Chapter II: Equipment; and Method

Literary influences--Jane Austen's defence of novelists--The old essayists--Her favourite authors--Some novels of her time--Criticism of her niece's novel--Sense of her own limitations--Her method--Humour--Familiar names--Some characteristics of style--Suggested emendations--A new "problem" of authorship--A "forbidding" writer--"Commonplace" and "superficial"--Thomas Love Peacock--Sapient suggestions.

"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary {50} form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular.

I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. "_Le style est la femme même_" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. _Clarissa_, _Sir Charles Grandison_ and _Pamela_ influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, {51} as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has never read _Camilla_): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing--namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."

Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most popular novels--_Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, and _The Antiquary_--appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; {52} especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like _Waverley_ if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.

The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe--"_la reine des épouvantements_" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition--were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less _pouvantable_, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction {53} which they represent that we chiefly owe _Northanger Abbey_, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
* * * * *
I grant I never saw a goddess go,--
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."

It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth--

"Let us not desert one another--we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the _Spectator_, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,--there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and {54} undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'I am no novel-reader.--I seldom look into novels.--Do not imagine that '_I_ often read novels.--It is really very well for a novel.' Such is the common cant. 'And what are you reading, Miss----?' 'Oh! it is only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only _Cecilia_, or _Camilla_, or _Belinda_;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the _Spectator_, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it."

{55}

This is a hard saying for those who count "Sir Roger de Coverley," "Mr. Bickerstaff," and many "Clarindas" and "Sophronias" among their friends. The age of the Regency may or may not have been as lax in its morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the pages of the _Spectator_ is not easily to be believed.

The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their novels. They did not read French fiction as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it scarcely possible to read French "without contracting some pollution, so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." Times had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed the voluminous romances of Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéri with William Temple.

Another important branch of Jane's private and voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison {56} and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_ which had their little days and died, particularly during the reign of George II. Not only in the _Rambler_ and the _Idler_ of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in the _World_, the _Mirror_, the _Lounger_, the _Connoisseur_, and other less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own.

Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to say, "If she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe." Her appreciation of such poems as _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_ is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born in a family which was itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the peasantry. George Crabbe, on the other {57} hand, the son of lowly folk, was born and nurtured in poverty, and he never forgot that he had sprung from the sand-dunes of the East Coast. His pictures of the poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the most delightful of his verses; his ease in their society, his understanding of their minds and characters mark him off as clearly from Jane Austen as--to take a very modern instance--the admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in la Vendée offered in _La Terre qui meurt_ distinguish M. René Bazin from M. Marcel Batilliat, who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence of the château in _La Vendée aux Genêts_. Jane found in Crabbe something that she missed in herself, a ready appreciation of all classes.

She loved Cowper too, both in his poems and his prose. There was much in _The Task_ that could not but please her, though the humour must have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and the descriptions over-laboured. Cowper, though kindly to the rural poor, and often referring to their occupations, smiles derisively at those who pretend to envy the labourer's lot and to regard his cottage, if properly "rose-bordered," as preferable to any other kind of residence.

{58}

"So farewell envy of the _peasant's nest_!
If Solitude make scant the means of life,
Society for me! thou seeming sweet,
Be still a pleasing object in my view;
My visit still, but never mine abode."

Jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of these lines. In some verses--composed in 1807 for a family competition in producing rhymes with "rose"--which, but for the rhyming, are a burlesque of Cowper's style, we find a picture of a cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be naturally of small account, are lines that would mark it, without the direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not Cassandra's or Mrs. Austen's.

"Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage-rose,
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gayest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows,
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close."

There is a letter of January 1758 from Johnson to Bennet Langton which, as Boswell remarks, shows its writer "in as easy and pleasant a state of {59} existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy." I cannot help quoting it here as evidence of an affinity of Johnson, in his happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful admirer, Jane Austen--

"The two Wartons just looked into the town, and were taken to see _Cleone_, where, David says, they were starved for want of company to keep them warm. David and Doddy have had a new quarrel, and, I think, cannot conveniently quarrel any more. _Cleone_ was well acted by all the characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. I went the first night, and supported it as well as I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone. I have left off housekeeping, and therefore made presents of the game which you were pleased to send me. The pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the bustard to Dr. Lawrence, and the pot I placed with Miss Williams, to be eaten by myself.... Mr. Reynolds has within these few days raised his price to twenty guineas a head, and Miss is much employed in miniatures. I know not anybody else whose prosperity has increased since you left them."

