Jane Austen (11 page)

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long walks alone in the twilight; and "while the others were busily helping Charlotte show her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, and stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of the hills in the horizon and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna could be seen."

The long course of wretchedness in which Marianne had indulged made her so low in health that when she caught a chill it developed into something serious. "Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had--assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings--given Marianne a cold so violent, as, though for a day or two trifled with and denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of everybody."

The cold and sore throat having developed into what the apothecary diagnosed as a putrid fever, Mrs. Palmer, nervous for her baby, left the house for a relation's and took Mr. Palmer with her. Mrs.

Jennings and Colonel Brandon remained to help and comfort Elinor, and when at last Marianne became desperately ill the Colonel went off in his own carriage to fetch Mrs. Dashwood from Barton. While he was actually gone, Marianne took an unexpected turn for the better, and Elinor, who at first scarcely dared to believe her eyes, longed with passionate impatience for her mother to arrive and receive the good news herself.

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"The night was cold and stormy. The wind roared round the house, and the rain beat against the windows; but Elinor, all happiness within, regarded it not. Marianne slept through every blast; and the travellers--they had a rich reward in store, for every present inconvenience."

"The clock struck eight. Had it been ten, Elinor would have been convinced that at that moment she heard a carriage driving up to the house; and so strong was the persuasion that she
did
, in spite of the
almost
impossibility of their being already come, that she moved into the adjoining dressing-closet and opened a window-shutter, to be satisfied of the truth. She instantly saw that her ears had not deceived her. The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view. By their uncertain light she thought she could discern it to be drawn by four horses; and this, while it told the excess of her poor mother's alarm, gave some explanation to such unexpected rapidity."

"Never in her life had Elinor found it so difficult to be calm, as at that moment. The knowledge of what her mother must be feeling as the carriage stopped at the door--or her doubt--her dread--perhaps her despair?--and of what
she
had to
tell
?--with such knowledge it was impossible to be calm. . . . The bustle in the vestibule as she passed along an inner lobby, assured her that they were already in the house. She rushed forward towards the drawing-room--she

entered it--and saw only Willoughby."

The dramatic surprise of this entry is sustained by the unexpected but convincing fashion in which Willoughby explains his conduct, though he cannot explain it away. His account of what led him to appear a scoundrel is not one of the arresting psychological studies, such as are furnished by the comic or satirical episodes; but it is perhaps, with the conversation of the second chapter, the soundest, most searching

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analysis of motive in the book. There are portions of the novel which one imagines may be the fruit of revision; when, for instance, Elinor disclosed to Marianne that Edward had for two years been entangled in an engagement with Lucy Steele, Marianne considered Lucy "so totally unamiable, so absolutely incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she could not be persuaded at first to believe, and

afterwards to pardon, any former affection of Edward for her. She would not even admit it to have been natural; and Elinor left her to be convinced that it was so, by that which only could convince her, a better knowledge of mankind." One does not know whether that last sentence was written by Jane Austen at twenty-two or Jane Austen at thirty-six; but the conduct of Willoughby is so integral a part of the story that it must have been conceived, with all its understanding of a weak, vicious yet fascinating character, at the time of the story's origin. The episode of Marianne and Willoughby is indeed

condemned from its outset; it brings out the worst characteristics in each, and Marianne at least recovers from it as if from some painful disease; yet it is a thing of beauty, and it sounds a note Jane Austen never repeated, when Willoughby says to Elinor in asking her to tell Marianne of his confession: "You tell me she has forgiven me already. Let me be able to fancy that a better knowledge of my heart, and of my present feelings, will draw from her a more spontaneous, more natural, more gentle, less dignified forgiveness."

