Jane Austen (5 page)

said Ellen. 'Yes, it is an horrible east wind,' said her Mother--'I assure you I can hardly bear the windows down--But you are used to be blown about by the wind, Miss Maria, and that is what has made your complexion so rudely and coarse. You young ladies who cannot often ride in a Carriage never mind what weather you trudge in, or how the wind shows your legs. I would not have my girls stand out of doors as you do in such a day as this. But some people have no feelings either of cold or delicacy.'"

Lady Greville is drawn in the harshest possible outline, and her character, like that of certain figures in the old drama, is revealed by her saying some things which in real life even she would scarcely say. But she is not a caricature. One recognizes immediately the type of person whom she represents, and admits the truth of the

presentation. Children who are fond of writing almost always expend themselves on description, or on the adventures of some character with whom they can identify themselves; not one in a thousand takes a theme like this. At sixteen Jane Austen could

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choose at random a handful of people, to whom no extraneous

interest whatever attached itself, either of beauty, character or circumstance, and breathe such life into them that while we are occupied with them we are not conscious of what they are without. It is in such a fragment as this that one can perceive the beginnings of her extraordinary genius. The agonized pity we feel for Macbeth makes us suppose that if we had Shakespeare's intuition, we should regard every criminal with sympathy rather than abhorrence; and the absorbing interest with which Jane Austen can invest a

commonplace or tiresome person reminds us that no human being

would seem dull to us if we had eyes to see.

If we may take the published
Juvenalia
as representative of what she wrote at this time, we feel it altogether natural that, in her case, the written self-expression showed none of the ordinary symptoms of adolescence, the glooms and gleams of half-formulated thought: Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized.

We feel convinced that she never kept a diary or a commonplace book. She had no energy, no time for vague, subjective outpourings; all her growing mental resources, her brilliant vitality, her vigorous imagination, were devoted to the preoccupation, unconscious but absorbing, of studying human beings as she saw them and as her intuition told her that they were.

Know thou thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is Man.

Pope's great fame was by 1790 suffering eclipse in the Steventon household, devoted to books and keenly interested

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in the latest literary fashions. There is reason to suppose that he was admired "no more than was proper." Jane Austen may never have read the
Essay on Man
; if she had, it is more than probable that she never applied this aphorism to her unassuming self; but it would be difficult to find, in the range of English poetry, words more

expressive of the inspiration of her art.

In examining the early pieces, it is interesting to notice their dedications; they show how conscious she was of an audience,

warmly partial it is true, but by nature critical and exacting. Her powers of mind, the strength of her creative imagination, her genius for perception and intuition, were gifts no human influence could enhance or take away; but of the style, so integral a feature of her work, who can say how much of its beauty, its finely tempered

strength, its dazzling lucidity, is owed to the fact that she was daughter and sister of the Rev. George Austen's family?

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IN A WORLD of undistracted leisure, the amusement of novel-

reading ranked high.

The circulating library, severely disapproved of by Sir Anthony Absolute, was an important feature of every country town by the middle of the eighteenth century. The usual form for a novel was three or four small volumes, bound in calf with a spine elegantly starred and flowered in gilt; as the price of the set was anything from one to three guineas, the purchasing of novels was restricted either to the wellto-do who put their names down on the subscription list of a fashionable author because it was the thing, or to those whose interest was so great that they were prepared to spend a considerable sum to gratify it.

It is always a nice point to decide how far the genius forms the trend of his time, and how far he is formed by it. In his review of
Emma
in the Quarterly of 1816, Sir Walter Scott placed Jane Austen in the foremost rank of innovators. He said of her novels: "They belong to a class of fiction which has arisen almost in our own times and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more

immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel." At the same time, no one who

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reads the great novels of the mid-eighteenth century, which were to Jane Austen in roughly the same relationship that Dickens and

Thackeray are to us, can fail to see that, unique as is her personal contribution to the art of novelwriting, she was also in direct descent from the masters of fiction who preceded her. She is like them in that she abounded in wit, and that her style, with all its individual brillance and grace, is founded, as on a rock, upon that of the essayists, historians and novelists of the eighteenth century.

Modern English prose has been fathered with good reason on

Dryden, who died in 1700; and though our own prose has lost his inimitable blend of vigor and elegance, yet if we compare one of Milton's pamphlets with a single paragraph of Dryden's, we

recognize that though Milton and he were contemporaries, the

former belongs to the antique world and the latter to our own. To the clarity and raciness of Dryden was added, with a clarity yet more luminous, the exquisite simplicity of Addison; and by the time Addison had made
the Spectator
a popular newspaper, the fundamental characteristics of eighteenth-century prose were so firmly established that everyone who wrote at all, wrote, however lacking in the strength and spirit of the great originals, in a manner that was formed to imitate and embody the salient features of their style. Indeed, it is the miracle of that time, and one conceivable only in an age when the reading public was so small that the influence of one man could be paramount. When Addison said that by the

amusement offered in his paper he was going to redeem the folly and grossness of post-Restoration society, and to show that morality was inseparable from good taste, one may doubt how far he was

successful in daily life; how widely he influenced the world of letters, a century of almost

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succeeded so completely had he not been an embodiment in human form of the tendencies of the age; his immediate fame shows how truly he interpreted the public taste; what is remarkable in his achievement is his very early position in the century. He died in 1719, and a hundred years later not novels and histories only, but newspapers, publishers' puffs and advertisements for rouge and face powder were being written in sentences that did credit to their models in
the Spectator
.

