Jane Austen (25 page)

Jane was glad Anna had enjoyed it, but she said: "At
her
age it would not have done for
me
." Anna had been to a much bigger one afterwards, and sent Jane a "very full and agreeable account of it."

"The grandeur of the meeting," said Jane, "was beyond my hopes. I should like to have seen Anna's looks and performance--but that sad cropped head must have injured the former."

In January, Henry was at Godmersham, and when Jane had a letter from Charles, she said she should say as little about it as possible, as

"that excruciating Henry" was sure to have had one too, and would make her information valueless.

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The letter was from Bermuda, and all were well. She reproached Cassandra with not returning her a due amount of news. Something had been in the air about Edward Cooper's sermons being published, but had Cassandra told her anything of it? "I tell you everything, and it is unknown the mysteries you conceal from me."

Jane's passion for news was insatiable, not only for receiving but for giving it; but fond as she was of writing letters she sometimes felt she had had enough. "As for Martha, she had not the least chance in the world of hearing from me again, and I wonder at her impudence in proposing it.--I assure you I am as tired of writing long letters as you can be. What a pity that one should still be so fond of receiving them." Another time she concluded a letter with saying: "Distribute the affectionate love of a heart not so tired as the right hand belonging to it."

The letters of Jane Austen will always be a source of controversy, for a sound judgment of them is rendered impossible from the start.

Most collections of letters are edited for publication, but hers is the only one which has been given to the public on the understanding that everything of an interesting nature has been first cut out. What remains is, to some readers, trivial and flat, its insipidity relieved only by touches of startling frankness and that remorseless clarity of perception and expression that will always make some people

uncomfortable. The intrinsic merits of the letters can be decided only by the reader's personal taste. No one would read them for a picture of the age, for they are the letters that are written in every age and have been since letter-writing began. Nor do they convey, as Byron's letters convey, a complete and instantaneous portrait of the writer. At best they give a sidelight only on Jane Austen's character. Here and there, as when she writes to the Prince Regent's

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librarian or to a schoolboy nephew, an objective impression of the writer's personality emerges for a moment; but the vast majority of the letters were written to someone with whom her intimacy was so complete that, as regards normal daily life, everything but trivial detail was too well known to need or to be capable of expression.

The mass of small and disintegrated detail, of persons, places, episodes and anecdotes, appears, on a casual reading, unintelligible; but the notes supplied by Dr. Chapman cause such a blossoming of comprehension in the reader's mind that it is possible under its influence to see, however obliquely, something of the letters' value to their original recipient. That Jane Austen herself regarded them as of no importance and was even dismayed at the idea of anyone else's doing otherwise was shown when she heard how much Fanny

Austen cherished her letters. She wrote to Cassandra: "I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write--but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning criticism may not hurt my style."

She would have been considerably embarrassed if she had known

that in 1930 one of her letters was to be sold for a thousand pounds.

To those who are fond of Jane Austen the letters need no apology, for even without the elucidation of Dr. Chapman's notes they provide a treasury of interest and delight, shot through as they are with sentences that cast a ray of light on something that she saw or felt, a country walk in a hard frost or on roads disagreeable with wet and dirt, a hamper of apples to be unpacked, a leaky store closet, a gown or a pair of shoes, the comings and goings of her family, the

occasional outbreak into words of her love for Cassandra. "Adieu, sweet You!" But they have an importance for even the indifferent reader: they reveal how much conscious art went to the formation of the novels.

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The letters are an expression, as it were, of the raw material, unsifted and unrefined, out of which the novels were composed. They are exquisitely written, with a racy, careless perfection the novels themselves do not surpass; but there is an earthiness about some of them which the novels, despite their directness of attack, do not smack of; yet such is the intense vitality of the latter, it implies in their author a full apprehension of life, an outspoken plainness in her own consciousness, at least. One of the erasures made by Cassandra Austen suggests that the sisters spoke plainly to each other of their bodily functions. Of a lady whose family increased too fast Jane said: "Good Mrs. D! I hope she will get the better of this Marianne, and then I would recommend to her and Mr. D the simple regimen of separate rooms." Visiting a young Craven at a fashionable boarding school, she said: "The appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like, amused me very much . . . if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the mantelpiece, which must be a fine study for the girls, one would never have smelt instruction." Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot would not have made these remarks, but Jane Austen was not either of these women; she was the person who created them both, and that was a very different matter.

But the most striking aspect of the letters so far as their relation to the novels is concerned is their very lack of objective

impressiveness. In a letter written daily to Cassandra everything was merely noted down. Cassandra knew the people and the scenes of which Jane wrote as well as Jane knew them herself, and the simple mention of them was enough to bring the living image before

Cassandra's mind. In a novel, where the reader knew nothing but from the author's information, every detail must be charged with significance, every word must tell. A comparison of one of

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the letters with the opening chapters of
Pride and Prejudice
conveys some idea, however inadequate, of the concentration of energy

which has gone to form the work of art.

The making of verses was a social pastime in an age without

mechanical amusement. Jane Austen had no talent for poetry though she wrote excellent charades, spirited and neat. To congratulate Captain Frank Austen on the birth of his son she wrote an entire letter in doggerel, quite as bad as anyone's sister might have written; but though she could not carry her extraordinary felicity into rhyme, one set of verses remains which shows that what she felt

passionately she could express with simplicity. On her thirty-third birthday, the third anniversary of Mrs. Lefroy's death, she wrote a short poem expressing the hope that when she was dead she might see Mrs. Lefroy again.

