Chapter VI: Personal and Topographical

The novelist and her characters--Her sense of their reality--Accessories rarely described--Her ideas on dress--Her own millinery and gowns--Thin clothes and consumption--Domestic economy--Jane as housekeeper--"A very clever essay"--Mr. Collins at Longbourn--The gipsies at Highbury--Topography of Jane Austen--Hampshire--Lyme Regis--Godmersham--Bath--London.

On an earlier page a contrast between Balzac and Jane Austen has been suggested. One characteristic they had in common was the sense of the reality of their own creations. Madame de Surville, the sister of Balzac, has recorded how, when the affairs of the family were being discussed, he would say, "Ah, yes, but do you know to whom Felix de Vandenesse is engaged? One of the Grandville girls. It is an excellent marriage for him." Further than this an author's sense of the actuality of his own imaginings could hardly go, unless, indeed, like one modern author--if the {202} story is true, as it probably is not--he were to invite the figments of his brain to lunch!

Jane Austen was not quite so much obsessed by her inventions, though she spoke of the very novels themselves as personal entities. _Pride and Prejudice_ was "my own darling child," and of _Sense and Sensibility_ she writes, when it is passing through the press: "No, indeed, I am never too busy to think of _S. and S_. I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child; and I am much obliged to you for your inquiries." As for the characters, she loved to talk of them as living people, and was so fond of Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, that, as she wrote to Cassandra, she did not know how she should be "able to tolerate" those who did not like her.

She used to tell her nieces what happened to her imaginary people after the novels were ended, how Mary Bennet married her uncle's clerk, or her sister Kitty a clergyman, and how Mrs. Robert Ferrars's sister "never caught the doctor." One of the most delightful of her letters, as evidence of her happiness in her work, and of her half-serious consciousness of the reality of her creations, was written after a round of London picture {203} galleries. The portraits she looked for were not those of Knights, or Austens, or Leighs, but of beautiful women out of her own novels. They might be labelled Lady this or Mrs. that, but she should recognize them if they were portraits of her darling Elizabeth or her dearest Anne. She was disappointed. It is true that at the Gallery in Spring Gardens she found "a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her," and, moreover, "she is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow." For it was "Mrs. D."--the beloved Elizabeth Darcy (_née_ Bennet), whose face her creator and devoted admirer looked forward to seeing on some fashionable portrait-painter's canvas. Alas! at none of the shows was the desired picture to be found. "I can only imagine," writes the disappointed "friend," soothing her regrets with a reflection natural to her mind, "that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling--that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy."

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Thus we can see that Jane knew exactly what her heroines were like, even if in their case, as in that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left to fill in details of colour and feature very much as he chooses. She was far more particular in describing the personal appearance of real people, and in her letters the handsome and the ugly are as clearly differentiated as the lively and the dull. "I never saw so plain a family"--she declares after calling on some people named Fagg--"five sisters so very plain! They are as plain as the Foresters, or the Franfraddops, or the Seagraves, or the Rivers, excluding Sophy. Miss Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family." Sometimes she attributed the blame for ill-looks to a definite part of the genealogical tree. "I wish she was not so very Palmery," she says of one of her nieces, "but it seems stronger than ever, I never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence." The Mrs. Palmer of _Sense and Sensibility_ was not of that family. She was as pretty as she was foolish.

Even if it be true that Jane Austen only painted the life which she found immediately around her, {205} and that she would almost as soon have attempted to depict the interior of a Thibetan lamassary as of an English country-house of the kind Disraeli loved to paint, yet do her characters "typify nothing?" If Mrs. Elton, and Sir John Middleton, and Mary Musgrove are not types, then I do not see why Sir Charles Grandison, or Mrs. Proudie, or Mr. Tulliver should be regarded as types. Perhaps they should not, but then, what are types? Most of Jane Austen's people may be common; there may be, in the flesh, a hundred Lady Russells for one Lady Camper, and five hundred John Willoughbys for one Willoughby Patterne. That is only to say that humanity is richer in one type than in another.

