Jane Austen (20 page)

At the same time one may incline to believe that the relation of Emma's past life with the aunt who had adopted and meant to

provide for her, and had then returned her penniless to the family, from whom she had been brought up as a stranger, would, in a

finished version, have been conducted with slightly more detail, supplying more information as to how that event occurred, of whose complete probability we have already been convinced. In the same way we feel that here and there, there would have been a statement, a remark, two sentences of dialogue, which would have amplified our pleasure, in the sense that though one strawberry is all that is necessary to show how strawberries taste, it is pleasanter to have a dishful.

The actual structure of the sentences is characteristically perfect, but they seem sometimes to follow each other more abruptly than is usual in Jane Austen's style; and though she used dashes very

frequently in the revised and completed form of her work, the

number of dashes between sentences in
The Watsons
is higher than it is in the completed novels: they appear, in fact, as frequently as they do in the letters.

In examining the fragment from the point of view of learning what we can about Jane Austen's method of composition, we may come to different conclusions, but one

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fact is inescapable: that from the very foundation, her conception of her characters was as firm and faultless as it appears at the

conclusion of one of her masterpieces. They grow into life before our gaze as she makes her magic passes, too rapid for the eye to follow; but to her they were distinct, separated from herself, fully born, in other words, before she had written the first chapter.

Mr. Edward Austen Leigh suggests that Jane Austen laid aside The Watsons because she had "become aware of the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in a position of poverty and obscurity, which, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain." One cannot feel that this reason is a convincing one, if only because Emma Watson is shown to such triumphant advantage in the poverty and obscurity of her home, as on the occasion when the pernicious Tom Musgrave brought Lord Osborne to call just as he knew that the table would be being laid for the Watsons' unfashionably early dinner.

Nevertheless, there
is
something painful in
The Watsons
. It is a study, of uncompromising realism, of three women desperately

anxious to get themselves married. Of the four sisters, Emma is outside this circle, and Penelope, though we feel we know almost all there is to know about her, we do not actually see; Elizabeth, the eldest of all, and Margaret, the youngest except Emma, show this desire through the medium of their widely differing characters.

Elizabeth, sane and good-natured, disposed to be fond of all her sisters, and welcoming Emma with a delight that is almost

incredulous after her experiences of Penelope and Margaret, feels to the full how necessary a marriage is, both from the practical and the emotional aspect of happiness, and has also

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been badly treated both by Penelope and by a flirtatious young man some years before; yet she has not become soured; her

disappointment does not interfere with a hearty cheerfulness and an innocent delight in Emma's interest and happiness. Her attitude to marriage is contrasted with Emma's in a conversation between the two. "You know, we must marry. I could do very well single for my own part--a little company and a pleasant ball now and then would be enough for me, if one could be young for ever, but my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at." She goes on to narrate the adventures of Penelope, who is staying with her friends the Shaws, to be near "a rich old Dr.

Harding." "I suspect the Doctor to have had an attack of the Asthma-

-and that she was hurried away on that account--the Shaws are quite on her side.--At least I believe so--but she tells me nothing. She professes to keep her own counsel: she says, and truly enough, that

'too many cooks spoil the broth."

"'I am sorry for her anxieties,' said Emma--'but I do not like her opinions. I shall be afraid of her.--She must have too masculine and bold a temper.--To be so bent on marriage--to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation--is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be Teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.'"

"'I would rather do anything than be Teacher at a school----' said her sister. '
I
have been at school, Emma, and know what a life they lead;
you
never have.--I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself--but I do not think there
are
many very disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humored man with a comfortable

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income. I suppose my aunt brought you up to be rather refined.'"

Elizabeth inspires pity and liking; the element of horror is supplied by Margaret, with her features pretty but too sharp and restless, and her voice drawlingly soft and sweet in company and snappishly ill-tempered behind the scenes. Her character is exceedingly

disagreeable, but the eagerness and frustration are depicted with such oppressive vividness that what would be contemptuous dislike gives way to a feeling of shocked sympathy.

It has sometimes been asserted that Jane Austen's novels are

preoccupied to a sordid extent with the business of marrying. There is, in each of her novels, much anxiety expressed by the elder generation that the younger members should not throw away the

chance of a good establishment for a mere whim of personal

reluctance; but this is treated by Jane Austen either as material for comedy, as in the case of Mrs. Ferrars or General Tilney or Mrs.

Bennet, or with severe criticism as in that of Sir Thomas Bertram and Lady Russell. She did, however, arrange for her heroines, as a matter of course, more financial security than the modern author would feel obliged to stipulate for; and there are some who will regard the existence of Mr. Darcy's park as sufficient to dispel the claims of Jane Austen to be considered a great novelist.

