Chapter III: Contact with Life

Origins of characters--Matchmaking--Second marriages--Negative qualities of the novels--Close knowledge of one class--Dislike of "lionizing"--Madame de Staël--The "lower orders"--Tradesmen--Social position--Quality of Jane's letters--Balls and parties.

In her letters, as in her books, the satiric touch was on almost everything that Jane Austen wrote. Her habit of making pithy little notes on the doings of her acquaintances was, in writing to her sister, irrepressible. The pith was not bitter. It was just the comment of a highly intelligent woman to whom the gods had given the gift of humour, and who, at an age when most girls of her day were as ingenuous as Evelina or as Catherine Morland, had learnt how much insincerity and affectation coloured the conduct even of kind and well-meaning people.

In her references to the foibles of real men and women we gain many glimpses of the origins--if not the originals--of some of her character studies. {100} At an Ashford ball in 1798 one of the Royal Dukes was present, and among those who supped in his company were Cassandra and a Mrs. Cage, with whom the Austens were well acquainted. This lady was uneasy in the presence of Royalty, and her mistakes were described in a letter from Cassandra. Jane's mention of the incident in her reply is a fair sample of the way in which, in her more serious mood, this young woman of twenty-three regarded the weakness of her less cool and reasonable friends: "I can perfectly comprehend Mrs. Cage's distress and perplexity. She has all those kind of foolish and incomprehensible feelings which would make her fancy herself uncomfortable in such a party. I love her, however, in spite of all her nonsense."

One can see a hint of Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Bennet in the silly woman who flustered herself and fidgeted her companions in her attempts to assume what she supposed to be the right behaviour on such an occasion. Jane, who had never seen a prince, so far as we know, would have had no "distress and perplexity." She would have curtsied in the prettiest way, the Duke would have been charmed by her graceful figure, her {101} clear complexion, and her soft brown eyes, and she would next day have written to her sister "all the minute particulars, which only woman's language can make interesting."

Her reflections on the gossip of the hour are not always quite so kindly. When Charles Powlett (of whose rejected offer of a kiss we have already heard) brings home a wife, Jane tells her sister that this bride "is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant." Once, when a story has reached her in the way that "Russian Scandal" is played, by the muddling up of half-understood particulars in the process of transmission from mouth to ear, she has to correct a previous statement about some of the Austen circle--

"On inquiring of Mrs. Clerk, I find that Mrs. Heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the Crooks and Morleys. It is young Mr. Crook who is to marry the second Miss Morley, and it is the Miss Morleys instead of the second Miss Crook who were the beauties at the music meeting. This seems a more likely tale, a better devised imposture."

{102}

The sting is where stings usually are.

Scandal was as distasteful to her as it can have been to Madame du Châtelet, of whom Voltaire said that "_tout ce qui occupe la société était de son ressort, hors la médisance._" Jane gave Cassandra many little bits of news about their friends which the principals might have resented, but between sister and sister such things are not scandalous, and as for those who read them now, they may talk about the incidents referred to as freely as they like without harm to any one. Many of the "scandals" Jane mentions are "serious" only in her innocent fun. We hear, for instance, that in 1809, "Martha and Dr. Mant are as bad as ever, he runs after her in the street to apologize for having spoken to a gentleman while she was near him the day before. Poor Mrs. Mant can stand it no longer; she is retired to one of her married daughters." Jane amused herself and her sister and teased poor Martha by her jokes on this affair. "As Dr. M. is a clergyman," she writes, "this attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air." Mrs. Jennings, Sir John Middleton's mother-in-law, would have told the story quite seriously, and with immense gusto, at the Barton {103} breakfast-table, but Dr. Mant and Martha were not transferred to a novel to the discomfort of themselves and their families and the delight of the _roman à clef_ hunters of Southampton.

The letters do seem occasionally to bring us into the company of people whom we know quite well in the novels. Jane, replying to Cassandra at Christmas 1798, says: "I am glad to hear such a good account of Harriet Bridges; she goes on now as young ladies of seventeen ought to do, admired and admiring.... I dare say she fancies Major Elkington as agreeable as Warren, and if she can think so, it is very well." Alter the surnames, and this passage might apply as well to Harriet Smith as to Harriet Bridges. "I dare say she fancies Mr. Martin as agreeable as Mr. Churchill, and if she can think so, it is very well," might have been written by Emma to dear Anne Weston about the "little friend" from the boarding-school. Jane, as in this case of Harriet Bridges, took so much interest in the love affairs of her friends that we often think of Emma Woodhouse and her match-making propensities, about which Mr. Knightley spoke so harshly. By Emma's advice Harriet Smith, having refused {104} Robert Martin, the young farmer, had regarded Mr. Elton as a prospective husband, and when he went elsewhere Emma had selected Frank Churchill for the vacant post. Then, through a serious mistake, Mr. Knightley was the man, until at last the "inconsiderate, irrational, unfeeling" nature of her conduct became clear to her mind, and Harriet was allowed to marry the constant Martin.