Jane was a realist, though Realism, in the sense in which we apply the term in the criticism of living writers, has little place in her novels. She assumes that her readers--the men and women of her own age--are neither blind nor unaccustomed to the ordinary resources of contemporary civilization. When her characters dine, they may usually, for all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a common dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after the manner of the nomads of the Asiatic Steppes; {206} they may drink out of gourds like the Bushmen, while, after the custom of the Romans, they recline on raised couches in the attitude of Madame Récamier. We know that they sat round solid mahogany or oaken tables, covered with damask cloths during the meat and pudding service, that the silver was polished, and the glass bright, even though the supply of plates was perhaps not always equal to the number of courses; we have little doubt as to the kind of chairs whereon the diners sat, and we may wish we had more of them in our own dining-rooms.

As to the costumes of the men and women who sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress them as we like, and there is little doubt that many a modern reader has mentally pictured Darcy wearing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, Charles Musgrove in a golfing-cap and loose knickerbockers, and Mr. Collins or Mr. Elton in a stiff "round-about" collar of the kind usually worn by the Anglican clergy of to-day. For the ladies, the whirligig of time has brought back the modes of a century ago. In spite of the cry for the equality of the sexes, there are, as the Lord Chancellor and other eminent authorities have laid down, marked {207} distinctions between the ways of women and of men. One of such distinctions may be found in the fact that the fashions of feminine dress move in a (very irregular and therefore theoretically impossible) circle, while those of masculine dress rarely cross the same point twice. Thus while, during the last few years, we have seen our sisters and aunts affecting "modes" that were in vogue in the periods of the Renaissance, the Directory, and the Empire, we have never seen our brothers and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the courtiers either of François _premier_ or of the First Consul. A woman need not despair of wearing, without being followed by a crowd, almost any costume of any period of woman's history. A man need not look for the day when he may walk in the parks in the garb of Raleigh or of Burke without attracting more attention than will be agreeable to the modesty of any one but an actor-manager or the European agent of some American world-industry. The Misses Bertram, of Mansfield Park, might go shopping in Regent Street to-day without any one remarking that their dress, or their coiffure, was seriously out of date. But we only know how they dressed because we know the date {208} of their birth, not because the author of a bit of their life-history has told us.

Who that has ever read _Weir of Hermiston_ can forget the description of the heroine as she first appeared to Archie in the kirk? It was in the very year (1814) in which Fanny Price's story was related, and of Mary Crawford, if not of Fanny, a tale of town finery as bright as that of Kirstie might have been told. We know how alluring Kirstie looked to Archie in her "frock of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle," and "drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between ... surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses." Of some such charming pictures we get at least the preliminary sketches in Jane Austen's letters, but the finished works are never shown in the novels, and we may dress the pretty heroines to our own fancy so long as we keep to the style of their period, or, if our imaginations are feeble and our knowledge of Regency costume deficient, Mr. Brock will do the work for us in the more delightful of his coloured drawings, or Mr. Hugh Thomson in his lively illustrations in pen and ink.

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This point--that the material factors of manners and habits are little noted by Jane Austen--will strike many readers, at first sight, as of quite trivial importance. But it is largely the reason why her novels have so modern an external air compared with those, let us say, of Scott, or even of Balzac, who only began to write when her short career was ending. If Jane Austen had described the conditions of life at Hartfield or Kellynch with the particularity with which Balzac describes the Grandets' house at Saumur, and the Guenics' at Guerande, or had given us such full accounts of the villagers on the estate of the Bertrams of Mansfield Park as Scott gave us of the smugglers and gipsies on the lands of the Bertrams of Ellangowan, we should see more clearly the changes that a hundred years have wrought in the habits of the English country.

Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to the cut and colour of her own clothing, however little she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. But when we read of "Jane Austen frocks" for bridesmaids in the accounts of modern weddings, they are copied from the illustrations of Mr. Thomson or Mr. Brock, or else are so-called merely because {210} they are of the period of her novels, which is much the same thing. With the general subject of dress she deals as a novelist, we may almost say once for all, in a single paragraph of _Northanger Abbey_. The occasion was the dance at Bath which was to prove so momentous an event in Catherine's life.

"What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. This would have been an error in judgment, great though not uncommon, from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biassed by the texture {211} of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better, for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."

