Chapter IX: Eugénie De Guérin 177 (2)

It is in no cynical spirit, nor with any question of the genuineness of these feelings, but simply as a comment on the ways of this world, that I turn to a passage of Greville, written three months after Lord Holland’s death: “I dined with Lady Holland yesterday. Everything there is exactly the same as it used to be, excepting only the person of Lord Holland, who seems to be pretty well forgotten. The same talk went merrily round, the laugh rang loudly and frequently, and, but for the black and the mob-cap of the lady, one might have fancied he had never lived or had died half a century ago.”

There has been some question as to whether Lady Holland cared very much for her children by either marriage. Certainly at her death she left her son only two thousand pounds and a large income to a comparative stranger. Yet at the time of her separation from her first husband she sought passionately to retain her daughter, even resorting to the strange and characteristic device of pretending that the child was dead and burying a kid in a coffin in her place.

The Journal, too, is full of passages that come straight from the heart and absolutely prove a sincere, if somewhat erratic maternal affection. I hardly know a stranger mixture of passionate grief and curious self-analysis than the following passage, written on occasion of a child’s death. “There is a sensation in a mother’s breast at the loss of an infant that partakes of the feeling of instinct. It is a species of savage despair. Alas! to lose my pretty infant, just beginning to prattle his little innocent wishes, and imagination so busily aids my grief by tracing what he might have been. In those dreary nights whilst I sat watching his disturbed sleep, I knelt down and poured out to God a fervent prayer for his recovery, and swore that if he were spared me the remainder of my life should be devoted to the exercise of religious duties; that I would believe in the mercy of a God who could listen to and alleviate my woe. Had he lived I should have been a pious enthusiast. I have no superstition in my nature, but from what I then felt it is obvious how the mind may be worked upon when weakened and perplexed by contending passions of fear, hope, and terror.”

It is admitted that Lady Holland was an able housekeeper, and Mr. Ellis Roberts even thinks that the success of her salon was largely owing to the excellence of her table. “It is true the parties were overcrowded, but ... men do not much care how they eat, if what they eat is to their liking.” It is admitted, also, that she was most generous, kind, and thoughtful for her servants. Yet the inveterate prejudice against her manifests itself even here. “In this,” says Greville, “probably selfish considerations principally moved her; it was essential to her comfort to be diligently and zealously served, and she secured by her conduct to them their devoted attachment. It used often to be said in joke that they were very much better off than her guests.” Nevertheless, perhaps there are worse tests of character than the devoted attachment of servants.

On Lady Holland’s intellectual and spiritual life much curious light is thrown by her Journal, when taken in connection with the comments of her friends. Her wayward childhood, her early marriage, her utter lack of systematic education must not be forgotten. “I should be _bien autre chose_ if I had been regularly taught. I never had any method in my pursuits, and I was always too greedy to follow a thing with any _suite_. Till lately [age 26] I did not know the common principles of grammar, and still a boy of ten years old would outdo me.” Yet she was a wide, curious, and intelligent reader, and remembered what she read, as when she located one of Moore’s innumerable stories in an old volume of Fabliaux.

She had her strong opinion on most general subjects. In art she was distinctly of the eighteenth century, as in her view of Wordsworth’s poetry, and her admiration for Guido and the Bolognese painters. “‘St. Peter weeping,’ by _Guido_, reckoned the first of his works and the most faultless picture in Italy.” Nature sometimes moved her deeply, however, as became a contemporary of Byron and Chateaubriand: “The weather was delicious, truly Italian, the night serene, with just enough air to waft the fragrance of the orange-flower, then in blossom. Through the leaves of the trees we caught glimpses of the trembling moonbeams on the glassy surface of the bay; all objects conspired to soothe my mind and the sensations I felt were those of ecstatic rapture. I was so happy that when I reached my bedroom, I dismissed my maid, and sat up the whole night looking from my window upon the sea.”

In religion she was more than liberal, in fact, had no positive beliefs. “Oh, God! chance, nature, or whatever thou art,” is the best she can do in the way of a prayer, though she never encouraged sceptical talk at her table and sometimes snubbed Allen sharply for it. With irreligion went a strong touch of superstition, as so often. “She would not set out on a journey of a Friday for any consideration; dreadfully afraid of thunder, etc.,” “was frightened out of her wits by hearing a dog howl. She was sure that this portended her death, or my lord’s.”