{60}

If the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one of Jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed "Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley, author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Langton pheasant is the author of _Clarissa_, another of Jane's favourites more than thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up.

Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth (after 1800), Scott (as poet), Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She had studied the essayists of Queen Anne's time and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "Mrs. Martin," she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to _our_ family, who {61} are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers." Unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure.

The novels supplied by "Mrs. Martin" and others, forerunners of those which now go forth from the Strand and Oxford Street, are frequently referred to in Jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at the British Museum. There was, for example, Sarah Burney's _Clarentine_, which Jane and her mother read for the third time (in 1807), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is ... full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was _Self-Control_, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but which Jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her own work forestalled by it; there was the _Alphonsine_ of Madame de Genlis, which "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure"; and there was _Margiarna_, which the Austens were reading in the winter of 1809, at {62} Southampton, and "like very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain."

About the same time Cassandra tells of some romance which the Godmersham circle has been devouring, and Jane replies--"To set up against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got _Ida of Athens_, by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather."

We shall not find much criticism of books either in the novels or the letters. There is a passage in one of "Aunt Jane's" letters to her niece Anna, written in 1814, in which her point of view on one important question of style is clearly expressed. Anna, probably inspired by her aunt's example--for the authorship of _Sense and Sensibility_ and _Pride and Prejudice_ had leaked out {63} in the family in spite of all precaution--had written a novel herself, and had sent the MS. to Jane for kindly consideration and advice. The result was not wholly encouraging--

"Your Aunt C. (Cassandra) does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort.... I have scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank, and when Mr. P. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the Honourable. That distinction is never mentioned at such times, at least I believe not."

Of a later novel of Anna's, which Jane "read to your Aunt Cassandra in our own room at night, while we undressed," she tells the girl that "Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let {64} him plunge into a 'vortex of dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened...."

Mrs. Austen had said, and Jane agreed with her, that Anna had allowed a married couple in the novel to be too long in returning a visit from the Vicar's wife, and Jane had ventured to expunge, as "too familiar and inelegant," the "Bless my heart" in which Sir Thomas, one of the characters, indulged. Jane's own Emma might say "Good God!" when she pleased, but Anna's Sir Thomas might not even bless his heart!

A last criticism on Anna's book is worth quoting for its direct bearing on the critic's own method. "You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left."

Jane's estimate of her own manner of work is modest enough. "The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour," she says. {65} With this phrase of her own as a text she has been called a "miniaturist," but if authors and artists are to be compared, there is quite as much of the selection and the richness of a Gainsborough in her work as of the minuteness of a Metzu or a Meissonier.

In her reply to the amazing proposal of the librarian at Carlton House that she should compose an historical romance founded on the records of the Saxe-Coburg family, she writes, not without a touch of her gentle satire--

"I am fully sensible that (such a romance) might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."

Her limitations of subject are clear to her own mind. Even of the "domestic life in villages" {66} she would only deal with the side where the daily bread was provided out of income, not out of retail profits or weekly wages. It is a suggestive fact, to which I have already alluded, that she never even tried to draw a peasant's family. Her heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a cottage to inquire after a sick child or leave a charitable gift, but of the conditions under which the labouring classes lived, during the hard times of the French wars, we learn nothing at all from her writings. The nearest approaches to such subjects are the account of the Prices' home at Portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, I think not unjustly, to be as vivid in its suggestion of impecuniosity and discomfort as anything written by Zola), and the similar, but far less effective, picture of the Watsons' family life.

Her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and so, in comparison with that of "stylists," it certainly is. She had stored her mind with good literature while still in her teens, and no doubt most of her limpid sentences flowed freely from her pen. But the consistent absence of superfluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence that she had consciously formed an ideal of {67} composition, and that she thought out the means of producing her effects is clear from several passages in her letters. To her niece who addressed her as "Dear Miss Darcy," and wanted her to answer in that character, Jane replied--"Even had I more time I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss D. would write." She had studied her art till she could analyze its qualities, as we may see from a letter written from Chawton in 1813. Mrs. Austen had been reading _Pride and Prejudice_ aloud to Jane and Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austens), and Jane tells Cassandra that--

"Though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling, it wants shade--to be stretched out here and there ... an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style."