If we regard these as the author's considered opinions, expressed with a characteristic touch of _malice_, we shall probably agree that she is, on the whole, right. Were women to make a note, every time a man describes one of them as "well dressed," of what the subject of the remark was wearing, they would, I believe, find an overwhelming preponderance of votes in favour of well-fitting, plain, if not actually "tailor-made" costumes for the daytime, and simple though not conventual frocks for the evening, as compared with all the highly decorated "confections," covered with what one may call "applied art," whereon women spend so large a proportion of their allowances.

The letters to Cassandra make up to some extent for the deficiencies of the novels in a {212} matter so attractive to the author's admirers among her own sex, though the particulars given are almost always incomplete; that is to say, they depend on information which Cassandra possessed, but which is denied to us. Such a case is presented when we read: "Elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat, but a pretty _style_ of hat too. It is something like Eliza's, only, instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. I flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! But I must write no more of this." The tantalizing thing is that while we know that this pretty hat was something like Eliza's, we have no idea what Eliza's was like, beyond the untrimmed fact that it was "all straw."

Then Cassandra is told by Jane, "I believe I _shall_ make my new gown like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect?" Alas! that we cannot discover how the robe was made, except that "the back was all in a {213} piece with the tail." Often, of course, the news about dress is mixed up with other news, as when Jane writes: "At Nackington ... Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does not become her complexion...." Once Jane's account of her own necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed by a sentence which not only contains evidence of her close acquaintance with Fielding's greatest novel, but also reminds us of Mr. Tom Lefroy. "You say nothing of the silk stockings; I flatter myself, therefore, that Charles has not purchased any, as I cannot very well afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian.... After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but _one_ fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove--it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which _he_ did when he was wounded."

Many of her references to dress are of the {214} partly serious, partly humorous kind which came naturally from her pen. "Flowers are very much worn," she writes from Bath in the summer of 1799, "and fruit is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. There are likewise almonds and raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never seen any of them in hats." She had, in the Southampton days, a spotted muslin which she meant to wear out, in spite of its durability. "You will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feebleness, which, with a little care, may come to something." Then she has some "bombazins" with trains, which "I cannot reconcile myself to giving up as morning gowns; they are so very sweet by candlelight. I would rather sacrifice my blue one ... in short I do not know and I do not care."

A peep into the economy of Steventon parsonage is now and again offered. In 1796, "We are very busy making Edward's shirts, and I am proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party. They say that there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps _I_ may kill a few."

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Another bit of work that the want of the riches of Kent forced upon the poorer folks of Hampshire is shown to us when Jane writes: "I bought some Japan ink and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend." In this case there is no difficulty of interpretation. Now-a-days there are simple "dips" wherewith young ladies whose allowances are small or who in any case wish to make the most of their money can change old straw hats into new, soiled white into black, or green, or heliotrope. It was not so a century ago, and when Jane wanted to turn her old white straw hat into a new black one, she must needs Japan it.

"I have read the 'Corsair,' mended my petticoat, and have nothing else to do," she writes from London in 1814, and on another day about the same time she informs her sister: "I have determined to trim my lilac sarsenet with black satin ribbon, just as my China crape is, six-penny width at the bottom, threepenny or four-penny at top." An even closer glimpse of Jane in her home is afforded by a letter in which she says--

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"I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I hope you do not wear yours too often. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering."

Such references may remind us of Henry Tilney's astonishment that Catherine did not keep a journal of her doings. "How are your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life...? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion and curl of your hair to be described, in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me."

Jane Austen was not reduced, as was her own Mrs. Hurst, to playing with her bracelets and rings when there were no games or dances in progress. On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennet, she took up some needlework, and amused herself by listening to the general conversation, and entering into it when opportunity offered. Like everything {217} done by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is admirable, and her embroidery would be treasured by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no such charming associations attached to it. There is a muslin scarf adorned by her needle which, to her true lovers, might seem a more precious relic than even her mahogany desk itself.

One little "interior" sketched by Jane, after a visit to a young wife who had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative of her own neat habits, and her ideas of the material needs of happiness, that, intimate as it is, it merits quotation: "Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one."