According to her critical guests she was pitifully afraid of death always. “She was in a terrible taking about the cholera,” writes Macaulay; “talked of nothing else; refused to eat any ice, because somebody said that ice was bad for the cholera.” And again, in regard to the same disease: “Lady Holland apparently considers the case so serious that she has taken her conscience out of Allen’s keeping and put it into the hands of Charles Grant.” At any rate, she was morbidly, almost ludicrously anxious about her health; and she herself records that in Spain she selfishly refused to let Allen leave her when she was very ill to attend another invalid friend who greatly needed him. Yet in view of many other passages in her Journal, I cannot think that she really lacked courage in the face of death or of anything else. With her it is never possible to tell what is serious and what is whim. Certain it is that her parting scene was dignified, if not even noble: “She evinced during her illness a very philosophical calmness and resolution, and perfect good-humor, aware that she was dying, and not afraid of death.”

In her main interest, she was preëminently a social being. Greville says that she dreaded solitude above everything, that she “could not live alone for a single minute; she never was alone, and even in her moments of greatest grief it was not in solitude but in society that she sought her consolation.” Her Journal is, I think, sufficient to prove that this is exaggerated. She read and loved to read, and no true lover of books hates solitude. Still she was social, loved men and women and their talk and laughter, loved the sparkle of wit, the snap of repartee, the long interchange of solid argument. Nor was she too particular in the choice of her associates. “There was no person of any position in the world, no matter how frivolous and foolish, whose acquaintance she was not eager to cultivate,” says Greville again. Here, too, her Journal supplies a needed correction, or at least sets things in a fairer and more agreeable light: “A long acquaintance is with me a passport to affection. This does not operate to exclusion of new acquaintances, as I seek them with avidity.” The “passport to affection” is generally recognized. She was loyal in her affections and in her admirations, though sometimes carrying them, like everything else, to the point of oddity, as in her strange worship of Napoleon.

That a person so fond of society should have shown so little tact in it is one of the curious features of her case. But some things throw an interesting light on her brusqueness, her downright rudeness. Here is one brief passage about a woman she met and liked. “If I were to see much of her she might perhaps be benefited, for as nobody can do more mischief to a woman than a woman, so perhaps might one reverse the maxim and say nobody can do more good. A little mild reproof and disapprobation of some of her doctrines might possibly rescue her from the gulf.” Does not that explain a host of oddities, and pleasantly? Who of us likes to be rescued from the gulf by a little mild reproof?

And the woman was nervous, sensitive, imaginative. Society irritates such people even when it fascinates them. Of one guest she writes: “His loud voice and disgusting vanity displeased me so much that I fled for refuge speedily into my own room.” Another bit of most delicate analysis shows how easily the social disillusionment of a sensitive organization might manifest itself in tactless ill-humor. “There is some perverse quality in the mind that seems to take an active pleasure in destroying the amusement it promises to itself. It never fails to baffle my expectations; so sure as I propose to my imagination an agreeable conversation with a person where past experience warrants the hope, so sure am I disappointed. I feel it perpetually, for example, with Dumont; with him I have passed very many cheerful hours. This knowledge tempts me to renew our walks, the consequence is we both yawn.” So clear, so sure is it, that in all human relations the true road to happiness and enjoyment is not to seek them directly for one’s self.

The sense of power, of guiding and controlling others, was doubtless a large element of Lady Holland’s social instinct. “Her love and habit of domination were both unbounded,” writes Greville. To achieve this, to govern the sort of men that gathered about her, she knew that she must study their pursuits. Hence she devoted herself to the details of politics almost as sedulously as did Greville himself. The minuteness of her Spanish Journals, personally of little importance, in this respect, is remarkable. Yet I know of few things more delightfully feminine than her brief comment on ministerial changes. Her friends go out of power, and she observes, “The loss of all interest in public affairs was the natural effect of the change of Administration to me.”

It is, I hope, by this time evident, that, whatever her virtues or her defects, Lady Holland was an extraordinarily interesting character. I have quoted from her guests and friends much that was bitter. But a careful search brings out also testimony all the more favorable when we consider the extent of the abuse. Thus Greville admits that “though often capricious and impertinent, she was never out of temper, and bore with good-humor and calmness the indignant and resentful outbreaks which she sometimes provoked in others.” And while asserting that “She was always intensely selfish,” he adds in the next sentence that “To those who were ill and suffering, to whom she could show any personal kindness and attention, among her intimate friends, she never failed to do so.” Sydney Smith writes to her with a tenderness, an obviously genuine affection, which would prove fine qualities in any woman: “I am not always confident of your friendship for me at particular times; but I have great confidence in it from one end of the year to the other: above all, I am confident that I have a great affection for you.” “I have heard five hundred people assert that there is no such agreeable house in Europe as Holland House: why should you be the last person to be convinced of this and the first to make it true?” “I love the Hollands so much that I would go to them in any spot, however innocent, sequestered and rural.” Finally, the most sympathetic, as well as one of the shrewdest judgments, comes from Sir Henry Holland, the physician, who had studied Lady Holland in all her aspects perhaps as carefully as any one. “In my long and intimate knowledge of Lady Holland, I never knew her to desert an old friend, whatever his condition might be. Many things seemingly wilful and incongruous in her might be explained through this happier quality of mind blended with that love of power, which, fostered by various circumstances, pervaded every part of her life.... Her manner of conversation at the dinner-table—sometimes arbitrary and in rude arrest of others, sometimes courteously inviting the subject—furnished a study in itself. Every guest felt her presence, and generally more or less succumbed to it. She was acute in distinguishing between real and false merit, and merciless in her treatment of the latter. Not a woman of wit in words, she had what might well be called consummate wit in all her relations to society. Once only, and that very late in life, she spoke to me of the labor she underwent in maintaining the position thus acquired.”

