Jane Austen (38 page)

Weston, her smile, her touch, her voice, was grateful to Emma."

The character of Mrs. Weston is perhaps the most attractive in the book, with its common sense only overcome by her affection for Emma, "My Emma," her extraordinary kindness to Mr. Woodhouse, her devotion to her husband and her acute anxiety that for his sake everything about Frank Churchill's behavior shall be satisfactory; nor was she, delightful as she was, undervalued by the family with whom she lived. But Jane Fairfax takes it for granted that when she

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becomes a governess she is to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope." And to Mrs.

Elton's officious inquiries and offers of assistance in helping to find a situation, she says: "'When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something--offices for the sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect.'"

"'Oh, my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave trade, I assure you, Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.'"

"'I did not mean--I was not thinking of the slave trade,' replied Jane;

'governess trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different, certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on, but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.'"

In
Mansfield Park
, when the casting of "Lovers' Vows" is under discussion, and it is proposed that Julia should take Cottager's Wife, the enamored Mr. Yates exclaims: "'Cottager's Wife! What are you talking of? The most trivial, paltry, insignificant part; the merest commonplace; not a tolerable speech in the whole. Your sister do that! It is an insult to propose it. At Ecclesford the governess was to have done it. We all agreed that it could not be offered to anybody else.'"

On the whole it must be confessed that the position occupied by Lord Ravenshaw's governess was more typical of the governess in general than that of Miss Taylor at Hartfield. At the same time it is almost impossible, when one considers Miss Taylor at one end of the scale, and Agnes Gray at the other, to form a generalized estimate of the position of the governess in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Barnard's Miss Meadows, and Dickens' Ruth

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Pinch--we fully believe in the authenticity of each. It can only be supposed that a position which depended for its comfort almost entirely on the character of the employer, varied as much as human nature itself. Jane Fairfax was thinking of the misery of exile from friends, uncongenial occupation and society in which she held, on however easy a tenure, the position of an upper servant; but as regarded the physical conditions of employment, an elegant, well-bred girl, as highly accomplished as herself, going into a family who could afford to pay for her, might, according to Mrs. Elton, be very fairly comfortable. "'Your musical knowledge alone would entitle you to name your own terms, have as many rooms as you like, and mix in the family as much as you chose; that is--I do not know--if you knew the harp, you might do all that, I am very sure; but you sing as well as play; yes, I really believe you might, even without the harp, stipulate for what you chose,--and you must and shall be delightfully, honorably and comfortably settled, before the

Campbells or I have any rest.'"

"'You may well class the delight, the honor and the comfort of such a situation together,' said Jane, 'they are pretty sure to be equal.'"

The humor of
Emma
is implicit in every turn of the work; and it has not only excellent comic characters such as the Eltons and Harriet Smith, but it is decorated, in the persons of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates, with two of the masterpieces of English comedy. To this gallery Jane Austen had already contributed the portraits of Mr.

Bennet, Mr. Collins and Mrs. Norris; but in their way the two latest achievements surpass even the earlier ones; at least they represent the apotheosis of that method that consists in picking up garden pebbles with the hand of Midas. Mr. Bennet was a man of unusual intellect, Mr. Collins one of nature's strongest

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efforts in foolishness; Mrs. Norris was a singularly disagreeable woman; but there is, in the abstract, nothing outstanding about either of the supreme comic creations of
Emma
; one is a feeble and silly old man, the other a garrulous and boring old woman. But not when we see them as Jane Austen saw them; never has such commonplace human material been so filled with light. Mr. Woodhouse makes

many appeals to our sympathies. He is touching, when he tries to remember a charade for the girls, and tells Emma regretfully that her mother had been so clever at that kind of thing; when he "fondly notices" the beauty of Emma's dress before she goes to the Coles'

dinner party; when, as the company are playing Word-Making and Word-Taking, he occasionally picks up a letter to remark how well Emma had written it; in his apologetic courtesies to the guests at Hartfield, wishing his health allowed him to be a better neighbor; but none of these appeals is made directly; they steal upon us with unresisted power as we watch the presentation of Mr. Woodhouse, and that is made purely through the medium of comedy. Mr.

Woodhouse is first and foremost a comic character; his

valetudinarianism is a charming folly because it takes as much thought for other people's nerves, colds and indigestion as for his own; his great scenes are concerned with his proposing a boiled egg to Mrs. Bates, or his suggesting that the company, which includes Mr. Knightley and Mr. John Knightley, shall join him in a basin of gruel, or finding fault with the portrait of Harriet Smith because it makes her look as if she were sitting down outside: "'But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer; a warm day in summer. Look at the tree.'"

"'But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear.'"

It is the same thing with Miss Bates; Miss Bates is a more exemplary and sympathetic character than Mr. Woodhouse;

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when the latter was not the prey of his almost unceasing agitation on the score of his own and other people's health and safety, he was having a very pleasant time of it, living in a beautiful house and surrounded by an adoring daughter and friends, whose first concern it was that he should be made as little uneasy as possible on every occasion. But Miss Bates lived on the extremest verge of genteel poverty, with the care of an infirm old mother; yet she was

nonetheless overflowing with cheerfulness, good will, and gratitude for the innumerable blessings she felt that she enjoyed. At the same time, she also is presented to us, her comic aspect foremost. She has been described as a bore; indeed, Emma thought her so; but the flow of her garrulity has that balanced and dramatic quality which it is stimulating to listen to; the sentences frequently run into each other, but they have that emphatic vividness that shows a mind thoroughly alive to diverse interests; her tiresomeness consists in a tendency to what the psychoanalysts describe as "total recall," and it is precisely this quality which makes her superbly comic. Miss Bates' bravura passages are all of great length: as, for example, her conversation, partly delivered out of the window to Mr. Knightley, partly to the company who have come to hear Jane Fairfax's new piano, and the monologue which she keeps up as Frank Churchill conducts her and Jane from the ballroom to the supper room at the Crown. It is not that what she says is ridiculous, but quite the contrary; her comments and remarks are all, in themselves, evidence of a nature that is only too trusting and easily pleased; it is simply that they are poured forth in such unstinting abundance that the listener becomes hypnotized beneath their flow. But though Miss Bates is presented for the purpose of making us laugh, we are not allowed for a moment to lose sight of a proper scale of human values. At the Box Hill picnic Emma

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makes a pert remark to Miss Bates on the subject of her verbosity, and without any sentimentality, indeed with unadorned severity, Mr.