We have seen on an earlier page that Jane Austen provided warm garments for the village poor. On one occasion we know where she bought her flannel. In an entry (made at Basingstoke) which might form the text for a dissertation on prejudice and economy, she notes that: "I gave {218} 2_s._ 3_d._ a yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Why this contempt for what, in spite of all patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise, is still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless and necessary of materials? Marianne Dashwood included the wearing of a flannel waistcoat by Colonel Brandon among the several defects which made it impossible that she should ever be his wife, and when, for reasons not all unconnected with the "happy ending" of the novel, she agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that this gallant officer had "sought the constitutional safeguard" of the much-despised garment. To Jane Austen and Marianne Dashwood flannel, it seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as celluloid collars and cuffs are to most people of our own day.

The ravages of consumption, as the Baron de Frenilly reflects in his recently published memoirs, would have been far less terrible in those times if women had been less hostile to warm dresses and flannel petticoats. Fresh air and thick boots were {219} also to seek. The women could not walk ten yards on a wet day without the water coming through the thin soles of their dainty little shoes. Miss Bates was quite exceptional in wearing shoes with reasonable soles.

One more sumptuary extract must be quoted; it comes from a letter from London in 1814: "My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are. They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin." The last sentence brings its writer for the moment very near to modern fiction, a considerable proportion of which is mainly occupied with the vivid representation of the process in question as applied to the world in general.

After clothes, the table. Out of the works of some novelists you might draw up menus, or at least bills-of-fare, for a month. People who dwell in a bracing air, and take a great deal of exercise, could live very comfortably on a small selection from the dishes served up in the novels of Dickens, and those who like an even more simple cuisine could rely quite confidently on the meals described by Dumas _père_. There is plenty of {220} substantial fare, of course, in the Waverley novels, and as for the works of Harrison Ainsworth, they groan under the sirloins and haunches that were provided in those imaginary ages when in Merry England the spits were always turning in every castle and hall. The people of Jane Austen ate quite as much as was good for them. They had breakfast, lunch--or noonshine--dinner, supper, and tea, and everybody--always excepting Mr. Woodhouse and those whose spirits were temporarily depressed--came with an appetite to every meal, for all we know of the matter. No dinner is particularly described, but those who want to know what people ate and drank at the end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify their appetite from the references which inevitably occur. Except that there were not quite so many dishes on the table at once the meals differed little from that to which Swift introduces us in his dialogue between the company at Lady Smart's table. The Smarts, by the way, dined at three, which in Jane Austen's time was still about the hour for the small country-houses, though in the big houses it was five, marking the gradual advance from the ten o'clock in the morning of the {221} twelfth century to the eight o'clock in the evening or later of the twentieth.

Plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, beef and veal, chickens, game in season, sweetbreads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet puddings, apple-tarts, jellies and custards were the ordinary food of the well-to-do. Port and Burgundy were their principal drinks, but probably the port was not usually such as is chiefly sold now-a-days. It was less fortified, nearer to the natural wine, which is itself more like a Burgundy than the port of modern commerce. Wine of any sort is scarcely mentioned in Jane Austen's works. One of the few exceptions I can recall is that--of unnamed species--offered to Mrs. and Miss Bates at the Woodhouses', which the host advised them to mix freely with water, advice they successfully managed to avoid taking, thanks to the good offices of Emma. Jane Austen herself seems to have been fond of wine. In her thirty-eighth year she writes: "As I must leave off being young, I find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like." On a much earlier occasion, when she was herself under {222} chaperonage, she had written: "I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne. I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hands to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error." With our full knowledge of Jane's habit of playful exaggeration we may be certain that her "too much" was nothing to shake our heads over, and that the "error" was indeed "venial."

Jane gives us sufficient evidence of the simplicity with which the Austens' own table was furnished. From Steventon parsonage, in 1798, she thus refers to one of the doctor's professional visits to her mother. "Mr. Lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither."

Years later, from Chawton, she writes that: "Captain Foote dined with us on Friday, and I fear will not soon venture again, for the strength of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for James."

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Jane herself did the housekeeping when her mother was indisposed and Cassandra away, and she prided herself on her success, though she detested the necessity of great economy. Her ideas on the eternal servant question are not, we may be sure, quite faithfully expressed when she writes: "My mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the secret. We plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former, and sweetheart to the latter. No children, of course, to be allowed on either side." The simple life of the parsonage is more accurately reflected in a comparison between the house of the Austens and that of the Knights at Godmersham. "We dine now at half-past three, and have done dinner, I suppose, before you begin. We drink tea at half-past six. I am afraid you will despise us. My father reads Cowper to us in the morning, to which I listen when I can. How do you spend your evenings? I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her, and that Edward goes to sleep." Jane declares that she "always takes care to provide such things as please (her) own {224} appetite," which she considers "the chief merit in housekeeping." Ragout of veal and haricot mutton seem to have been specially attractive to her.