Happily she did not provide the conventional "shade," which would have been on a par with {68} the "brown tree" that, according to Sir George Beaumont, was an indispensable feature of every properly composed landscape painting. Shade, however, did appear in several chapters of _Persuasion_, which, for a certain suggestion of melancholy, stands apart from the other novels, though not as markedly as _Northanger Abbey_ stands apart for its exuberant frivolity.

Macaulay declared of Fanny Burney's later style that it was "the worst that has ever been known among men." Jane Austen's style, in its happy hours, is so admirably adapted to its purpose that, while we may not call it "the best," a term which advertisement has rendered meaningless as a standard of excellence, it has never been surpassed as a means to a desired end. It seems trite to say that the first point to consider in any question of style is the intended result, but it is a point so frequently overlooked that much criticism about art and letters, as about politics or agriculture, is vitiated by the hopeless effort to set up an abstract ideal applicable to all cases, like a universal watch-key.

The result for which Jane Austen worked can scarcely be put in question. She was impelled to {69} make her little world live in fiction, not precisely as she saw it and heard it, but as she could most attractively present it to minds possessing the indispensable modicum of humour, without which the charm is lost at least as nearly as the charm of a Turner sunset by a person whose optic nerve is irresponsive to the red rays. Apart from her prevailing humour, the modesty of her style is a continual beauty. There is none of that florid eloquence which depends more on sound than sense for its effect, nor of that forcing of strange phrases which in these days so often passes for literary excellence. There is no preciosity about her books; the narrative is easy, the incidents are probable; the dialogue, with few exceptions, is natural, the bright people being differentiated from the dull by their talk, and not, as in most novels, by the author's assurances. If Mr. Meredith was right when he declared that "it is unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better than they should be," there must be many "unwholesome" pages in Jane Austen's work for the tolerably large class to which he referred. Neither in real life nor in the life of her books did she "suffer fools gladly," {70} and so far as the men of her creation are concerned she is on the whole more successful in representing the foolish than the wise. Her chief failure is in the realization of such a young man as one of her heroines would have been likely to admire. Most of the younger men are sketchily drawn, and we who are men would fain believe that she did not understand the nature of a man's heart, seeing that she never found one worth accepting. Knightley and Bertram seem to have been favourites of hers, but they are not lively people, nor sufficiently wanting in priggishness. The liveliest of them all is Henry Tilney, whatever his qualities of mind. The Jane Austen touch is charmingly varied, and it is felt in some of its happy strokes in the talk between this mercurial young rector and the girl whose early-budding affections he so speedily returns.

"'Have you been long in Bath, madam?'

"'About a week, sir,' replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.

"'Really!' with affected astonishment.

"'Why should you be surprised, sir?'

"' Why, indeed!' said he, in his natural tone; 'but some emotion must appear to be raised by {71} your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other.'"

This bit of dialogue recalls a remark in a letter written by Jane to Cassandra: "Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help putting it down."

Mr. Collins is one of the most finished of Jane's studies of men. He comes near to the impossible at times, but she makes him a living creature. The speech in which he offers his hand and advantages to his cousin Elizabeth has often been quoted, and its charms can never fade. Only a page of it is necessary to tempt the reader to turn--again or for the first time--to _Pride and Prejudice_ in order that he may find the rest of the inimitable scene--

"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and, thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom {72} I have the honour of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford--between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh's footstool--that she said, 'Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake, and for your own; let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me, by the way, to observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite."

The immediate consequences of Elizabeth's refusal are delightfully imagined and described. The moment Mrs. Bennet hears of it, she rushes to her husband's room--

"'You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will not have him; and {73} if you do not make haste he will change his mind and not have _her_.'

"Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern, which was not in the least altered by her communication.

"'I have not the pleasure of understanding you,' said he, when she had finished her speech. 'Of what are you talking?'

"'Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.'

"'And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems a hopeless business.'

"'Speak to Lizzy about if yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him.'

"'Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.'

"Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.

"'Come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth replied that it was. 'Very well--and this offer of marriage you have refused?'

"'I have, sir.'

"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'

{74}

"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'

"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you _do_.'"

There is nothing "commonplace" about this. What matter that the characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford material for such excellent wit?

In one respect, judged by the present standard in fiction, Jane Austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." No novelist was ever less troubled in the search for names. She merely took those of people she had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. Bennet, Dashwood, Elliot, Price, Woodhouse--names that the modern "popular" novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a Darcy or a Tilney being her highest flights in nomenclature. As for the Christian names, they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. In _Sense and Sensibility_, for example, three of the prominent characters are named John--John Dashwood, John Middleton, and John Willoughby. There are two {75} Catherines in _Pride and Prejudice_. Elizabeths, Fannys, Annes, Marys, Henrys, Edwards, Roberts, "fill the bills," and such a name as Frank Churchill seems recondite. It is much the same in the letters, the truth being that the Gwladyses, and Evadnes, and Marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural society. The burden which her sister Cassandra bore must have strengthened Jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should not have unusual names, and so we have our Elinors and Elizabeths, and Fannys, with their Edwards and Edmunds, and Henrys. The Darcys are almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "Fitzwilliam" and "Georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life."

So much for names. How are the men and women who bear them "introduced" to us? When a Colonel Newcome, or an Alfred Jingle, or a Sylvain Pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us with similar formalities. Jane Austen, like a casual hostess at a modern {76} dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in any way we can. Scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and crofters, was the most generous giver of types among Jane Austen's contemporaries; Maria Edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry of Ireland, and John Galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in the Scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. Jane had no use for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be specially described for a particular purpose. Only in one of her novels (_Sense and Sensibility_) is the busy life of London made the subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three towns-people back to their London houses from their country visits that is effected. (The general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks, and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. Yet, as we know from many passages in her letters, Jane during her visits was a keen spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she {77} jestingly declared, played havoc with her character. "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from Cork Street in August 1796, "and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." And in the next month she sends this little message to Mr. Austen: "My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'." She was not "prodigal"--save in gloves and ribbons--but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in town. She went very often to the play, so often at times as to be weary of it. _The Hypocrite_ (Bickerstaff's "alteration" of Cibber's "adaptation" of _Tartuffe_) "well entertained" her, Dowton and Mathews being the chief actors; and she saw Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss O'Neill, and Kean at the outset of his fame. "The Clandestine Marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in Don Juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." Such joys, however, did not move her mind enough to seduce {78} her from the country as a source of inspiration for her work.

"_All_ lives lived out of London are mistakes more or less grievous--but mistakes," said Sydney Smith, adapting, consciously or not, the saying of Mascarille to the _Précieuses_: "Pour moi, Je tiens que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens." The life of Jane Austen, whose humour the author of the _Plymley Letters_, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved generalization. Her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.

It is one of Jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. Lord Chesterfield told his son: "If, instead of saying that tastes are different, and that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb, and say, that 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ... everybody would be persuaded that you had {79} never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids." Proverbial philosophy finds little encouragement from Jane, who places it in the mouths of her least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her books and her letters, that she agrees with her own Marianne Dashwood, who, when Sir John Middleton has dared to suggest that she will be "setting her cap" at Willoughby, warmly replies: "That is an expression, Sir John, which I particularly dislike. I abhor every commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." The offending Sir John "did not much understand this reproof," but he "laughed as heartily as if he did." Elizabeth Bennet's use of the saying, "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse shock than it can have given to Darcy, so unexpected is it from the mouth of a Jane Austen heroine. When one of Cassandra's letters had diverted Jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "I could die of {80} laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as Marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say at school."

Whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by Catherine Morland when she said to Henry Tilney, "I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible," a remark which Mr. Tilney hailed with delight as "an excellent satire on modern language." Its origin may be found in that first volume of _The Mirror_ which Catherine's mother brought down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected."