Mrs. Mitford declared that Jane Austen was husband-hunting at twelve years of age, but the old lady's memory was evidently quite untrustworthy about people and dates when she talked such nonsense. Jane was, however, on her own showing, fond of looking out for possible husbands for her pretty little nieces. Here is an instance, from a letter of 1814--"Young Wyndham accepts the invitation. He is such a nice, gentlemanlike, unaffected sort of young man, that I think he may do for Fanny." Next day she is less pleased with him--"This young Wyndham does not come after all; a very long and very civil note of excuse is arrived. It makes one moralize upon the ups and downs of this life."

That the habit was hereditary--it was a custom {105} of Jane's time, even more than it is of our own--we may see from a report she sent to Cassandra of the pleasure with which Mr. and Mrs. Austen, with one accord, lighted upon a suitable "match" for their elder daughter. He was "a beauty of my mother's." Having no _affaire_ of her own to trouble her rest, Jane took an active part as adviser for those in whose fate she was affectionately interested. Especially was this the case with this favourite niece, Fanny Knight, who, having fancied she was "in love" with one man, discovered that she preferred, or thought she preferred, another.

"Do not be in a hurry," wrote Aunt Jane, "the right man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as possible, and who will so completely attract you that you will feel you never really loved before."

Fanny, who was "inimitable, irresistible," whose "queer little heart" and its flutterings were "the delight of my life," might have been fickle, but she did not, said her aunt, deserve such a punishment {106} as to fall in love after marriage, and with the wrong man.

Jane's views on second marriages are expressed in the case of Lady Sondes, whose haste to find consolation after the death of Lord Sondes was the subject of much chatter among the Mrs. Jenningses and Mrs. Bennets of her neighbourhood. "Had her first marriage been of affection, or had there been a grown-up single daughter, I should not have forgiven her; but I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can, and provided she will now leave off having bad headaches, and being pathetic, I can allow her, I can _will_ her, to be happy."

In the novels no woman of consequence--excepting the callous and selfish Lady Susan Vernon--is allowed a second mate, nor is the courtship before any of the marriages much in accord with the general practice of English fiction. There is not even a description of some splendid wedding. Jane, by the way, did not regard a marriage as the proper occasion for public advertisement of the bride's qualities. "Such a parade," she writes of the conduct of a certain {107} "alarming bride," is "one of the most immodest pieces of modesty that one can imagine. To attract notice could have been her only wish."

It might seem, indeed, that the most original characteristic of her works is the absence of almost all the qualities of plot and treatment on which fiction usually depends for success with the public. If we were asked of some modern lady writer, "What are her books like?" and we replied, "In one respect they are conventional, for they all end in the choosing of wedding-rings. But scarcely anybody in these novels feels the 'grand passion,' they have no relation to current events, nobody ever has a strange adventure, only one married woman is faithless to her vows, no adventuress appears, there are no foreigners, no one is in revolt against anything, nobody is seriously troubled about the trend of society or the decadence of morals and taste, nobody starves, or commits a murder, or engineers a swindle, there are no cruel husbands, no triple _ménages_ and no mysterious occurrences or detectives, and as nobody dies, nobody makes death-bed revelations," the retort would probably imply, "What stupid stuff they must be." These novels {108} do, indeed, depend for their effect on less of "plot and passion" than almost any others of consequence yet written. There are many novels of small plot. Balzac, in _Eugénie Grandet_, George Sand, in _Tamaris_, show what even "stormy" novelists can do with a modicum of events. But the lack of both plot and passion is rare in the work that lives. It is thus that the genius of Jane Austen is strongly displayed. Only genius could give a vital, an enduring fascination to a record chiefly concerned with the ordinary experiences of a few respectable country people, almost all of one class.

She had the power, because, with the gifts of expression and of humour, she combined an almost perfect knowledge of a typical section of society, all the more clearly exhibited because of her comparative ignorance of any other section. She did not care to study the very poor, the very rich were outside her circle of common experience, and she would rarely write about people or phases of life that were not as familiar to her as the squire's daughter and the manners of the hunt ball. She had none of Disraeli's audacity. "My son," said Isaac Disraeli, when some one {109} expressed surprise at the knowledge of "exalted circles" shown in _The Young Duke_, "my son, sir, when he wrote that book, had never even _seen_ a duke." Jane Austen, "never having seen a duke," or a ducal palace, never attempted to describe either. She shrank from any kind of "lionizing," whether in village society or in the "great world," and to this healthy pride is no doubt partly due the obscurity in which she lived and died. One instance of her reserve may be adduced. Soon after the appearance of _Mansfield Park_ she was invited, "in the politest manner," to a party at the house of a nobleman who suspected her of the authorship of that book, and who, as an inducement, intimated that she would be able to converse with Madame de Staël. "Miss Austen," says her brother, "immediately declined the invitation. To her truly delicate mind such a display would have given pain instead of pleasure." The story, which has sometimes been regarded as evidence of improper pride on the part of the English novelist, is in keeping with all that is known of Jane Austen's nature.

Had the meeting of the authors of _Emma_ and {110} _Corinne_ come about, one would like to have heard their conversation. The talking would have been largely on one side. Madame, who knew the "world," and enjoyed the distinction of having been called a "wicked schemer" and a "fright" by the greatest man of her time, would have tried in vain to impress the unaffected Englishwoman who cared so little for politics and Napoleon that, in those novels which Madame regarded as "_vulgaire_," she scarcely alluded to either. Jane would have listened attentively, and now and again, when Madame paused for breath, would have made a polite remark, the covert humour of which would have been lost on her famous companion. There is no suggestion that any hint as to Madame de Staël's reputation had reached Chawton Cottage, otherwise some might suppose that it was not only the diffident modesty Jane's brother alleges which prevented her from going to the party. It is quite likely that she who described the loves of Lydia Bennet and Maria Rushworth with such an entire absence of sermonizing would yet have felt that, though she might like to converse on a more private occasion with the author of _Corinne_ and _Delphine_, she would {111} prefer not to be matched with a lady who had put to so practical a test her theories "_de l'influence des passions sur le bonheur_."

Could there be a stronger contrast, physical or moral, than between the country parson's slight and good-looking daughter, whose knowledge of men and affairs was gained in the parlours of manor-houses and the assembly-rooms of watering-places, and the financier's stout and ugly daughter, whose political activities were so persistent that she had been expelled from Paris, who had travelled, mingling in the society of the governing classes, the artists, the men of letters in Italy, Germany, and other lands, and whose literary performances, historical, political, and imaginative, were read wherever educated readers existed?

If Jane had no strong desire to be brought into contact with the great, wise, and eminent of her time, neither were her tastes at all in the direction of social equality or the advocacy of the "rights of man," and while she was indifferent to the famous and influential, she was scarcely more concerned for the obscure and lowly. Admire her work as we may, and love her as many of us {112} must, we cannot recognize that she was much in sympathy with any class but her own. It is certainly to no undue regard for social position, to no want of charitable intention, that we can attribute her general neglect of the drama, comedy and tragedy alike, of humble life. It might be said that she could, and if she would, have drawn the poor as well as she drew the "gentry." She knew her limitations, and thus such rare sketches of the "lower orders" as she gives stop short of any errors of understanding. Mrs. Reynolds, Darcy's housekeeper, whose admiration for her master and his sister is so strongly expressed, and Thomas, the servant at Barton Cottage, who comes in to describe how he has seen "Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars" in Exeter, are in no way out of drawing, though the phrase with which the author finishes off the man-servant--"Thomas and the table-cloth, now alike needless, were soon dismissed"--so aptly suggests the position accorded to the working classes in her own works that it almost seems to have a double meaning. Let any one familiar with the novels try to recall occasions when a servant is introduced even in such common cases as the answering of a bell or waiting {113} at table, and he will find it hard to add to the examples already given any with a better part than the overworked Nanny at the Watsons', who, when Lord Osborne is paying his untimely visit, puts her head in at the door and says, "Please, ma'am, master wants to know why he be'nt to have his dinner." As for the class from which most of these servants came, it has no place at all. Emma takes Harriet to a cottage where there is a convalescent child who requires jellies or beef tea, but the incident is of no account except as leading up to the visit to Mr. Elton; and she goes to see an old servant while Harriet pays her formal call at the Abbey Mill Farm. Robert Martin is a farmer, and a letter from him is introduced, but he has no share of any consequence in the dialogue. When we remember Jane Austen's avowed partiality for Emma, and Emma's disgust at the idea of Harriet marrying a mere farmer, no matter how much her admirer Knightley might support the man's claims, we may not unreasonably suppose that Jane to some extent shared Emma's prejudice. There was, however, a notable exception to Jane's remoteness from the farming class. The joint tenant of the Manor {114} farm at Steventon, the happily named James Digweed--who seems to have been ordained later on--was admitted to so much favour that she could not only dance and dine, and gossip with him, but could chaff her sister about his evident desire to gain Cassandra's affection.

Two or three apothecaries are admitted into the novels. One attends Jane Bennet at Netherfield, and another attends Marianne Dashwood at Cleveland. Apothecary was almost a term of contempt in those days, and one of Jane's hits at the neighbourhood of Hans Place was that there seemed to be only one person there who was "not an apothecary." She even, as we have seen, corrects her niece for supposing that a country doctor--not a mere "apothecary"--would ever be "introduced" to a peer!

The only country tradesman who figures at all prominently is Sir William Lucas, who had "risen to the honour of Knighthood by an address to the King during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business.... By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous." He is {115} not so diverting a creature as Martin Tinman of Crikswich in Mr. Meredith's delightful comedy _The House on the Beach_, who, when rescued from that storm-beaten home on a terrible night, was found to be wearing the Court suit in which, long before, he had presented an address to the throne! But Sir William Lucas's constant recollection of the fact that _he_ had been received by the sovereign, while his neighbours, the "small" country-gentlemen, had not, is illustrated with admirable art. In his "emporium," with his stock-in-trade around him, his portrait would never have been drawn. Mr. Weston also made money in trade, apparently "in the wholesale line," after he had retired from the militia, and of the proud and conceited Bingley sisters we are told that "they were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade."

Jane has many kindly things to tell her sister about, her mother's maids, especially of a faithful and industrious "Nannie." Of the maids' relations, the agricultural class, amid whose homes {116} she passed nearly all her life, she has, as I have said, left no account in her novels. Her letters do indeed contain many bits of news concerning the ploughmen and washerwomen of the parish, and they are significant as to the manner, proper to the age, in which she regarded her humble neighbours. Her references to the cottagers are commonly devoid of any indication of deeper feeling than the consciousness of a need to give them clothes. Of the people employed on her father's farm, she says--

"John Bond begins to find himself grow old, which John Bond ought not to do, and unequal to much hard work; a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labour, and John himself is to have the care of the sheep. There are not more people engaged than before, I believe; only men instead of boys. I fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters. Lizzie Bond is just apprenticed to Miss Small, so we may hope to see her able to spoil gowns in a few years."

About Christmas (1798) she writes--

"Of my charities to the poor since I came home you shall have a faithful account. I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; {117} a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins, amounting in all to about half-a-guinea. But I have no reason to suppose that the _Battys_ would accept of anything, because I have not made them the offer."

Of personal service we hear but little. There is just the old "Lady Bountiful" idea, adapted to the purse of the parson's younger daughter. Alms were what the poor chiefly wanted, and alms they received--if not in money, in warm garments. She gave them worsted stockings, and flannel to wear in the cold weather. She did not often, so far as we hear, sit and chat with Dame Staples and Dame Kew over the things that made up their life-interests, or listen to the confidences of Lizzie Bond and Hannah Staples concerning their rustic lovers.

Sometimes we do hear of talks with poor women, as when Jane writes, "I called yesterday upon Betty Londe, who inquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, which I am sorry to have merited, and from which I will profit." We may well believe that Jane was no {118} pioneer in "district visiting." Her services to humanity were of another kind. Almost alone among the greater novelists who have written the fiction of drawing-rooms, she was hardly less indifferent as a writer to the concerns of the governing class of her day than of the voteless class, unless, indeed, she was a hostile witness so far as her knowledge went. Among the worst-bred persons in the novels, with John Thorpe, Mr. Collins, and the ever-delightful Mrs. Bennet, are Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the hero whose manners are most open to reproach is Lady Catherine's nephew, Darcy--before he has been refused by Elizabeth.

Jane Austen's views on the claims of social position, as distinct from individual character, were much the same as Anne Elliot's. Mr. Elliot and Anne, we learn--

"Did not always think alike. His value for rank and connection she perceived to be greater than hers. It was not merely complaisance, it must be a liking to the cause, which made him enter warmly into her father's and sister's solicitudes on a subject which she thought unworthy to excite them.... She was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen--a wish that they {119} had more pride.... Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created; but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding."