Picnics we hear of--one in particular, of course, at Box Hill--and the Middletons were always getting them up. Cold pies and cold chickens, and no doubt cold punch, were provided in plenty on those happy occasions.

French cookery was not so much appreciated in England in those days as it had been twenty or thirty years earlier, before the Revolution. The bread of our then hostile neighbours across the Channel was, however, not infrequently copied in the bakehouse, as was the Boulanger dance in the ball-room. Mrs. Morland reproached Catherine for talking so much at breakfast about the French bread at Northanger, but the poor little girl who had been so shamefully treated by General Tilney, and sadly missed the attentions of his younger son, replied that she did not care about the bread, and it was all the same to her what she ate. Mrs. Morland could only attribute the girl's obvious unhappiness to the contrast afforded by their humble parsonage to the glories of {225} the Tilney mansion, "There is a very clever essay in one of the books up-stairs, upon much such a subject," says this anxious mother, "about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance--_The Mirror_, I think. I will look it out for you some day or other, because I am sure it will do you good." Catherine tried to be cheerful, but presently relapsed into languor and weariness; and Mrs. Morland went off to seek for the "very clever essay." As Henry Tilney arrived before she returned with it, its efficacy as a prophylactic for listlessness and discontent was never put to the test. I will take the risk of inducing the "listlessness and discontent" of the present reader by devoting a page to this moral souvenir of Jane Austen's infancy and of her own literary diversions.

The "very clever essay" is dated March 6, 1779, and is in the form of a letter from John Homespun, a "plain country gentleman, with a small fortune and a large family," two of whose daughters had been allowed--his opposition having been overcome--to spend the Christmas holidays with a "great lady" whom they had met at the house of a relation. They went with sparkling {226} eyes and rosy cheeks, they came back with "cheeks as white as a curd, and eyes as dead as the beads in the face of a baby." Their father sees no reason to wonder at the change when he hears the girls, with new-found affectations of speech and manner, describe the habits of their new friends.

"Instead of rising at seven, breakfasting at nine, dining at three, supping at eight, and getting to bed by ten, as was their custom at home, my girls lay till twelve, breakfasted at one, dined at six, supped at eleven, and were never in bed till three in the morning. Their shapes had undergone as much alteration as their faces. From their bosoms (_necks_ they called them), which were squeezed up to their throats, their waists tapered down to a very extraordinary smallness; they resembled the upper half of an hour-glass. At this, also, I marvelled; but it was the only shape worn at ----. Nor is their behaviour less changed than their garb. Instead of joining in the good-humoured cheerfulness we used to have among us before, my two _fine_ young ladies check every approach to mirth, by calling it _vulgar_. One of them chid their brother the other day for laughing, and told him it was monstrously ill-bred.... Would you believe it, sir, my daughter _Elizabeth_ (since her visit she is offended if we call her {227} _Betty_) said it was _fanatical_ to find fault with card-playing on Sunday; and her sister _Sophia_ gravely asked my son-in-law, the clergyman, if he had not some doubts of the soul's immortality?"

Mr. Homespun declares that the moral plague among the worldly rich should be dealt with by Government "as much as the distemper among the _horned cattle_."

Happily Catherine Morland had not caught this particular disease of all--it was only the plague of love that troubled her innocent soul, and the medicine was provided without the interference of a Government inspector.

From such a deliberate departure from the straight path I come back to the subject of the economy of accessories in Jane Austen's novels. When the French bread at Northanger led me astray, I was writing about domestic economy, costumes and cookery. Why _should_ the dresses be described or the dishes be named? We are concerned with the sayings and doings of squires and parsons and their wives and daughters, not with the achievements of cooks and milliners. This would be quite a fair criticism, but it is none {228} the less certain that an author who tells you what people eat and drink and wear does enable you to realize more fully the contrast between the present and the period with which the novel is concerned. That is our business, however, not his. He is an artist, not an historian. There is a common practice on the stage of "furbishing up" old plays by cutting out obsolete references and introducing topical touches. The comedies of Robertson may be "freshened" considerably to meet the taste of thoughtless play-goers, by giving Captain Hawtrey a motor-car and Jack Poyntz a magazine-rifle. The "moral" of these present pages is merely this, that with a few such slight changes as making post-chaise read motor and coach read train, and retarding the dinner from three or five to eight or half-past, cutting out the occasional "elegants," and otherwise changing a word here and there in the dialogue, long scenes from any one of Jane Austen's novels could be acted without material alteration, in the costume of to-day, with no serious offence to the unities. The absence of physical detail in her narrative is no artistic defect. Mr. Collins's first evening at Longbourn, for instance, is so vividly represented that {229} we gain the impression of having been in the room, though of its size and shape, and furniture, or of the appearance and costume of its occupants, we are told little or nothing--

"Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.

"By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he chose _Fordyce's Sermons_. Lydia gaped as he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages she interrupted him with--

"'Do you know, mamma, that my Uncle Phillips talks of turning away Richard; and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him? My aunt told me {230} so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.'

"Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr. Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said--

"'I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes me, I confess; for certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.'

"Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements."

The mephistophelian delight of the father in the unconscious absurdity of his sententious guest, the rudeness of the younger daughters, and the attempts of the elder girls to enforce the observance of ordinary good manners, could not well be realized with finer effect, and no description of accessories would heighten it.

It is not only material accessories and necessaries, furniture, dress, and so on that are slighted by Jane Austen. Incidents that are of positive {231} value to her plan are not allowed to linger a moment after they have served the turn. The adventure of Harriet Smith (in _Emma_) with the gipsies, ending in her rescue by Frank Churchill, fills just half a page. It would have filled a chapter in a novel by Scott or Dickens. One possible reason for this brevity is clear enough. The author knew little about gipsies, they were to her merely low ruffians and drabs, horse-stealers and pilferers, and of their fascination for the student of character she had no idea at all. There were hundreds and hundreds of genuine Romany about the country in those days. Borrow was not yet at work, and few people had taken the trouble to discover what manner of mind the "Egyptians" possessed, and how they spent their time when they were not robbing henroosts or swindling housemaids. Scott felt something of the mysterious charm of this ancient and nomadic race, but he was romantic, and romance, in Jane Austen's way of thinking, was very nearly a synonym for absurdity. So it is, therefore, that the gipsies in the Highbury lane appear for half a page, speak no word that is reported, and then vanish from our ken. The author implies that they hurried {232} away to avoid prosecution. Perhaps she was almost as glad to see the last of them as were the inhabitants of Highbury. Thus is a fine opportunity for a "picturesque" scene thrown away. Undeveloped as it is, the adventure stands absolutely alone in the novels as the sole occasion whereon any of the characters has reason to fear violence at the hands of ill-disposed persons. It was only in imagination that Catherine Morland was carried off by masked men, though a spirited illustration of Mr. Hugh Thomson's did once mislead a too hurried critic into regarding the affair as an event in the heroine's life.

There are, in fact, very few digressions in these books. Fielding "digressed" by whole chapters at a time, Sterne's digressions filled more space than his tale in his one "novel." Jane Austen keeps to the road, and leaves the by-lanes unexplored. It is a pleasant road, old, and bordered here and there with attractive-looking houses into which we may enter by her kindly introduction, but if we wish to go off to that hamlet on the right, or that coppice on the left, we must go alone. She will sit on a stile till we return to pursue the direct route. It is to her {233} effort to avoid all but the essential factors in achieving her object that the general absence of landscape and topographical detail of all kinds in her work is to be attributed. In the case of a Dickens, a Balzac, a Hardy or a Meredith, you can constantly identify the places where the scenes are laid. In Lincoln's Inn Fields you can watch Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows; at Rochester you can see the very room where Mr. Pickwick slept; at Nemours you can gaze at the house where The Minoret-Levraults (in _Ursule Mirouet_) lived; at Woolbridge you can find the manor house where the unhappy Tess passed her bridal night. Down in Surrey you can take a photograph of the Crossways House which was almost the whole fortune of Diana, at Seaford you can see the "Elba Hall" of _The House on the Beach_ sheltering beneath the downs, and as in these instances so in scores of others. But in connection with the Austen novels, save for the London streets and squares, there are only Bath and Lyme Regis and Portsmouth where one can truly feel sure that such or such an incident in one or other novel "occurred" on this very spot.

If, however, there is no special "Jane Austen {234} country" to be traced out by the diligent seeker for visible associations, there are scattered spots where her presence is still to be felt. At Steventon, where the earlier works were produced, the house of the Austens no longer stands, having given place long since to a rectory on the other side of the valley, more convenient and comfortable than that wherein the father wrote his sermons and the daughter her novels--sermons and novels which at the time seemed equally likely to achieve enduring fame. Only the well and the pump remain to mark the site. The surroundings are not all new--how should they be in a thinly populated parish? There are still farms and cottages that were old before Jane was born. The church is in better trim, but, externally at least, it is much the same.

Probably with scenery as with men and women Jane Austen did not usually draw from models, and when she did, she gave the models their own names. The one real bit of description of a place named in her work is the account of the environs of Lyme Regis, which is so obviously written from personal interest that some of her biographers have supposed that her own {235} experiences during her visits there had included a Captain Wentworth or at least a Captain Benwick.

"A very strange stranger it must be," she writes, "who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight--these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood."

This was quite an exceptional digression from the thoughts and conversation of Jane Austen's characters. One of those letters which Leslie Stephen and others have thought so "trivial," but {236} which are so characteristic in their spirit, was written from Lyme by Jane to Cassandra, on September 14, 1804--

"I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this morning..... I endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, and be useful and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters, as fast as I can, and keep everything as it was under your administration.... The ball last night was pleasant.... Nobody asked me for the two first dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Crawford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville ... or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction, asked me if I meant to dance again."

It is impossible to leave Lyme Regis without recalling how Tennyson, when he was shown the place where the Duke of Monmouth was supposed to have landed, cried: "Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth! Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!"

Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined to Steventon, Godmersham, Chawton, Southampton, Bath, and their neighbourhood. It is not a {237} day's walk or an hour's motoring from Steventon to Chawton, where, after the long interval of comparative inactivity, the later novels were "born." At Chawton, according to one of her later biographers, the "cottage" where she lived and worked has disappeared. This is happily not true. It is true that it is now turned to other uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughters. It has been divided internally, and now forms a couple of labourers' cottages and a village club, where tired toilers who have never read a line of the books that were written under that roof discuss the merits and defects of the tobacco tax and the Old Age Pensions Act. Chawton House itself shows little structural change, and the park is scarcely altered since Jane walked across from the Cottage to take tea with her relations at the great house.

At either of these villages, Steventon the birthplace of Jane herself and of _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Mansfield Park_, and Chawton where _Persuasion_ and _Emma_ came into being, you may find scenes which you will associate with this or that story or incident, but nowhere are you likely to feel the influence of locality more strongly in {238} connection with either author or novels than at Godmersham, the home of her brother Edward, where, until long after her death, her relations dwelt amid their own broad acres. The place, with other property, came to Edward Austen from Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had adopted him, and whose name he ultimately took. There is no more typically English seat in the typically English county of Kent. The small sylvan village, the old church above the Stour river, offer no special attractions for tourists, and Godmersham House itself is one of the plainest even among the country seats of the early Georgian age. Its one external charm is its unpretentiousness. It has not even the huge classic portico on which so many of the country houses of its period depend for "impressiveness." Plain, commodious, well-placed, the house is lovely for us only in that it sheltered for many a week, from year to year, the author of _Pride and Prejudice_. It is just such a house as Sir John Middleton filled with visitors at all seasons, or Mr. Darcy showed to his future bride and her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner.