May we not accept Greville’s dictum that she was a very strange woman, adding that, after all, she played her rôle of a great lady in not unseemly fashion? And perhaps it was with some justice that on her deathbed she spoke—most characteristically—of her life “with considerable satisfaction, asserting that she had done as much good and as little harm as she could during her existence.”

III

MISS AUSTEN

CHRONOLOGY

Jane Austen.
Born December 16, 1775.
Wrote “Pride and Prejudice,” 1796-1797.
“Sense and Sensibility,” published 1811.
“Pride and Prejudice,” published 1813.
“Mansfield Park,” published 1814.
“Emma,” published 1816.
Died July 18, 1817.
“Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” published 1818.

III

MISS AUSTEN

Jane Austen lived her brief life in two or three quiet English towns. She had no adventures, no experiences, no great fortunes or misfortunes. She began to do her best writing when she was little more than a girl. She left a few immortal works, surpassed by no others in the painting of the human heart. What sort of woman was she herself? Not very remarkable to look at, it appears. Round, full cheeks—“for the most part, they are foolish that are so,” Cleopatra tells us—bright, hazel eyes, brown curls about her face. No doubt, in every point a lady. But her soul?

At first sight, it seems that she laughed, mocked, at all things, very gently and decorously, but still mocked. “I dearly love a laugh,” says the heroine who surely most resembles her creatress. And again it is said of this same Elizabeth Bennett: “She had a lively, playful disposition which delighted in anything ridiculous.”

Those who love Miss Austen best will recognize, far beyond any testimony of quoted instances, this incessant, pervading spirit of gentle mockery which appears in all her books, courteous, infinitely well-bred, but sometimes very far from amiable.

That she should mock at woman’s education was, perhaps, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, natural enough. But it would be hard to find any one in any century who has mocked at it more cruelly. “Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” Which was also the opinion of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, considered one of the most learned women of her time. Now we have changed all that.

But if you suppose that Miss Austen wishes to contrast with learning the sweets of domesticity, you are far astray indeed. I do not know whether she read La Rochefoucauld. She hardly needed to. In any case, she well supports his dictum that there are comfortable marriages, but no delicious ones. The motive of most she lashes with her whip of silken scorn. “His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favor of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.” Though she had a sister whom she loved better than anything on earth, the kindest thing she could find to say of two most affectionate sisters was: “Among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that, though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.”

Nor is she much more enthusiastic about the charms of society. Her heroines do, indeed, love an outing or a ball; but much more stress is laid on untoward accidents that blight enjoyment than on its rapturous completeness. And this is life, as we all know. Only—As for the little distresses of social converse, who has ever depicted them more subtly? “To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.”

No one probably will maintain that Miss Austen treats love very seriously. Its common youthful ardors, “what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged,” she makes matter for derision or dismisses with indifference. Isabella utters a platitude on the subject. “This charming sentiment, recommended as much by sense as novelty, gave Catherine a most pleasing remembrance of all the heroines of her acquaintance.” With the author’s own serious heroines love is an emotion of such reverend profundity that the ladies themselves require years to discover it, and even then it has to be forced upon their notice.

Religion and the deeper concerns of life generally, where they are mentioned at all, fare no better. They are touched with an irony of somewhat dubious effect on the profane, as at the end of Northanger Abbey, where those it may concern are left to wonder “Whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.” There is no doubt, however, that Miss Austen sincerely honored sacred things. She would have said with her own Elizabeth, “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good.” She appeared to think she would attain this end by keeping matters of the soul mainly out of her work. But she miscalculated a little. I do not know how one could more discredit religion than by exhibiting it in such representatives as Dr. Grant, Mr. Elton, and Mr. Collins: a glutton, a ninny, and an imbecile. If any reader holds that the prosy sermonizing of Edward Bertram helps the divine end of the matter, I disagree totally.

