The Common Reader
no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find
ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.
To begin with, that prim little girl whom Philadelphia found so unlike a
child of twelve, whimsical and affected, was soon to be the authoress of
an astonishing and unchildish story, _Love and Friendship_,[9] which,
incredible though it appears, was written at the age of fifteen. It was
written, apparently, to amuse the schoolroom; one of the stories in the
same book is dedicated with mock solemnity to her brother; another is
neatly illustrated with water-colour heads by her sister. There are
jokes which, one feels, were family property; thrusts of satire, which
went home because all little Austens made mock in common of fine ladies
who “sighed and fainted on the sofa”.
Brothers and sisters must have laughed when Jane read out loud her last
hit at the vices which they all abhorred. “I die a martyr to my grief
for the loss of Augustius. One fatal swoon has cost me my life. Beware
of Swoons, Dear Laura. . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not
faint. . . .” And on she rushed, as fast as she could write and quicker
than she could spell, to tell the incredible adventures of Laura and
Sophia, of Philander and Gustavus, of the gentleman who drove a coach
between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, of the theft of the
fortune that was kept in the table drawer, of the starving mothers and
the sons who acted Macbeth. Undoubtedly, the story must have roused the
schoolroom to uproarious laughter. And yet, nothing is more obvious than
that this girl of fifteen, sitting in her private corner of the common
parlour, was writing not to draw a laugh from brother and sisters, and
not for home consumption. She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for
our age, for her own; in other words, even at that early age Jane Austen
was writing. One hears it in the rhythm and shapeliness and severity of
the sentences. “She was nothing more than a mere good tempered, civil,
and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was
only an object of contempt.” Such a sentence is meant to outlast the
Christmas holidays. Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom
upon sheer nonsense,—_Love and Friendship_ is all that, but what is
this note which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and
penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The
girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world.
Girls of fifteen are always laughing. They laugh when Mr. Binney helps
himself to salt instead of sugar. They almost die of laughing when old
Mrs. Tomkins sits down upon the cat. But they are crying the moment
after. They have no fixed abode from which they see that there is
something eternally laughable in human nature, some quality in men and
women that for ever excites our satire. They do not know that Lady
Greville who snubs, and poor Maria who is snubbed, are permanent
features of every ball-room. But Jane Austen knew it from her birth
upwards. One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her
a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in
the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had
already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over
that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few
illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes
is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage,
but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the
writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the
book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of
anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once
received. Her gaze passes straight to the mark, and we know precisely
where, upon the map of human nature, that mark is. We know because Jane
Austen kept to her compact; she never trespassed beyond her boundaries.
Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she round upon herself
in shame, obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an
outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have
said, pointing with her stick, end _there_; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct. But she does not deny that moons and mountains and
castles exist—on the other side. She has even one romance of her own.
It is for the Queen of Scots. She really admired her very much. “One of
the first characters in the world,” she called her, “a bewitching
Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only
ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs. Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself.” With these
words her passion is neatly circumscribed, and rounded with a laugh. It
is amusing to remember in what terms the young Brontës wrote, not very
much later, in their northern parsonage, about the Duke of Wellington.
The prim little girl grew up. She became “the prettiest, silliest, most
affected husband-hunting butterfly” Mrs. Mitford ever remembered, and,
incidentally, the authoress of a novel called _Pride and Prejudice_,
which, written stealthily under cover of a creaking door, lay for many
years unpublished. A little later, it is thought, she began another
story, _The Watsons_, and being for some reason dissatisfied with it,
left it unfinished. Unfinished and unsuccessful, it may throw more light
upon its writer’s genius than the polished masterpiece blazing in
universal fame. Her difficulties are more apparent in it, and the method
she took to overcome them less artfully concealed. To begin with, the
stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one
of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first
version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and
atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say—by what
suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would
have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family
life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and
apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed
what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go
through. Here we perceive that she was no conjuror after all. Like other
writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar
genius could bear fruit. Here she fumbles; here she keeps us waiting.
Suddenly, she has done it; now things can happen as she likes things to
happen. The Edwards’ are going to the ball. The Tomlinsons’ carriage is
passing; she can tell us that Charles is “being provided with his gloves
and told to keep them on”; Tom Musgrove retreats to a remote corner with
a barrel of oysters and is famously snug. Her genius is freed and
active. At once our senses quicken; we are possessed with the peculiar
intensity which she alone can impart. But of what is it all composed? Of
a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an
assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy
being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is
no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is
moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made
to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how
tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown
herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come
inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much
deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to
supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet
is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows
with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.
Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder,
will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrove make their call at
five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the
knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are
accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred,
vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the
tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment,
half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way
as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been
made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in
this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of
Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature.
Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there
remains to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of
human values. Dismiss this too from the mind and one can dwell with
extreme satisfaction upon the more abstract art which, in the ball-room
scene, so varies the emotions and proportions the parts that it is
possible to enjoy it, as one enjoys poetry, for itself, and not as a
link which carries the story this way and that.
But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise,
and taciturn—“a poker of whom everybody is afraid”. Of this too there
are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most
consistent satirists in the whole of literature. Those first angular
chapters of _The Watsons_ prove that hers was not a prolific genius; she
had not, like Emily Brontë, merely to open the door to make herself
felt. Humbly and gaily she collected the twigs and straws out of which
the nest was to be made and placed them neatly together. The twigs and
straws were a little dry and a little dusty in themselves. There was the
big house and the little house; a tea party, a dinner party, and an
occasional picnic; life was hedged in by valuable connections and
adequate incomes; by muddy roads, wet feet, and a tendency on the part
of the ladies to get tired; a little money supported it, a little
consequence, and the education commonly enjoyed by upper middle-class
families living in the country. Vice, adventure, passion were left
outside. But of all this prosiness, of all this littleness, she evades
nothing, and nothing is slurred over. Patiently and precisely she tells
us how they “made no stop anywhere till they reached Newbury, where a
comfortable meal, uniting dinner and supper, wound up the enjoyments and
fatigues of the day”. Nor does she pay to conventions merely the tribute
of lip homage; she believes in them besides accepting them. When she is
describing a clergyman, like Edmund Bertram, or a sailor, in particular,
she appears debarred by the sanctity of his office from the free use of
her chief tool, the comic genius, and is apt therefore to lapse into
decorous panegyric or matter-of-fact description. But these are
exceptions; for the most part her attitude recalls the anonymous ladies’
ejaculation—“A wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk is
terrific indeed!” She wishes neither to reform nor to annihilate; she is
silent; and that is terrific indeed. One after another she creates her
fools, her prigs, her worldlings, her Mr. Collins’, her Sir Walter
Elliotts, her Mrs. Bennetts. She encircles them with the lash of a
whip-like phrase which, as it runs round them, cuts out their
silhouettes for ever. But there they remain; no excuse is found for them
and no mercy shown them. Nothing remains of Julia and Maria Bertram when
she has done with them; Lady Bertram is left “sitting and calling to Pug
and trying to keep him from the flower beds” eternally. A divine justice
is meted out; Dr. Grant, who begins by liking his goose tender, ends by