The Dalrymples and Lady Catherine de Bourgh do not lead one to suppose that Jane's acquaintance with their class was a fortunate one. Had it been, she would probably have given some happier examples of the titular aristocracy. Lord Osborne, in _The Watsons_, is in some ways a more amiable type, but too "sketchy" to be of much account as an antidote to such unpleasing people as the aunt of Darcy and the cousins of Anne Elliot.

If persons of artificial eminence are almost unknown in the novels, there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for their individual gifts or achievements. Sir John Middleton fills his too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. He hardly allows {120} time to speed the parting guests before he must turn to welcome their successors. But no statesman, or traveller, or professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those ever-open doors. They do not come, for one reason--and it seems a sufficient one--because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and Madeira around the mahogany tables at Netherfield, or Barton, or Uppercross, know and care nothing whatever about them and their performances. "Each thinks his little set mankind" is as true of the characters in Jane Austen's books as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their author. The Morlands, and Musgroves, and Woodhouses, and Bennets have never travelled, unless an occasional visit to London may count as travel. They have been into some neighbouring county, they have been perchance to Bath. They have not so much as been to Paris. Emma had never seen the sea. Twenty years earlier it would have been different. Darcy at any rate would have known something of France had he been twenty years older. From the outbreak of the Revolution till the first exile of {121} Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any but the most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after the rise of Napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the Continent very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. Thus, not only are the conversations which Jane Austen offers devoid of any such elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance of Byron in _Venetia_, or of Shelley in _Nightmare Abbey_, but the opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. On the other hand, we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a contemporary of Jane Austen's declared, "If you introduce the name of a river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the _Rhine_, or make you dizzy with the height of _Mont Blanc_."

In any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities for enlarging her knowledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own class in the country. Her published correspondence has been described as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what {122} Madame de Staël meant by "_vulgaire_," and not "vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. They are, however, exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. Her satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her time. It is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are hunting or shooting--the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids, the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that young woman who is so pretty--enlivened by Jane's wit.

The dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops" were among the favourite pleasures of Jane Austen. If you have read her letters you will feel that she is present when Fanny Price dances so prettily at Mansfield Park, or when Darcy declines to dance with Elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is {123} "not handsome enough" to tempt him. "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however. We had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated in a very elegant manner." Such bits of news are common at all periods of Jane's correspondence. For example: "The ball on Thursday was a very small one indeed, hardly so large as an Oxford smack;" and again, "Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but twenty-three people in the room"--just as it was when they got up the scratch dance at the Bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall."

On another occasion, at a public hall at the county town--

"The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. There was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. I danced nine dances out of ten--five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute, and James Digweed, and four with {124} Catherine. There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves."

Jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another girl as with a man--it was the dancing she loved, and watching the behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs and affectations.

Emma Woodhouse, the day after a dance at Highbury, might have sent to her sister in Brunswick Square just such an account as Jane Austen to her sister at Godmersham--

"There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome." One of the girls seemed to her: "A queer animal with a white neck. Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She danced away with great activity. Her husband is ugly enough, uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so _very_ old. The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish, very like Anne, with brown skins, large dark eyes, and a good deal of nose. The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice."

A ball to which Jane Austen went in 1808--her {125} thirty-fourth year--was "rather more amusing" than she expected. "The melancholy part was to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders. It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago. I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. We paid an additional shilling for our tea." This letter is but one of many bits of evidence that no memory of a Captain Wentworth troubled Jane's own life. The "shame" such a woman could have felt in being "older" one can scarcely imagine, and the context shows it was not seriously felt.

The most pathetic dancing incident in the novels was the impromptu affair at Uppercross (in _Persuasion_), where Anne saw her old lover apparently losing his heart elsewhere. "The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services, as usual; and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved." She did not know that Wentworth, who was making so merry with {126} the Musgrove girls, was faithful all the time to his old love--herself. We might doubt whether the author knew it until later on in the story, were it not that the idea of ending a novel without the marriage of the principal maiden to the man she liked best would have been entirely foreign to Jane Austen's method. So Frederick Wentworth danced with the Musgroves, and Anne played for their delight.