And as she mocked all things in human life, so she had a peculiar fancy for mocking the departure out of it. We know much mockable is there; but it seems odd matter for a young girl to deal with. “It was felt as such things must be felt. Everybody had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness toward the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.”

Obviously Miss Austen’s mocking was not all sweet, sunny, natural gaiety. It had too much ill-nature in it. This shows, I think, in her fundamental conception of character. Read over her list of _dramatis personæ_ and see how many are attractive or agreeable. It is not that she presents set types of evil or folly. Far from it. Her people are all human, vividly human, walking figures of flesh and blood humanity. But like all true human beings, they have good and evil both, and her vision usually turns towards the evil, the mildly evil, the foolish and ridiculous. This perversion is slight, but constant, and its very slightness makes it more true—and more depressing. What doubles the hideousness of the hideous scene between Mr. and Mrs. Dashwood (“Sense and Sensibility,” chapter II) is its perfect humanity and the possibility that it might have been you and I.

She will brand a whole company with a touch: they “almost all labored under one or other of these disqualifications for being agreeable—want of sense, either natural or improved—want of elegance—want of spirits—or want of temper.” As any company might, to be sure—if you took it so. She will brand a whole sex. Mr. Palmer had “no traits at all unusual in his sex and time of life. He was nice in his eating, uncertain in his hours; fond of his child, though affecting to slight it; and idled away the morning at billiards, which ought to have been devoted to business.”

Above all, she is severe upon women past middle life. Few indeed has she drawn that are even tolerable. Yet I have known some who were charming. With what infinite, subtle, loving art are Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Norris made odious! And the best illustration of all for Miss Austen’s methods is Miss Bates. Her creatress starts with a heroic determination to be amiable for once. God has given this poor old specimen excellent qualities. For heaven’s sake, let us dwell upon them and leave the defects in shadow. “She was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good will. It was her own universal good will and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved everybody, was interested in everybody’s happiness, quick-sighted to everybody’s merits.” Yet the turning of a page makes Miss Bates ridiculous, and the turning of more makes her almost as tedious to us as the author evidently found her. In the end she drives even Emma to open insult, which Emma speedily regrets, and would probably as speedily renew.

But, it will be urged, I am making the old mistake of interpreting an author from her writings, of transferring to her the sentiments of her characters, or, at any rate, her merely formal literary expression.

Very well, let us turn to Miss Austen’s letters, and see what we find there. To begin with, they are charming letters, full of life, spirit, and vivacity, quite as charming as her novels. Her editors and biographers seem to feel it necessary to apologize for them. Why? It is true, they contain no reference to topics of the day. She might never have heard of Napoleon, or known that America was discovered. But, as letters, they are none the worse for that. Also, they are not formally literary, have no set pieces, or elaborate disquisitions. There is hardly a general thought in the whole of them. Who cares? They are literary as being the work of one of the most exquisite masters of expression. Indeed, an occasional odd glimpse of her constant literary preoccupation slips out. “Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is! I do not know exactly why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help putting it down.” And again: “Your letter is come. It came, indeed, twelve lines ago, but I could not stop to acknowledge it before, and I am glad it did not arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the sentence had been made ever since yesterday, and I think forms a very good beginning.” But, in general, they are merely the swiftest, lightest chronicle of little daily happenings, made eternal by a sense of fun as keen as Lamb’s. Is there in Lamb any bit of happier nonsense than the sketch of Mr. Haden? “You seem to be under a mistake as to Mr. H. You call him an apothecary. He is no apothecary; he has never been an apothecary; there is not an apothecary in this neighbourhood.... He is a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel, but without the least spice of an apothecary. He is, perhaps, the only person _not_ an apothecary hereabouts. He has never sung to us. He will not sing without a pianoforte accompaniment.”

Yet, minute as they are, and natural as they are, Miss Austen’s letters tell us little about herself, that is, the inmost self that we wish to get at. Those we have were almost all written to her nearest and dearest sister, Cassandra. To Cassandra, if to any one, she must have opened her soul. But, if so, she did it by lip and not by letter. It is rare indeed that she goes so far as to say, “I am sick of myself and my bad pens.” To be sure, such concealment of personal feeling and emotion is a most significant trait of character. The gleam and glitter of those sparkling pages with all their implication and suggestion recalls the charming speech of Birnheim to Fanny Lear, “_Ce qui fait le charme de votre conversation, ce n’est pas seulement ce que vous dites; c’est encore et surtout ce que vous ne dites pas._” But when we try to get any definite picture of the writer, she eludes us like a kind of elfin spirit, in perpetual glimmering, mazy dance, refusing to stand still.