A peculiarity of Jane Austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty," "unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"--a pet fancy of hers, which occurs, I am told, at least eight times in _Emma_ alone--being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion" in the older romances of Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years {81} of her residence at Bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its text.

In clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to carelessness as to defective art. Not that she was exempt from all the weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of her sex. Henry Tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the author over her own achievements--

"'I have sometimes thought,' says Catherine, doubtfully, 'whether ladies _do_ write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is, I should not think the superiority was always on our side.'

"'As far as I have had opportunity of judging,' replies Tilney, 'it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.'

"'And what are they?'

"'A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.'

"'Upon my word, I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment! You do not think too highly of us in that way.'

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"'I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'"

Deficiency of subject has not been charged against Jane's published letters, but they have often been charged with deficiency of serious interest. Her works certainly do exhibit an occasional looseness of grammar, mostly due to bad punctuation. The faulty construction of Lucy's letters (_Sense and Sensibility_) is noted by the author, but while Jane would not have been likely to regard "Sincerely wish you happy in your choice" as a proper way of beginning a sentence, her own delinquencies with respect to commas are sometimes no less grave than those of Mrs. Robert Ferrars. She would have felt no serious sympathy with Cyrano's declaration concerning his literary compositions--

"... Mon sang se coagule
En pensant qu'on y peut changer une virgule."

Her blood was too cool to be frozen by the printer's fancies in punctuation.

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In an old number of the _Cambridge Observer_ the curious student may find some suggested emendations of Jane Austen's text by Mr. A. W. Verrall, many of them being concerned with what are probably printers' errors. Those which deal with punctuation need not reflect on the printer as prime offender. The author was a woman. Mr. Verrall's ingenious suggestion that when Jane Austen is made to say that William Price's "direct holidays" might justly be given to his friends at Mansfield Park (his own family seeing him frequently at Portsmouth, where his ship was lying), she really wrote "derelict holidays," has little to commend it, "direct" so evidently, I think, being used to differentiate his actual leave from his ordinary leisure hours when on service. But there are two emendations, typical of many which might be suggested (Mr. Verrall has probably noted them for the edition which he ought to undertake in time for the centenary), which are entirely acceptable. Fanny Price is made to say to Mr. Rushworth, on the occasion when Maria Bertram and Crawford gave that unfortunate person the slip in his own garden, "They desired me to stay; my {84} cousin Maria charged me to say that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts." Mr. Verrall justly observes that no one had desired Fanny to stay, and she would be the last girl to utter "an irrelevant falsehood." He holds that "she really did on this occasion, for kindness' sake, say something 'not quite true,'" and it was: "They desired me to say--my cousin Maria charged me to say, that you would find them at that knoll, or thereabouts."

Again, when in describing the discussion over Mrs. Weston's proposed dance, Jane Austen is made to say (in _Emma_), "The want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be attempted to attend, were mentioned," the author's words were, in Mr. Verrall's opinion, "tempted to attend." Like Shakespeare's, the MSS. of Jane Austen's masterpieces are to seek, so that what she wrote we cannot prove. The probability that in these two cases, as in others, the author omitted to notice in proof the errors of the printer is more likely, on the whole, than that her pen had slipped badly, and that her "copy" had never been carefully read over. She {85} cared little for such slips, however, as we know from a letter written after _Pride and Prejudice_ was published, wherein she says: "There are a few typical errors, and a 'said he' or 'said she' would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear, but 'I do not write for such dull elves,' as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves." "Typical," of course, is here used in its obsolete sense of "typographical."