The dance most fully described was that given by the Westons at the "Crown," when Mr. Elton behaved so abominably to Harriet Smith, and Mr. Knightley showed himself a _preux chevalier_ and saved Emma's lovely _protégée_ from the humiliation of being the only "wallflower." In describing how Elizabeth at Netherfield, Catherine at Bath, Harriet at Highbury, and Fanny at Mansfield Park idly watched the dancing because no man had asked them to join it, Jane, pretty girl and excellent dancer as she was, spoke from personal experience. Once at any rate, when "in the pride of youth and beauty," she was able to write, after a dance at a neighbouring house--

"I do not think I was very much in request. People were rather apt not to ask me till they {127} could not help it; one's consequence, you know, varies so much at times without any particular reason. There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about."

She would not, if she could help it, dance with bad partners. "One of my gayest actions," she writes after a ball, "was sitting down two dances in preference to having Lord Bolton's eldest son for my partner, who danced too ill to be endured."

It is in connection with one of the Westons' parties that Mr. Woodhouse makes his sage observations on the eternal question of ventilation. When Frank Churchill says that the fresh air difficulty will be settled by their dancing in a large room, so that the windows need not be opened, because "it is that dreadful habit of opening the windows, letting in cold air upon heated bodies, which does the mischief," Mr. Woodhouse cries--

"'Open the windows! but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls. Nobody could be so imprudent! I never heard of such a thing. Dancing with open windows! I am sure neither your father nor {128} Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it.'

"'Ah! sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected. I have often known it done myself.'

"'Have you, indeed, sir? Bless me! I never could have supposed it. But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear.'"

The conversation of this valetudinarian quietist is always diverting. He suggests that Emma should leave the Coles' party before it is half over, as it is so bad to be up late. "But, my dear sir," cried Mr. Weston, "if Emma comes away early it will be breaking up the party."

"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse. "The sooner every party breaks up the better."

Advancing maturity did not do much to spoil Jane's love of dances. From Southampton, in 1809, she wrote: "Your silence on the subject of our ball makes me suppose your curiosity too great for words. We were very well entertained, and could have stayed longer but for the arrival of my list shoes to convey me home, and I did not like to keep them waiting in the cold."

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If Jane tells Cassandra about her own dances, she is ever ready in return for news of Cassandra's. "I shall be extremely anxious to hear the event of your ball, and shall hope to receive so long and minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it.... We were at a ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone and in the evening danced two country dances and the Boulangeries." This French dance, by the way, was on the unwritten programme at Mr. Bingley's ball, in _Pride and Prejudice_. It seems to have had its birth in the Revolution, when the bakers, men and women together, kept themselves warm by joining hands and dancing up and down the streets.

After Jane Fairfax had sung herself hoarse at the Coles' party--

"The proposal of dancing--originating nobody exactly knew where--was so effectually promoted by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly clearing away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, capital in her country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and Frank Churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to Emma, had secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment."

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The waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be classed as a country dance. It had been imported from Germany, where Mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after Jane Austen had written her earlier novels, and I cannot remember any other reference to it in her work. It was at first considered an "improper" dance, and one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered by the new fashion. Sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room, repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when Emma danced at the "Crown" and Jane Austen at Goodnestone.

"With tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance,
Behold the well-paired couple now advance.
In such sweet posture our first parents moved,
While, hand in hand, through Eden's bowers they roved,
Ere yet the Devil, with promise fine and false,
Turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz."

Little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if Edmund Bertram, Fanny, and Sir Thomas were shocked at the very idea of play-acting by the family and guests at Mansfield Park. {131} Not that there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a play, when Lady Bertram asked her children not to "act anything improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer, but because "Sir Thomas would not like it."

The Bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which Mrs. Weston played, serve to emphasize the place which Jane Austen fills as an historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific nineteenth. "What is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks her sister in 1807; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." Morals change but little as compared with _moeurs_. The girls who act in private theatricals every winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their {132} garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet was moved to utter the quatrain--

"When dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days,
Scarce an atom of dress on them leave;
Nor blame them, for what is an evening dress
But a dress that is suited to Eve."

Thus the mother of mankind is accused by one poet of having danced the first waltz, and held responsible by another for the airy fashions of the Récamier period.

One of the principal differences of etiquette, we may note before passing on, between the customs of the ball-room a century ago and now, was that in the days when John Lyford was eluded with so much difficulty a girl danced two successive dances with the same partner as a matter of course, so that neither an imaginary John Thorpe nor a real John Lyford could be got rid of by the promise of one dance.

The scraps from the letters, given on the last few pages, help us to realize how clearly Jane Austen's own life is at times reflected in her books.

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