At any rate, mockery is the prominent feature in the letters, as in the novels; and in letters as in novels, the mockery, though sometimes sunny and sweet, is too often unkindly and leaves a sting. Miss Austen herself once at least recognizes this. She describes a certain person as “the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well and who likes her spasms and nervousness, and the consequence they give her, better than anything else. This is an ill-natured statement to send all over the Baltic.” Doubtless, her modesty prevented her from thinking of the ill-natured statements she was to send for ages all over the world.

But let us see, again, with more minuteness how completely she spins this gauze web of satire over every phase of life. Is learning in question? “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Or is she discussing family relations? “The possessor of one of the finest estates in England and of more worthless nephews and nieces than any other private man in the United Kingdom.” A prospective marriage is summarily disposed of. Mr. Blackall is “a piece of perfection—noisy perfection.... I could wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn, fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window-blind at night.” Mrs. Austen is disturbed by receiving an unamiable letter from a relative. Miss Austen is not. “The discontentedness of it shocked and surprised her—but _I_ see nothing in it out of nature.”

As to society she resembles her heroines in liking balls, and, like her heroines, she finds many drawbacks in them. “Our ball was chiefly made up of Jervoises and Terrys, the former of whom were apt to be vulgar, the latter to be noisy.... I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.” On beauty she comments freely. “There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck.” As in this passage, she often refers to dress and too often unkindly. “Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively and nakedly dressed; we have had the satisfaction of estimating her lace and her muslins; and she said too little to afford us much other amusement.” In regard to one special company she seems to express naïvely her general attitude. “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable.”

More intimate social relations and the sacred name of friendship are treated at least as lightly. “The neighborhood have quite recovered the death of Mrs. Rider; so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at it now; her things were so very dear! And Mrs. Rogers is to be all that is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendships of the world.”

And love? Persons who mock at nothing else mock at that. What should we expect, then, from the genius of mockery? Whether she rallied her young men to their faces, I do not know. Assuredly she rallied them behind their backs. One evening she expects an offer, but is determined to refuse, unless he promises to give away his white coat. The next she makes over to a friend all her love interest, even “the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me,” everything except Tom Lefroy, “for whom I don’t care sixpence.” And when, writing to her niece in later years, she sketches the man she might have loved, she ends by turning all into laughter. “There are such beings in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend and belonging to your own county.”

Also, as in the novels, she is perpetually laughing at religion and virtue, that is, of course, at those elements in religion and virtue which are undeniably laughable. Morals and immorals she can treat lightly in individual cases. “The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him.” In their general phases she can jumble them happily with physical disorders. “What is become of all the shyness in the world? Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the progress of time, and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints.” On death she is inexhaustible. One would think she found it the most humorous thing in life—as perhaps it is. With what amiable, kid-gloved atrocity does she bury Mrs. Holder. “Only think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.” Apparently, even this supreme effort of Mrs. Holder’s was not successful, in fact embalmed her in spiced abuse forever. Other interments are quite as sympathetic as hers.

Most curious of all is Miss Austen on the death of a near relative, the trim decorum, the correct restraint, the evident fear of being either over-conventional or under-feeling. So in the first letter; but two days later she rebounds and trifles with her mourning. “_One_ Miss Baker makes my gown and the other my bonnet, which is to be silk covered with crape.” Well could she say of herself, “I can lament in one sentence and laugh in the next.” Only she immensely mistook the proportion.

One bare strong phrase takes us right to the root of all the mocking and perversity. “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”

It is in this spirit that she makes fun even of her own art, novel writing, will not take it seriously, “the art of keeping lovers apart in five volumes,” will not take its professors seriously. She mocks at their machinery, their heroines, their landscape, their morals, and their language, “novel slang,” she calls it, “thorough novel slang, and so old that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.” Whatever pains she may have taken with her own work, she does not mention them, unless ironically, when some one praises her. “I am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room.” If money and profit are suggested as possible objects, she laughs at them. Fame is all she is thinking of. “I write only for fame and without any view to pecuniary emolument.” But when it is a question of glory, she laughs at that, and toils instead for pounds and shillings. “Though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls _Pewter_, too.” Yet at the getting of money, and at the keeping of it, and at the spending of it, and at the lack of it, still she laughs: “They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel, therefore, that we are not worth her acquaintance.”