The negative bond of union referred to above between Jane Austen and the only English writer whom some of her eminent admirers have allowed to take precedence of her--that the MSS. of both have disappeared--suggests the passing reflection that in these days when Shakespeare is not allowed to hold the title to his plays without challenge, when Anne and Emily Brontë are accused of being (so far as the public is concerned) mere pseudonyms of their sister Charlotte, when George Henry Lewes has been given the credit for George Eliot's novels, and the speeches of eminent statesmen are said to be written by their wives, it is rather surprising that no one in search of a striking subject for a magazine article has attacked the claims of Jane Austen to a place among English {86} authors. There is no evidence in the memoirs of her time that any distinguished person ever found himself in her company, her name did not appear on the title-pages of any books, she was almost unknown outside a small provincial circle, and in that circle no one seems to have had any idea that there was anything specially remarkable about her. Is it likely that such an obscure little body should have written such admirable books? Is it not much more likely that they were the work of Madame d'Arblay, or that in these peaceful compositions Mrs. Radcliffe found rest and recreation after the fearful strain on her delicate nervous system involved in the production of her "_èpouvantable_" melodramas? Jane Austen lays claim to some of the novels in her letters, it is true, but, since Ben Jonson's references to Shakespeare, and all other contemporary evidence in favour of the Stratford actor's authorship of the plays have been explained away to the complete satisfaction of those who dispute his claims, it would be no very difficult task to persuade a number of earnest souls that Jane Austen's letters are not really evidence of her authorship of the novels. As for her nearest relations, they were {87} not in the real secret. The secret they are supposed to have kept during her life was that she wrote the novels, but if so, where are the MSS.? Why did not her admiring brothers treasure those most precious relics? Two of her MSS. (in addition to the opening chapters of her final effort in fiction) her family did, as a fact, preserve, those of _Lady Susan_ and _The Watsons_, and these (here italic type becomes necessary) _are so inferior to the six novels acknowledged, soon after her death, as hers_, that it is easy (if we like) to find it _difficult to believe that they are from the same pen_! The real secret was that she did not write those six novels. This fascinating theory is freely offered to whomsoever it may please to follow it up.

We gain many vivid glimpses of Jane Austen's views of life in her novels, and _Northanger Abbey_ holds a place apart from the others, not only for its many pages of burlesque, but as the vehicle by which so many of the author's reflections are conveyed, in a bright wrapping, to her appreciative readers. Let me give one or two examples--

"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen {88} of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though, to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable, and too well-informed themselves, to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."

The sister author is Fanny Burney. The opinion of men, the "trifling" or the "reasonable," is Jane Austen's. In Henry Tilney's remarks upon Catherine's extraordinary fears concerning his father's conduct to Mrs. Tilney we may discover something of Jane's view of the general condition of society in her time.

"Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of {89} what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies; and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

Of Jane Austen as humourist there is no need to write specifically at any length. Almost every extract given from her novels, whatever the point to be illustrated, shows her in that capacity. It is impossible for long to separate her humour from the rest of her qualities. Yet there are people who see no humour in her, and actually like her novels in spite of their "seriousness "!

An American author, Mr. Oscar Adams, wrote a book about her some years ago in order "to place her before the world as the winsome, delightful woman that she really was, and thus to dispel the unattractive, not to say forbidding, mental picture that so many have formed of her." Who were these "many" people? Evidently they existed (either without or within the author's own circle) or there would have been no reason {90} to write a book for their conversion. They were probably those worthy persons--we have all met a few of them ourselves--who read _Emma_, and _Pride and Prejudice_, and the rest, without noticing that a malicious little sprite is for ever peeping between the lines. Imagine a reader who regards all Mr. Bennet's remarks as sober statements of considered opinion, and you will understand how Jane Austen might seem formidable. Though she is never so ruthless to her characters as Mr. Bennet is to his wife, Jane is herself a member of his family. Perhaps "ruthless" is the wrong word. You might apply it to a boy who throws pebbles at a donkey, but if the object of his attack was a rhinoceros, the boy would suffer more than the pachyderm. To the slings and arrows of her husband's outrageous humour Mrs. Bennet was less sensible than was Gulliver to the darts of the Lilliputians. Gulliver did feel a pricking sensation, whereas Mrs. Bennet was merely annoyed that Mr. Bennet did not always agree with her mood of the moment. In his critical introduction to _Pride and Prejudice_ Professor Saintsbury forcibly says, in reply to those who resent the presence of such a husband as Mr. Bennet, that {91} Mrs. Bennet was "a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but the ironic." The most unpleasant aspect of Mr. Bennet's sarcasms is not that they hurt his wife, which they could not, but that they were heard by his five daughters, three of whom at least were more or less able to understand them.