Henry Austen said that his sister loved to read the volumes of
the
Spectator
, and though her only known comment upon them appears to be a disparagement, one must remember the context in which it was made. She criticized the attitude of girls who, if discovered reading a novel, put it hurriedly aside, or said they were merely skimming it for lack of something better to do; whereas had they been found with
the
Spectator
in their hands, they would have displayed it proudly, although the chances were that they would be reading in it something either fantastic, or relating to people and scenes in which no one now took any interest, or something which was frankly indecent. No one can judge the truth of this criticism who knows
the
Spectator
only by its best pieces. It was not directed to such essays as those embodying the adventures of
Sir Roger de
Coverley
,
the Vision of Mirza
or
the Trial of the Petticoat
.

The implied contrast, to the great advantage of the novel, shows how seriously she admired the masterpieces of this art, and it may throw some light on the furniture of her mind to consider a little the novels to which she so constantly referred. Henry said that much as she admired Fielding, she did not award him the very highest praise, because though she was devoid of mock modesty, she shrank from

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what was gross. "Neither nature, wit nor humor could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals."

At the same time, like the rest of her family, she was quite at home in Tom Jones. Writing to her sister in 1796, she said that Tom Lefroy had but one fault: his morning coat was too light; but she supposed that, as an admirer of Tom Jones, Mr. Lefroy copied the color of his coat, which, as its color was white, showed very visibly the streams of blood which had flowed down it.

Jane Austen's implied praise of Fielding's nature, wit and humor is especially interesting, because it is in his work that one sees, more clearly than in that of Sterne or Richardson, those qualities of robust gracefulness, of ultra-vivid but harmonious coloring, and a vigorous humanity of outlook which, as it were, pierces through the accretions of commonplace and tedium, and reveals the ordinary man and

woman as the wonderful creatures that they are. It is this capacity to illuminate the normal, which cannot exist without the kindred

qualities of humor and strong common sense, that she shares with her great predecessor.

Jane Austen's own manner of writing being what it is, the most interesting consideration connected with her reading is perhaps that she had in the background of her consciousness such work as

Sterne's, so wild, elusive and, above all, so trembling with sensitive humanity, as is that passage from A Sentimental Journey which

occurred to her in
Mansfield Park
when Maria Bertram, looking through the iron gates, exclaims: "'I cannot get out, as the starling said.'" It is Sterne's attempt to reason away the horrors of imprisonment. "'As for the Bastille, the terror is in the word--Make the most of it you can,' I said to myself. 'The Bastille is but another word for a tower:--and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out of. . . .' I was interrupted in the

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heyday of this soliloquy with a voice which I took to be that of a child, which complained: 'it could not get out,' . . . and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung up in a little cage. I stood looking at the bird, and to every person who came through the passage, it ran fluttering towards the side which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity--'I can't get out,' said the starling. God help thee!-said I--but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turned the cage about to get at the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. . . . The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it. . . . --I fear, poor creature, said I, I cannot set thee at liberty.--'No,' said the starling; 'I can't get out--I can't get out.'"

"'I vow I never had any affections more tenderly awaked. . . .

Mechanical as the notes were . . . in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastille, and I heavily walked upstairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.'"

The novelist of whom Jane Austen was personally the fondest has faded most in popular esteem. The extreme length of Richardson's novels, and the particular nature of his sensibility, which, unlike Sterne's, does not expend itself on objects which human nature will always think worthy of it, but upon characters of a restricted interest, placed in romantic rather than ordinary circumstances, are sufficient reasons for the decline of his once-resplendent popularity. Of his three novels--
Pamela
,
Clarissa
and
Sir Charles Grandison
, we have no evidence that Jane Austen ever read
Pamela
; but from a reference in
Sanditon
to the hero of
Clarissa
, and to "such Authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's determined pursuit

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of Woman, in defiance of every opposition of feeling and

convenience is concerned," it seems probable that she had read the second novel; considering her passion for
Sir Charles Grandison
, she was unlikely not to have read the author's previous work, which many people considered the finer of the two; after all, she was allowed, from a very early age, to read what she liked; and as the Rev. George Austen had Tom Jones on his shelves, he was not likely to have drawn the line at
Clarissa
; though one is tolerably convinced that that clear-headed and sensible gentleman would have preferred the hearty rudeness of Fielding to the hothouse sensibility of Richardson.

In a synopsis the story of
Clarissa
carries little conviction, but to the reader who has reached the conclusion through the preceding

volumes with their long tale of distress, loneliness, trouble, persecution, terror and delirium, the heroine's death following on what would now be described as an acute nervous breakdown seems only too credible. It is necessary to read the novel as a whole to appreciate its cumulative effect and surrender to Richardson's spell.

Could it be read as slowly now as it was by its original admirers, in a world which received no emotional excitement from cinemas and

journalism, no doubt each separate portion would stand out in its own right; as it is, certain of them emerge with terrible distinctness: the house to which Lovelace carried Clarissa under the pretense that it was a respectable lodging, and Lovelace's own letter to his friend, in which he says that he always put on mourning for such of his mistresses as died in childbed by him, and that his promise to do so was of great comfort to them in their last agonies.