One subject only is too sacred for mocking—the British navy. And even that seems sacred chiefly in connection with the Austens; for Sir Walter Elliot is allowed to say that all officers should be killed off after forty because of their weatherbeaten complexion. Miss Austen herself, however, appears to have been possessed, like Louisa Musgrove, with “a fine naval fervour,” which blossoms in Captain Wentworth’s rapturous praise of his calling and fruits in the charming conclusion of “Persuasion”: “She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in the domestic virtues than in its national importance.” A sentiment which would have delighted Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., though it would have obliged Nelson to turn away his face.

So, are we to set down this demure, round-faced chit of a parson’s daughter as one of the universal mockers, _der Geist der verneint_ in petticoats, a sister of Aristophanes and Heine? It sounds ridiculous? How she would have shrunk from _Das Buch Le Grand_ and shuddered with horror at _Schnabelwopski_! Yet would she?

But her cynicism is more nearly related to Fielding and Smollett and to the eighteenth century, that is, it does not flow from Heine’s universal dissolution of all things, but is founded on a secure basis of conventional belief. Minds of that eighteenth-century type were so confident of God that they felt entirely at liberty to abuse man; “whatever is is right” said the “one infallible Pope,” as Miss Austen styles him, therefore there could be no harm in calling it wrong.

On the other hand, what separates Miss Austen from Fielding, what brings her close to Heine, and what almost, if not quite, makes up for all her mocking, is that you feel underneath the mocking an infinite fund of tenderness, a warm, loving, hoping, earnest heart. Rarely has a woman been more misjudged by another woman than Miss Austen by Miss Brontë when she wrote,“Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and insensible woman.” Oh, no, under that demure demeanor was hidden the germ of every emotion known to woman or to man. She knew them all, she felt them all, and she restrained them all, which means quite as much character—if perhaps not quite so much “temperament”—as the volcanic flare of Charlotte Brontë. The very difficulty of tracing these things under Miss Austen’s vigilant reserve adds to their significance when found and to the convincing force of their reality.

First, as to emotion in general. The testimony of the novels is often disputed. It is disputable when it refers to particular experiences and must be used with care. But many little touches would have been absolutely impossible, if the writer had not first felt them herself. Thus, she says: “It is the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoy it completely, and the strong feelings which alone can estimate it truly are the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.” Or again, with brief and rapid analysis, “She read with an eagerness which hardly left her the power of comprehension; and from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring, was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her eyes.” Do you suppose the writer of that had never torn the heart out of a letter as madly as Jane Eyre? And was there not plenty of emotion in the woman who described the moment of release from a disagreeable partner as “ecstasy,” and who fainted dead away when told suddenly that she was to leave her old home and seek a new one?

Or in another line, how all the mockery of her own writing withers before one short sentence which shows the real author, like all other authors: “I _should_ like to know what her estimate is, but am always half afraid of finding a clever novel _too clever_, and of finding my own story and my own people all forestalled.”

Then as to love. Here the problem is more obscure. Some critics have endeavored to deduce Miss Austen’s feelings from that of her heroines. Others have entirely denied the legitimacy of such deduction. No doubt, observation and divination may do much, but it seems to me that the subtle details introduced in many a critical moment must be based on experiences closely akin to those described. No man can ever understand Miss Austen’s taste in heroes, and her creations in this line are the worst of her mockeries, all the more so because unintentional. But if she was blind to the faults of the type, she may have been equally blind to them in some real Edward or Knightley. We all are. I should even like to believe, with her adoring relative, that that shadowy lover who died unnamed to posterity blighted her literary effort and accounted for the singular gap between her earlier and later work. “That her grief should have silenced her is, I think, quite consistent with the reserve of her character,” writes the said relative. I agree as to the possibility, but somewhat question the fact.

With the more common domestic and social feelings we are on surer ground. There is a universal concordance of testimony as to Miss Austen’s sweetness in such relations, her tenderness, her charm. Guarded as her letters are, these qualities appear, in all the laughter, in all the mockery. She watches over her mother, she longs for every detail about her brothers, she cries for joy at their promotion, she exchanges with her sister a thousand little intimacies, all the more sincere for their daily triviality. It is said that the family were always amiable in their daily intercourse, never argued or spoke harshly, and I can believe it. It is said that Cassandra always controlled her temper, but that Jane had no temper to control, and the latter statement I do not believe, but do believe that appearances justified it. It is said that she loved children, and many passages in her letters prove this. See in the following the deep and evident tenderness turning into her eternal mockery. “My dear itty Dordy’s remembrance of me is very pleasing to me—foolishly pleasing, because I know it will be over so soon. My attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manner until a few years have turned him into an ungovernable ungracious fellow.”