Jane Austen the novelist, then, may truly be "forbidding" to readers who take her _au pied de la lettre_. Such readers are in the position of Catherine Morland listening to Henry Tilney's imaginary account of the antiquities and mysteries of Northanger Abbey. She went there and painfully discovered the truth, while they can no more hope to discover it than a man with one eye can hope to see things as they appear to his fellows who have two. Still, he is a king among the blind, and the readers who find pleasure in Jane Austen as an entirely serious author are to be counted happy as compared with those who cannot read her at all.

It has been said by Mr. Goldwin Smith that there is no philosophy beneath the surface of Jane Austen's novels "for profound scrutiny to bring {92} to light," her characters typifying nothing, because "their doings and sayings are familiar and commonplace. Her genius is shown in making the familiar and commonplace intensely interesting and amusing." Such justification as may be discovered for the charge that the subjects of the novels are commonplace is chiefly negative in kind. It is not that we may find in real life innumerable people as distinctive and entertaining as the principal characters of these stories, but that Jane does not introduce us to dramatically unusual scenes or persons. There are no houses like Dotheboys Hall or Ravenswood Tower, no incidents like the flight of Jos Sedley from Brussels or the arrest of Vautrin, no strange creatures like Mr. Rochester or Jonas Chuzzlewit, no scenes like those in Fagin's kitchen or Shirley's mill. She was immediately followed by a humourist whose scenes and characters are as unusual as hers were familiar. He is almost unknown to the great fiction-devouring public, and little read in comparison even with Jane Austen, with whom he has some strong affinities as well as antipathies. Thomas Love Peacock was never, so happily inspired--or so happy perhaps--as when he was "ironing" the {93} insincerity or the unreasonable prejudice of the "well-to-do" class. There is, among the parsons of Jane Austen's creating, none who is more gloriously diverting than Dr. Ffolliot in _Crotchet Castle_, and it is pleasant to imagine Mr. Collins as curate to that militant theologian. The talk of the young women in Peacock's modern novels is better "informed" and much less natural than that of Elizabeth Bennet, or Emma, or Anne, and as for the men, while Mr. Tilney or Mr. Darcy might not have found it difficult to hold their own with most of the lovers in Peacock's novels, his intellectuals--Milestone, McQueedy, and the rest--would have found no one to refute their arguments among the company at Netherfield or at Mansfield Park. Peacock allows his satirical hobby-horse to run wild over the bramble-covered desert of British prejudice, while Jane Austen never leaves go of the rein. The result is that while he frequently makes us laugh at the absurdities of his Scythrops and Chainmails, whose performances we know to be burlesque, she makes us chuckle by her silver-shod satire of the class which she had studied from childhood. There are some who read Jane Austen and cannot read {94} Peacock, and the reverse is also true. Those who can read both are never likely to be in want of pleasure on winter evenings so long as mind and eyes are left.

It is certain that no one familiar with either author could mistake a page written by one of them for a page by the other. Jane Austen's people, in spite of the humour with which the atmosphere is charged, are always possible--except, some of her most intimate admirers say, for Mr. Collins--while Peacock was never to be deterred from breaking through the fence which borders the pathway of probability. Only such readers as the prelate who declined to believe some of the incidents in _Gulliver's Travels_ could be expected to regard _Melincourt_ or _Nightmare Abbey_ as veracious narratives. For all that Peacock, whose first novel, _Headlong Hall_, appeared in the year (1816) in which Jane Austen's last (published) work was done, was her immediate successor as a satirist of the follies and foibles of English men and women, and he was succeeded in turn by the splendid Thackeray, whose most obvious difference from Jane Austen lies in his frequent indulgence in sentimental reflections.

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Jane was amused by the suggestions for improving her work, or for the plots of fresh novels, given to her from time to time, and among the papers found after her death was one endorsed "Plan of a novel according to hints from various quarters," the names of some of these human "quarters" being given in the margin. There were to be a "faultless" heroine and her "faultless" father driven from place to place over Europe by the vile arts of a "totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion." Wherever she went somebody fell in love with her, and she received frequent offers of marriage, which she referred to her father, who was "exceedingly angry that he should not be the first applied to." The "anti-hero" again and again carried her off, and she was "now and then starved to death," but was always rescued either by her father or the hero! For even the mildest varieties of the plots thus burlesqued Jane had no use, unless to laugh at them.

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