More interesting perhaps than the contention that she is preoccupied with the incomes of the suitors, is a discussion of the simple fact that Jane Austen depicts every heroine as marrying at the end of the book. To say that even nowadays the vast proportion of novels deal with the love affairs, if not the marriage, of the protagonists, is of course, in sober earnest, neither here nor there. From a writer of Jane Austen's eminence we have a right to expect that we shall be given a

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picture of life viewed from a rational rather than a popular angle, and it was clearly her considered opinion, not only that a happy marriage was the best thing for everybody--in which, after all, many people would concur today--but that the great majority of women were

concerned in getting themselves married as the most important

accomplishment in their career. The people whom she approved of: women like Emma Watson and Elizabeth Bennet, did not regard an eligible marriage as the first object of existence, though a very desirable one; but quite pleasant, respectable girls of a less disinterested and exacting nature were prepared to command their affections to a very considerable extent. The overbearing desire for romance, or sexual satisfaction, or marriage, or all these, as such, irrespective of a genuine attraction, is shown constantly in her less important female characters: in the Steele sisters, in Isabella Thorpe, in Lydia Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, in Maria Rushworth and

Harriet Smith, and Louisa Musgrove and Penelope and Margaret

Watson; in fact, with all of them it really appears their most important consideration. The point at issue is whether Jane Austen gave undue importance to a state of affairs which existed only at a time when women of the upper middle class who were single and

unprovided for had no refuge open to them but a post as governess or companion, or lingering out an existence in genteel distress.

In one instance, but in one only, we feel that modern conditions of wage-earning employment for women would have altered Jane

Austen's treatment of a character had she been writing today. Today, so sensible and respectable a woman as Charlotte Lucas, the intimate friend of Elizabeth Bennet, would not have felt herself obliged to marry Mr. Collins.

But of the other characters, it is true that so realistic a writer as Jane Austen would today have described some--or

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perhaps all of them--as engaged in some wage-earning pursuit; they might be typists or assistants in a friend's hat shop, or kennel maids or apprenticed to teachers of ballroom dancing and elocution, or students at an art school or an academy of music; but would their natures have been radically altered by these conditions? Would they have been less excited by the presence of men, less prone to think that pleasure means the admiration and society of the opposite sex, less anxious and hopeful in looking forward to a marriage that would put an end to the necessity of their earning a living?

Should we be justified in saying that the majority of women today are less interested in their actual or possible relations with men and their practical future as seen in terms of a successful marriage, than they were a hundred years ago?

We say that today the lot of spinsters is less hard to bear because of the innumerable opportunities now open to them; that, in fact, the lot of the spinster has ceased to be a hard one; so it has--if she thinks so.

Multitudes of single women who would have suffered keenly from the restraints and tedium and emptiness of their lives had they lived a century ago are now happy and busy, interested and sane: but they are not all; one wonders even if they constitute the greater number.

There must always have been unmarried women, even those with the normal attitude to marriage, who, like Jane Austen, could lead a full and happy life, loving and beloved, but just as the successful single women of today had their counterparts in the nineteenth century, so, too, the Margaret Watsons of 1804 have their pitiable and terrifying counterparts today.

In
The Watsons
Jane Austen was beginning a study, perfectly balanced in variety and of a stereoscopic distinctness, of a problem which she never touched again in so unrelieved

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a manner. That she was essentially capable of a realism as sordid as Flaubert's is testified in those few startling pages, but the power of a great artist is sometimes something separate from his conscious personality; Mrs. Siddons never undertook the part of Cleopatra, because, she said, she would hate herself if she were to play it as she knew it should be played, and Jane Austen was no artless disciple of her own genius, following delightedly wherever it led her; her conscious likes and dislikes were pronounced. "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery; I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can,"

runs the famous sentence in
Mansfield Park
; and it is not impossible to suppose that when she began to write again, and left
The Watsons
in obscurity, it was not because the heroine dined at three, but because something had been started in the story too near to

morbidness to please the mind that had composed it.

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IN 1804 the Austens left Sydney Place for a house in Green Park Buildings, whose situation, although in a less elegant neighborhood than that of Great Pulteney Street, was not unlike that of No. 4

Sydney Place, in that it stood in one of two quiet rows of houses overlooking a shady green; Green Park Buildings were much nearer the Pump Room, an advantage to the Rev. George Austen, who had become very feeble and who could not now walk without a stick.

Nonetheless, he seemed to enjoy a very reasonable state of health, and though he was now seventyfour, his daughters had no immediate idea of losing him.

But on January 19th he was unwell; on the following morning he was so much recovered that he got up and breakfasted with the

family; soon after breakfast, however, he showed signs of a feverish attack, and these increased so rapidly that he presently sank into a stupor from which he never recovered, and in which he died at

twenty minutes past ten the following morning.

Among the many concerns of the day, Jane wrote to Frank, aboard H.M.S.
Leopard
, lying, as she supposed, off Dungeness. She did her best not to break the news too suddenly, but as Frank's first

intimation of the illness was the

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letter announcing his father's death, the task was no light one. "I wish I could better prepare you for it. But having said so much, your mind will already forestall the sort of event which I have to

communicate--our dear Father has closed his virtuous and happy life in a death almost as free from suffering as his children could have wished." She told him that their mother was bearing the shock as well as could be expected. Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot had been with them, and showed them "every imaginable kindness," and, said Jane,

"tomorrow we shall, I daresay, have the comfort of James' presence, as an express has been sent to him." But when the letter had been posted, Jane discovered that the
Leopard
was not at Dungeness after all, but at Portsmouth, and so she was obliged to write again, repeating the substance of what she had said before: by the time this letter was written she was able to say that James had arrived; he begged his mother to go back to Steventon with him, but Mrs.

Austen said she would rather stay where she was.

The funeral was conducted at Walcot Church, that building whose porch is entered on a level with a lane that leads from Belmont, and whose further end overhangs the street above a sheer precipitous drop. The church, a fashionable, neo-Grecian building, stands over a crypt of such antiquity that one of its walls contains a Roman window. One side of the crypt is open to the churchyard with its tombs and grass, and a few paces within, lies the grave of the Rev.