From her writing it is easier to see how much the world about her cared for poetry rather than the extent to which she cared for it herself; but one may judge how well the revivers of Shakespeare had done their work when in 1813 Henry Crawford was made to say:

"Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. He is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct." Jane Austen herself had had an education in poetry in common with the circle in which she moved. She thought that one of Edward's visitors must be a man of taste because she saw him in the Godmersham library reading Milton. One might have

expected that she herself would have been a whole-hearted admirer of Pope. It is true that by the end of the eighteenth century Pope's great fame had suffered an overthrow correspondingly complete; but in spite of the lack of sentiment, the indifference to natural beauty, and the use of clichés derived

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from classical literature which obliged Marianne Dashwood to make sure, before capitulating altogether to the charm of Willoughby, that he admired Pope "no more than was proper," one might have supposed that some of his qualities would have kindled a responsive admiration in Jane Austen; his delineation of character, conveyed, as in a streak of lightning, his devastating satire and the diamond-like lucidity of his expression. Some of his couplets are what, had she been a poet, she might have written herself, such as

Men must be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown proposed as things forgot
.

But the only sign of familiarity with them that she gives is one misquotation, in a letter, from the
Essay on Man
, and a quotation from the
Elegy of an Unfortunate Lady
which she cites as one of the tags that formed Catherine Morland's education. Her indifference speaks much for the truth of the tradition that James Austen helped to form her taste, and perhaps it is a rebuke to our tendency to fit a character to the Procrustean bed of a previous conception; perhaps we can learn something of importance about Jane Austen from the conclusion that she admired Pope "no more than was proper."

The same passage in
Northanger Abbey
makes perfunctory mention of Thomson, and though much of Thomson's work would have

become ponderous to a circle attuned to the simplicity of Gray and Cowper, many passages of the Claude of Poets, his descriptions of meadows in the spring evening and the autumn woods, "a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun," could not but give pleasure to one who thought that beauty of landscape must make one of the joys of

Heaven.

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Her genuine criticism is, in an intesting manner enough, reserved for the poets contemporary with herself. Burns, if one may accept the opinion of
Sanditon
's heroine as her own, she admired but thought too rough and profligate to be considered as of the first rank. The conversation of Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick was upon "the richness of the present age" in poetry, but they confined themselves to Scott and Byron. Jane Austen said on first hearing
Marmion
that she did not know whether she liked the poem or not, but afterwards her favorable opinion of it increased, and she demanded praise for having sent her copy of it abroad to Charles. Anne Elliot's gentle hint to the lovelorn Captain Benwick, apropos of Lord Byron's

"impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony" that she thought it the

"misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly," is beautifully in harmony with the characters, their previous history and the scene; it was what Anne Elliot would have thought, and it was advice sorely needed by Captain Benwick; but that Jane Austen herself could be credited with such extreme

sensibility to Byron's poetry seems doubtful. Her one reference to him in the published correspondence is as follows: "I have read
The
Corsair
and mended my petticoat and have nothing else to do."

It is difficult today to associate the mass of Cowper's neat and thoughtful verse with ardent, youthful enthusiasm, yet Marianne Dashwood said she had been "driven nearly wild" by his lines--

perhaps it was
The Castaway
she was thinking of rather than
The
Sofa
. But strange as it seems to us that lovers of poetry were once ravished with enthusiasm for Cowper's work, it is partly explained by the fact that the

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readers of 1800, though in full revolt against the conventions of the Augustan age, had had as yet no opportunity of reading Keats or Shelley, or even Scott and Byron.
Lyrical Ballads
had been published in 1798, but the newness of Wordsworth's style made it at first a sealed book to the common readers. Cowper gave them the ideas and feelings of sensibility, clothed in a language which, though to them it appeared the perfection of simplicity after the tarnished splendors of poetic diction, was more comfortably close to what they were used to, than the disconcerting nakedness of Wordsworth.

Jane Austen herself was not one of those people who cannot exist without poetry. She would scarcely have supported Wordsworth

when he said: "To be incapable of a feeling for poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and without reverence of God." But she had the sensitiveness of an educated taste; it is not a reflection on the latter that she had not, by 1806, discovered the
Lyrical Ballads
for herself, and that when she roamed about the February earth, delightedly planning a garden, it was The Task she thought of, rather than the
Lines written in Early Spring
.

Cowper remains alive, even to our unsympathetic age, by virtue of a few poems, but one versifier, though he was far more in accordance with modern thought, has perished altogether. Yet a study of

Crabbe's verse tells us something of unique value and interest about Jane Austen. Her fondness for his work was well known to her

family. She had been known to say that had she ever married, she would have liked to be Mrs. Crabbe; and when we remember some

of the assertions made about her, we can hardly smile at Mr. Austen Leigh for begging us to understand that this was meant as a joke. She only knew that Crabbe was married

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when she heard of his wife's death. "Poor woman!" she wrote, "I will comfort
him
as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any." It has been suggested that what attracted her in Crabbe's verse was his minute and highly finished detail. The Tales are indeed amply furnished with detail, but it is detail of a most grinding and prosaic kind.
Tales of the Hall
are anecdotes of middle-class life, but
Tales of the Borough
and
Tales of
the Village
are pictures of poverty and hardship whose realism was evolved for a very definite purpose. Crabbe objected to The Deserted Village as giving a false impression of the happiness of village life; the reader had only to look about him, he said, to be convinced of Goldsmith's disingenuous romanticism, and describing a peasant's existence as he himself saw it, Crabbe exclaimed: