the early
Sense and Sensibility
as in whichever of the other novels may be the reader's favorite; it is the capacity to work up conversation to a pitch of comedy bordering nearly upon farce, and yet to sacrifice almost nothing--sometimes nothing at all--

to photographic realism. We laugh at Mrs. Malaprop as at an

excellent joke; we laugh at Mrs. Palmer and Robert Ferrars and Nancy Steele with the pleasure, and it is altogether different from the pleasure usually derived from humorous authors, that we get from something irresistibly funny in daily life. The perception that cuts out a self-portrait in conversation, as with a razor edge, was perhaps never better shown than in the celebrated second chapter of
Sense
and Sensibility
, in which John Dashwood, the half-brother of Elinor and Marianne, and present owner of the family estate, has a

discussion with his wife on the subject of how he is to carry out the promise made to his dying father, of taking care of the widowed Mrs. Dashwood

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and her daughters. To give an adequate idea of how the grasping and callous nature of the wife influences that of the superficially amiable husband who is at heart as selfish as she, but more anxious to view himself in a respectable light, it would be necessary to quote the greater part of the chapter in its entirety. By stages, exquisitely graduated yet rapid enough to maintain the stimulus of comedy, John Dashwood is brought to change his original idea of giving each of his half-sisters a thousand pounds, to that of helping them to move their things when they find a new house and sending them presents of fish and game when in season: and to think it a generous one.

The style, even in the serious passages, has a constant subdued sparkle, like that of a dark but quartz-shot stone; in the lighter narrative portions, apart even from the achievements in character and episode, it scintillates with every turn.

The principal comic relief of the book is supplied by a figure who is not, for the purposes of comedy, seen from one angle only, but whom we begin by ridiculing, despising and disliking, and end, as is so often the case in real life, by coming really to know and

consequently to value with warmth and respect. Mrs. Jennings, the mother-in-law of the Dashwoods' Devonshire relation, Sir John

Middleton, appears in the first volume of the book practically intolerable; her coarse good humor finds its most usual vent in joking about the supposed love affairs of everybody in her

neighborhood, and as both Elinor and Marianne are, from different causes, very susceptible to impertinent comment, the reader's view of Mrs. Jennings is naturally colored by theirs. No less offensive is her blundering, unfeeling, remorseless curiosity with regard to some particularly painful private business of Colonel Brandon's; even her harmless conversation puts

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her in a contemptible light; as when she brings her second daughter, the pretty, stupid little Mrs. Palmer, to call on the Dashwoods. Mrs.

Jennings said that she wished her daughter had not travelled so fast because it might have done her harm, as she was expecting a baby; she made this communication "leaning towards Elinor, and speaking in a low voice as if she meant to be heard by no one else, though they were seated on different sides of the room. . . ."

It is in the second volume, when Marianne, knowing Willoughby to be in London, accepts Mrs. Jennings' invitation to spend some weeks at her town house, that Mrs. Jennings' character begins to develop itself. Elinor had at first declined the invitation, supposing that in doing so she was consulting Marianne's wishes even more than her own; but Marianne, thinking of nothing but Willoughby, said that if Elinor were frightened away by her dislike of Mrs. Jennings, at least she had no such scruples, adding: "'I am sure I could put up with every unpleasantness of that sort with very little effort.'"

"Elinor could not help smiling at this display of indifference towards the manners of a person to whom she had often had difficulty in persuading Marianne to behave with tolerable politeness, and

resolved within herself that if her sister persisted in going, she would go likewise, as she did not think it proper that Marianne should be left to the sole guidance of her own judgment or that Mrs. Jennings should be abandoned to the mercy of Marianne for all the comfort of her domestic hours."

The visit thus embarked upon, with its immediate exploding of the mine which had been already laid for Marianne's happiness, brings out the essential qualities of Mrs. Jennings, of which--and herein lies the art of the portrayal--we were unconscious before, but which, when brought before

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us, we at once realize to have been latent in the character as previously described. Her extraordinary kindness to the girls, her good-tempered, humble recognition of herself as a silly old woman of "odd ways," her comically expressed but most genuine friendship for poor Colonel Brandon, and her instinctive condemnation of all the people whose falseness and cold hearts add so much to Elinor's unhappiness, make her by the end of the book appear as one of the pleasantest people in it.