That she enjoyed playing the rôle of maiden aunt I see no reason to imagine. But she accepted it with sweet kindliness, and as years went on, she seems to have grown even more self-forgetful and thoughtful of those about her. I have spoken of Heine. What could be lovelier than his efforts to spare his old mother every detail of his last torturing illness, writing her the gayest of letters from his pillow of agony? Everything with Miss Austen is on a slighter scale; but how sweet is the story of the sofa. Sofas were scarce in those days. The Austen rooms contained but one, and Jane, dying, propped herself on two chairs, and left the sofa to her invalid mother, declaring that the chairs were preferable.

And if she loved others, they loved her. Her brother makes the truly astonishing statement that in regard to her neighbors “even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness.... She always sought in the faults of others something to excuse, to forgive or forget.” And he adds, “No one could be often in her company without feeling a strong desire of obtaining her friendship and cherishing a hope of having obtained it.” The profound affection of her sister Cassandra needs no further evidence than the pathetic letters written by her after Jane’s death, and the feeling of the other members of the family seems to have been hardly less deep. Especially was her society cherished by children and young people. “Her first charm to children was great sweetness of manner,” writes her niece, “she seemed to love you, and you loved her in return.” Again, “Soon came the delight of her playful talk. She could make everything amusing to a child.” And later, when years had somewhat diminished the difference of age, “It had become a habit with me to put by things in my mind with reference to her, and to say to myself, I shall keep that for aunt Jane.”

Altogether, whatever may have been her instincts of intellectual cynicism, she was past question a woman exquisitely lovable and one who craved and appreciated love, even when she made least show of doing so. How pathetic is the tenderness of her last letter! “As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.” And again: “If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious friends be yours; and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all, in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_ could not feel this.” Surely those with such a longing and with such a sense of unworthiness are not the least worthy of love in this harsh, self-absorbed, and loveless world.

Nevertheless, what remains most characteristic of Miss Austen is her singular and inexhaustible delight in the observation of humanity. No one illustrates better than she the odd paradox that it is possible to love mankind as a whole, or, at any rate, to take the greatest interest in them, while finding most individual specimens unattractive and even contemptible. I think she would have understood perfectly that wonderful passage in a letter of another novelist not unlike her, Mrs. Craigie: “I live in a world and among beings of my own creation, and when I hear of tangible mortals, what they do, what they say, and what they think, I feel a stranger and a pilgrim; life frightens me; humanity terrifies me; perhaps that is why it is real suffering for me to be in a room with more than one other. I believe I am a lover of souls, but people scare me out of my wits: it is not that I am nervous. I have only a sensation of being, as it were, in ‘the wrong Paradise.’ I am not at home: I talk about things I do not believe in to people who do not believe me: I become constrained, artificial.”

“I am a great wonderer,” says one of Miss Austen’s characters. I think she was a great wonderer herself.

How fertile this interest in human nature was, what endless and richly varied entertainment it afforded, is made manifest in many passages throughout both novels and letters. “I did not know before,” says Bingley to Elizabeth, “that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.” Elizabeth’s creatress found it so. When she visits picture galleries, she confesses that she cannot look at the pictures for the men and women. In trying social situations the watchful critical instinct remains imperturbable and revels in the unguarded display of emotions commonly concealed. “Anything like a breach of punctuality was a great offense, and Mr. Moore was very angry, which I was rather glad of. I wanted to see him angry.” Even in the most solemn crises the habit of curious observation cannot be wholly extinguished. Writing to her sister, with deep and genuine sympathy, on occasion of a sister-in-law’s death, she interjects this query, which strikes you like a flat slap on an unexpectant cheek. “I suppose you see the corpse? How does it appear?” Finally, like all profound, minute observers of character, she realizes how far from perfect her knowledge is, that she cannot predict, cannot foresee. “Nobody ever feels or acts, suffers or enjoys, as one expects.”

Miss Austen alone would be sufficient to disprove the contention that age and wide knowledge of the world are necessary for the understanding of the human heart. She had neither of these qualifications. Yet, though she may have missed many superficial varieties of experience, who knew better the essential motives that animate us all? She lived in a quiet neighborhood and saw comparatively few specimens; but those were enough. As she says, through Elizabeth, “people alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever.”

Thus she herself enjoyed and pointed out to others the simplest, the most available, the most inexhaustible of all earthly distractions. Only, I could wish she might have seen mankind a little more constantly by the amiable side. As Lamb well observed, the great majority of Shakespeare’s characters are lovable. How few of Miss Austen’s are! Yet it may be that at twenty-one she knew better than Shakespeare.

IV

MADAME D’ARBLAY

CHRONOLOGY

Frances Burney.
Born June 13, 1752.
“Evelina,” published January, 1778.
“Cecilia,” published July, 1782.
At Court 1786-1791.
Married General D’Arblay July 31, 1793.
“Camilla,” published 1796.
“The Wanderer,” published 1814.
Died January 6, 1840.