If the house itself is without external beauty, the park surrounding it is delightful. The {239} sparkling river flows through the midst of great elms and oaks beneath which mingled herds of deer, sheep, and oxen browse in the peaceful security of the golden age. As you sit on the low wall of the lichen-covered bridge you see nothing that can have changed in character since Jane Austen sat there and thought over the doings of her dear heroines. One can almost hear the rumble of the barouche that brought her mother and herself from the coach at Ashford to the Hall at Godmersham, and if that high-hung carriage were suddenly to turn the corner beside the big elm near the gate one would scarcely be astonished. This park and this house, this river, the old trees, the thatched cottages, the lanes and brooks all speak of the days when Bingley came for Jane Bennet, and Henry Tilney for Catherine Morland. If there is anything in the influence of place, Godmersham was part author of the novels. The spirit of Jane Austen abides in the delicious air of this quiet and unspoilt valley, where, when the wind blows strongly from the south-east, the salt of the sea-breeze mingles with the perfumes of the grass and the wood smoke as pleasantly as the Attic wit of {240} Jane Austen mingles with the sweetness of her heroines and the thousand delights of her dialogue.

These are the chief country scenes of Jane's life. As to the towns, we know more or less of her associations with Bath, Southampton, and Winchester, as well as London. At Bath she used to stay in early youth with her uncle and aunt, and she lived there for four years with her parents. The fruits of her experience there may be enjoyed in _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_, though her lack of the topographical instinct is suggested by the absence of evident interest in the buildings of Bath. We learn as much about the place from the _Pickwick Papers_, which merely touch there on their way, or from the allusions of the characters in _The Rivals_, where the events are of a few days, as we do from chapters that cover long periods of residence in one of the most beautiful, and still, in spite of the disproportionate and architecturally discordant hotel, the least injured cities of England. Souvenirs of the personal association of Jane Austen with Bath are almost as plentiful as those of Johnson with Fleet Street. The house in Sydney Place where the {241} Austens lived during most of the time between Mr. Austen's resignation and his death is the only one that bears a tablet to Jane's memory. But in Queen Square, whence several of her letters are dated, in Gay Street, in the Green Park, in the Paragon, the rooms she occupied with her relations at one time or another remain very much as they were in her day, and externally the buildings are unaltered, one and all being built of the local stone which gives so notable a character to the Georgian architecture of the city. In Camden Place where the Elliots rented "the best house," in Pulteney Street where Catherine stayed with the Allens, in Westgate Buildings where Anne cheered Mrs. Smith's lonely days, there has been little change since _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ were written. There is probably no town in the world associated with the work of a famous person of even so near a period which has altered less in appearance than Bath since 1805.

At Southampton the mother and daughters lived, after the father's death, in a house in that secluded part of the town which stands between the High Street and the old walls above the {242} "Water." There is a bit of those walls which abuts on the spot where the Austens' house stood, and it is one of the places where we may feel confident that we are walking where Jane often walked, and gazing out over a scene which was familiar to her in almost all save the funnels of the steam yachts and the distant view of the train on its way to Bournemouth or to London.

In London itself there are many spots that will always recall Jane Austen to her devoted friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street (Covent Garden), in Hans Place, in Cork Street, we know that she herself stayed. Many of the characters in _Sense and Sensibility_--the only novel in which we hear much of London--are associated with familiar streets. Edward Ferrars stayed in Pall Mall, the Steele girls in Bartlett's Buildings, Mrs. Jennings in Berkeley Street, the John Dashwoods in Harley Street. The Gardiners (_Pride and Prejudice_) lived in Gracechurch Street.

The day has not yet come when public bodies could be sufficiently affected by imaginative literature to place memorials on the houses where fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. {243} In Paris the memorial to Charlet is an admirable group of a grenadier and a gamin--typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that any sculptor should be commissioned to give us life-size figures of Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen. But when next the London County Council contemplates the placing of plaques on the former residences of departed worthies they might consider whether--of course with the consent of the freeholder and the leaseholder--her name might not be placed on the house in Henrietta Street, once her brother Henry's home, where so many of her letters were written. She tells of the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort of herself and her nieces, and from its door she went to the neighbouring church, or the theatres, which were within a few minutes' walk. It is not likely that any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced Progressive on the Council to object to the name of so very mild a Tory being thus honoured. As to the more probable objection that she did not "reside" there, but was only a visitor, one may plead that as there is {244} a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling the "residence" of Mrs. Siddons, and that a tablet proclaims that Turner "lived" in a house built thirty years after his death, there would be no great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a house in which Jane Austen did undoubtedly write, and sleep, and talk. The front was cemented in the middle of the last century, and the ground-floor is now used for business purposes, but otherwise the house is little changed since the Austens were there.

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