Complete Works of Jane Austen (368 page)

Leaving these exalted regions of literary criticism the reviewers now attack her character. She was cold, they say, and ‘turned away from whatever was sad, unpleasant, or painful’. That is easily disposed of. The family archives contain proof that she nursed a cousin through the measles, and ‘attended her brother Henry, in London, in an illness of which he nearly died’. It is as easy from the same source to dispose of the malevolent assertion that she was the illiterate daughter of an illiterate father. When the Rev. George Austen left Steventon he sold five hundred books. The number that he must have kept is quite enough to prove that Jane Austen was a well read woman. As for the slander that her family life was unhappy, it is sufficient to quote the words of a cousin who was in the habit of staying with the Austens. ‘When among this Liberal Society, the simplicity, hospitality, and taste which commonly prevail in different families among the delightful vallies of Switzerland ever occurs to my memory.’ The malignant and persistent critic still remains who says that Jane Austen was without morality. Indeed, it is a difficult charge to meet. It is not enough to quote her own statement, ‘I am very fond of Sherlock’s sermons.’ The testimony of Archbishop Whately does not convince us. Nor can we personally subscribe to Miss Austen-Leigh’s opinion that in all her works ‘one line of thought, one grace, or quality, or necessity... is apparent. Its name is Repentance.’ The truth appears to us to be much more complicated than that.

If Miss Austen-Leigh does not throw much light upon that problem, she does one thing for which we are grateful to her. She prints some notes made by Jane at the age of twelve or thirteen upon the margin of Goldsmith’s History of England. They are slight and childish, useless, we should have thought, to confute the critics who hold that she was unemotional, unsentimental and passionless. ‘My dear Mr G — , I have lived long enough in the world to know that it is always so.’ She corrects her author amusingly. ‘Oh! Oh! The wretches!’ she exclaims against the Puritans. ‘Dear Balmerino I cannot express what I feel for you!’ she cries when Balmerino is executed. There is nothing more in them than that. Only to hear Jane Austen saying nothing in her natural voice when the critics have been debating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.

Jane Austen Practising

The summer of 1922, remarkable for public reasons in many ways, was privately remarkable for the extreme coldness of its nights. Six blankets and a quilt? A rug and a hot water bottle? All over England men and women went to bed with such words upon their lips. And then, between two and three in the morning, they woke with a start. Something serious had happened. It was stifling. It was portentous. Steps must be taken immediately. But what a frightful effort it needs in the early hours of the morning to throw off all one’s clothes!

All over England for the past ten or twenty years the reputation of Jane Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and blankets. The voices of the elderly and distinguished, of the clergy and the squirearchy, have droned in unison praising and petting, capping quotations, telling little anecdotes, raking up little facts. She is the most perfect artist in English literature. And one of her cousins had his head cut off in the French Revolution.

Did she ever go fox hunting? No, but she nursed Miss Gibson through the measles. Her knowledge of the upper middle classes was unrivalled. One of her ancestors entertained King Charles. Macaulay, of course, compared her with Shakespeare. And where is Mansfield Park? So they pile up the quilts and counterpanes until the comfort becomes oppressive. Something must be done about it. But what a frightful effort it needs at this time of day to shake off all these clothes!

Now opportunely, in the nick of time, comes
Love and Friendship
to give us the very chance we want. Here is a little book written by Jane Austen long before she was the great Jane Austen of mythology. The Jane Austen of
Love and Friendship
was a girl of seventeen scribbling stories to amuse the schoolroom. One is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother. Another is nearly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. Nobody (for we may leave Mr Chesterton to the end) has been here before us, and so we may really read Jane Austen by ourselves for the first time.