IV

MADAME D’ARBLAY

Frances Burney (Madame D’Arblay) wrote a diary or diary-like letters almost from the cradle to the grave. For reasons which will appear later we do not know so much about her intimate self as might be expected from such minuteness of record; but her external life, the places she dwelt in, the people she saw, the things she did, are brought before us with a full detail which is rare in the biography of women and even of men.

She was by no means a Bohemian in soul. Yet her career has something of the nomadic, kaleidoscopic character which we are apt to call Bohemian. She met all sorts of people and portrayed all sorts, from the top of society to the bottom. And through this infinite diversity of spiritual contact she carried an eager eye, an untiring pen, and a singularly amiable heart.

Her father, Dr. Charles Burney, the musician and historian of music, had an excellent stock of what is nowadays called temperament. He was witty, gay, and charming. Everybody went to his house and he to everybody’s. Thus Fanny in her youth (she was born in 1752) had the opportunity of seeing many of the distinguished men and women of eighteenth-century London: Johnson and Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Händel, Garrick and Sheridan, Bruce the traveler, actors, singers, beaux, divines, ladies with blue stockings, and with stockings of other colors. It was a gay and variegated world for a quick-eyed girl to make merry in. She made merry in it, she studied it, and as a certain literary gift was born in her, she profited.

Then, when she was twenty-five, she wrote and published anonymously an epistolary novel called “Evelina.” Even to-day, though its charm is of a peculiarly perishable order, the book may be read with pleasure and some laughter. But its freshness, its ease, and its rollicking spirits must have commended it highly to an age whose own speech and manners were reflected in it. Fanny had first the delicious satisfaction of hearing genuine praise from those who had no idea of her authorship. And when the authorship was confessed—as who, under such circumstances would have concealed it?—the praise became universal, more high-pitched still, and perhaps no less delicious. The book was read everywhere, commended everywhere. Fanny’s father, whom she adored, was bewitched with it. No less so was that odd personage Samuel Crisp, almost equally adored, who, like some others, having made a notable failure in literature himself, felt especially qualified to advise those who had succeeded.

In the houses where Fanny had before been a minor personage, a petted child, watching great doings and bewigged celebrities with wide-eyed curiosity from quiet corners, she now appeared as a celebrity herself, not bewigged, but with the wigs bowing down to her. Titles of honor begged for an introduction and titles of learning. She was pointed out in the streets and in the theatres. Her characters were cited, her wit quoted, her sentiments applied by daily personages to daily life. London was all the English world then and a book read by ten thousand people in London had a sort of personal success which no book could have anywhere to-day.

Best of all, Fanny was praised to her face by those whose praise she knew to be really worth having. Sir Joshua said he would give fifty pounds to know the author of “Evelina.” Burke sat up all night to finish it. Murphy and Sheridan entreated her to write a comedy and Sheridan agreed to take it before a word was put on paper. To a girl of twenty-five, up to that day merely one of the babes and sucklings, all this must have seemed like a golden dream.

But the best was Johnson. Fanny was brought into intimate contact with him in Mrs. Thrale’s hospitable house at Streatham. Something of the Doctor’s enthusiasm must doubtless be laid to the influence of grace, beauty, and feminine charm on that ogrish and susceptible heart. But, whatever the cause, he set no bounds to an outcry of admiration sufficient to turn the head of an older and sedater woman. Nothing like “Evelina,” he said, had appeared for years. And of its author “I know none like her—nor do I believe there is, or ever was, a man who could write such a book so young.” And the literary praise was mingled with expressions of personal affection. “Afterwards, grasping my hand with the most affectionate warmth, he said: ‘I wish you success! my dear little Burney!’ When, at length, I told him I could stay no longer, and bid him good night, he said, ‘There is none like you, my dear little Burney! there is none like you!—good night, my darling!’”

In such a highly-flavored atmosphere did the girl live until the publication of her second novel, “Cecilia,” in 1782. This, though more elaborate, more Johnsonian, and less freshly entertaining than “Evelina,” was equally well received, and Miss Burney continued to be idolized by all the literary set of London.

Then there came an extraordinary change. Mrs. Thrale married the Italian musician, Piozzi, and the Streatham circle was broken up. Miss Burney’s greatest supporter, Johnson, died in 1784, and in the following year Fanny was transplanted, elevated or degraded, as you please, from the free, fascinating life of a popular author to be a personal attendant on the queen. Dr. Burney thought his daughter’s future assured in the most promising fashion. She herself entered upon her new career with anxiety and regret and found nothing in it to contradict her unpleasant expectations.