Knightley afterwards takes her to task about it, and Emma drives home with the tears running down her cheeks.

Lord David Cecil has accounted for the extraordinary depth of the impression which Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates make upon us by

the explanation that, highly individualized as each character is, they are not only characteristic of themselves, but of the whole world of the feeble and the foolish as well: that is perhaps why, when we read of Miss Bates and the baked apples, and Miss Bates and her niece's letters, and of her imperceptive, generous gratitude to Mrs. Elton, and her pure, unselfish bliss at the publication of Jane's engagement ("Miss Bates looked about her, so happily")--we are touched far more deeply than the mere occasion seems to warrant.

The figure of Miss Bates is the production of a genius, the touch that called her into life is something we believe in but can never

understand; but that a hint, a spark that set imagination alight may have been caught by Jane Austen from one of her most prosaic

rounds of visiting, is the suggestion of Mr. A. B. Walkley.

In the circle of Godmersham acquaintances visited in Canterbury were included a Mrs. Miles and her daughter. Jane Austen liked old Mrs. Miles "because she is cheerful and grateful for what she is at the age of 90 and upwards." In her Godmersham visit of October 1813 she described a call the party made on Mrs. Miles, in the course of which her daughter came in. Jane said of her: "Miss Miles was as queer as usual and provided us with plenty to laugh at. She undertook in three words to give us the history of Mrs. Scudamore's reconciliation, and then talked on about it for half an

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hour, using such odd expressions, and so foolishly minute, that I could hardly keep my countenance. The death of Wyndham

Knatchbull's son will rather supersede the Scudamores. I told her that he was to be buried at Hatch. She had heard, with military honor at Portsmouth. We may guess how that point will be discussed

evening after evening."

Jane Austen's novels all reflect her view that physical health was essential to female beauty. Marianne Dashwood and Catherine

Morland with their fondness for the open air, and even more the lively, agile Elizabeth Bennet, are in keeping with this kind of attraction. The effects of ill health seemed to Jane Austen nothing but a disadvantage, the destruction of attractiveness. She was entirely at variance with the attitude, so popular with the nineteenth-century novelist, that ill health could be interesting, that the symptoms of consumption were beautiful, or that a hot-house

delicacy of figure or complexion conferred a charm. In none of the heroines, however, is the ideal of vital beauty realized so fully as in Emma. Mrs. Weston says of her: "'There is health not merely in her bloom but in her air, her head, her glance. One hears sometimes of a child being "the picture of health"; now Emma always gives me the idea of being the complete picture of grown-up health. She is

loveliness itself.'"

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EMMA HAS been described as being, in some respects, the most

polished example of that method of novelwriting which Jane Austen made particularly her own; an by a strangely apt coincidence, the year of its composition was also the year in which she wrote a series of letters containing advice on the method of novel-writing, as practiced by herself.

Anna Austen was not married till the November of 1814, and she amused herself during the summer of her engagement in writing a novel. First of all it was called
Enthusiasm
, and then the title was changed to
Which is the Heroine?
She sent the chapters, as they were written, to her Aunt Jane, and though her aunt was writing
Emma
at the time, she had the leisure to read them and be amused by them and return them with her comments.

Which is the Heroine?
must have been good, because Jane not only treated it with the generous enthusiasm she kept for the doings of her nephews and nieces, but she said over and over again that she had been amused with the manuscript and looked forward to reading the next installment. Considering her own preoccupation at the time, her interest was a high tribute to Anna's powers of entertainment.

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The bulk of the criticism is directed to the ends of naturalness and probability, and its importance lies much more in its relation to her work than to novel-writing as a whole. Many female writers, perhaps most, possess keen powers of observation; many are accurate and painstaking; there may be some who would never have made even

that solitary blunder of causing strawberries and apple blossoms to come together. There is nothing very remarkable in these qualities, even when they are possessed in an eminent degree; but they become inexpressibly important when they are the medium by which the

spirit of genius is made visible to us. The novels of Jane Austen are not what they are because she almost never makes a mistake over detail, or because the tenor of life in them is outwardly tranquil and unadventurous; the medium itself becomes transfigured, and all its details take on a new significance, because of the power which burns behind it. Reviewers seldom say a more foolish thing than when they describe some ambling tale of domestic relationships as "quite in the Jane Austen manner."

But some hints on the practice of this manner was all of her method that she could impart. She could not say: you must be exquisitely witty; you must have one fixed viewpoint in your mind from which you survey all your scenes and characters, and though that viewpoint is essentially comic, its comedy must cover a range, both wide and deep, of sympathy as well as laughter. Above all, I recommend you so to form your characters that when you have introduced them and let them speak for half a page, the reader feels that he is in the room with them.

The first installment of Anna's manuscript was received in March.

Jane read it aloud to Mrs. Austen and Cassandra, and they were all much amused by it. Jane commended the