She is a girl of seventeen writing in a country parsonage. And on page two, without turning a hair, out she raps ‘natural daughter’. Yet her mother might have come in at that very moment. The eighteenth century, of course, still persisted. The little Austens had the freedom of the house as no other children were to have it for a century at least. Money and marriage would no doubt be jokes in the nursery as they were, much more coarsely, jokes upon the stage. And clever children, beginning to laugh at their elders, would in the year 1790 pick up the last new novel and make fun of its heroine. ‘Ah! what could we do but what we did? We sighed and fainted on the sofa.’ When Jane Austen read that aloud, no doubt her brothers and sisters took the reference to Adeline Barrett, or whoever was the fashionable heroine of the moment. And as the Austens were a large family, and Mrs Austen stitched and darned and lay an invalid on the sofa, her daughters, while still very young, were well aware that life in a country parsonage has little in common with life in Mrs Radcliffe’s novels. This is all plausible enough, and much more might be written in the same strain. But it has nothing whatever to do with
Love and Friendship.
For this girl of seventeen is not writing to amuse the schoolroom. She is not writing to draw a laugh from sister and brothers. She is writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own; she, in short, is writing. ‘A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends, my Acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called. Alas! how altered now! Tho’ indeed my own Misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other.’ The authoress of those lines had, if not a whole sitting room to herself, some private corner of the common parlour where she was allowed to write without interruption. But now and then, as the writing of
Love and Friendship
proceeded, a brother or a sister must have asked her what she was laughing at. And then Jane Austen read aloud, ‘I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware of Swoons, Dear Laura.... Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint....’And taking up her pen again she wrote, it is clear, as fast as she could write, and faster than she could spell, for the incredible adventures of Laura and Sophia popped into her head as quick as lightning. She was in the enviable position of having one page to fill and a bubbling fancy capable of filling half a dozen. So if she wants to dispose of the husband of Phillipa she decrees that he shall have one talent, driving, and one possession, a coach, and he shall drive for ever between Edinburgh and Stirling, or, for Jane Austen does not exaggerate, shall drive to Stirling every other day. And Philander and Gustavus - what shall we do with them? Oh, their mothers (and, by the way, no one knew who their fathers were - perhaps Philip Jones the bricklayer, and Gregory Staves the staymaker) - their mothers kept their fortune of nine hundred pounds in the table drawer. So they stole it, and wrapped it in nine parcels, and spent it in seven weeks and a day, and came home and found their mothers starved, and went upon the stage and acted Macbeth. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense, there can be no doubt that
Love and Friendship
makes excellent reading. But what is this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of seventeen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.

Girls of seventeen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr Binney helps himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old Mrs Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment after. They have no fixed point from which they see that there is something eternally laughable in human nature. They do not know that wherever they go and however long they live they will always find Lady Grevilles snubbing poor Marias at a dance. But Jane Austen knew it. That is one reason why she is so impersonal and remains for ever so inscrutable. One of those fairies who are said to attend with their gifts upon cradles must have taken her on a flight through the air directly she was born. And when she was laid in her cradle again she knew what the world looked like. She had chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory she would covet no other. Thus at seventeen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation to the universe like a work of art. When Jane Austen, the writer, wrote down, in the most remarkable sketch in the book, a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which Jane Austen, the clergyman’s daughter, no doubt once received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and somehow we know precisely where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of seventeen, did she round upon herself in shame, and obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, end here. And the boundary line is perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and castles exist - on the other side. She has even one romance of her own. It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. ‘One of the first characters in the World,’ she called her, ‘a bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight and myself.’ With these words the passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It is amusing to remember how the young Brontës wrote, not so very much later, about the Duke of Wellington.

It may be that we are reading too much into these scraps and scribbles. We are still under the influence of the quilts and counterpanes. But just as we determine to shake ourselves free - and, after all, she was a limited, tart, rather conventional woman for all her genius - we hear a snatch of music. ‘Yet truth being I think very excusable in an historian.’ And again, ‘She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her - she was only an object of contempt.’ And yet again, ‘... for what could be expected from a man who possessed not the smallest atom of sensibility, who scarcely knew the meaning of sympathy, and who actually snored’. She is only humming a tune beneath her breath, trying over a few bars of the music for
Pride and Prejudice
and
Emma.
But we know that there is no one else who can sing like that. She need not raise her voice. Every syllable comes quite distinctly through the gates of time. And whatever they may say about her genius and her cousins and
Mansfield Park
we are content to listen all day long to Jane Austen practising.

The house in Winchester where Austen spent her final days

The plaque commemorating the author’s residence at the house