Even in this early work, Jane Austen's achievement suffers great injustice from an attempt to discuss it in parts, to illustrate it by detached quotations; for her very first novel shows a capacity for construction, and for making all her characters act upon each other amazing in a writer who was so young that one would have expected the book to be a

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series of passages, brilliant in themselves but not making each one an indispensable contribution to the whole. Art lies in concealing art, and it is true that the framework of
Sense and Sensibility
is obvious; that, in a sense, is why it is so remarkable; beneath the enthusiastic delight in creating character, the conscious preoccupation with some favorite ideas about conduct and common sense, the light and shade of romantic passion, and the itch that besets us all, to make a personal comment upon the trends and fashions of the day, is the instinctive, faultless sense of balance, the intellectual attack upon form, which matured into that unique quality of hers, the power to impose a shape upon her material without sacrificing anything to probability.

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JANE AUSTEN'S existence was apparently without incident; the

answer to such a comment lies in six works of art, and one cannot avoid the question of how much actual experience of character and scene she incorporated into her novels in recognizable form. Of trivial details there are not many, but there are some; perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some knowledge of her daily life enables one to guess, here and there, with some degree of

confidence, that she is at least modelling her creation on experience, especially, one believes, with reference to visual description: the view from Mr. Darcy's drawing room windows, the vast kitchen

premises of Northanger Abbey, Donwell Abbey "with all the old neglect of prospect." A few, a very few minor characters seemed to her family ascribable to people they knew or had known. We

ourselves are occasionally tempted to think that in the relationship, at least, of one character to another, if not in the characters themselves, as in Jane Bennet's influence on her brilliant sister, Emma Woodhouse's grateful affection for her older friend Mrs.

Weston, Emma Watson's for an invalided father, there is a reflection of something to be seen in Jane Austen's own life. But to go farther than such speculations, to try to deduce from her novels a personal history of Jane Austen, is completely

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to misunderstand the type of mind she represents.

The creative mind of the first order is infinitely difficult to understand; Dryden understood it when he said of Shakespeare:

"After God, he has created most"; but there are numberless people who say "Anne Elliot must be Jane Austen" because Jane Austen could never otherwise have understood how Anne Elliot would have felt; and the only thing that deters them from believing that

Shakespeare smothered his wife in a fit of jealousy, was deeply distressed by a second marriage of his mother's, murdered a

distinguished guest in the hope of succeeding him in his office, and was finally turned out of doors by his ungrateful children, is that the stories of Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear were published and widely known before he undertook them.

The highest type of creative genius owes to daily life at once everything and nothing; its implements, its medium, are supplied by observation of the topical existence, but its inspiration lies in the fact that owing to some extraordinary
lusus naturae
it is in touch with something that encompasses us but that the rest of us do not see; racial memory or basic consciousness, one knows not how to name this vantage ground, and dark as it is to us, there is no doubt that it was equally so to the conscious mind of its possessors. But when they postulated to themselves a human being in a particular situation, something nameless whispered to them all the rest. How else could Shakespeare, three hundred years before anyone had investigated the working of the subconscious mind, have understood that though

Lady Macbeth had urged her husband not to be appalled by blood, which a little water could wash away, yet when her conscious mind was asleep, she was haunted by the nightmare that she would never get the bloodstains off her hands? When Macaulay

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mentioned Shakespeare and Jane Austen in the same breath, he did not suppose it necessary to state the obvious differences of their art and scope; admirers of Jane Austen understand what he meant in making the comparison, and feel that however far apart they stand, the two share the quality, in however differing degrees, of creating character.

It is this most unusual caliber of mind that she possessed which is the inmost secret of her skill and explains, insofar as words can explain, the miracle of her achievement; and an attempt to

understand it, however faintly, provides a strong warning against the folly and the uselessness of attempting to establish definite

connections between the world she lived in and the world of her imagination. Her creation is as much like the world of her experience as one human being is like another, in that they are both

recognizable as belonging to the same species; but two human

beings are not, in any other sense, the same.

One may, however, trace the sort of experience which, germinating in her mind, told her what hope was, and despair, and comfort and joy and every emotion, not as it shows itself in some superhuman form, but as it affects the so-called ordinary man and woman.

In December 1797, a month after the refusal of Messrs. Cadell to read
First Impressions
, Eliza de Feuillide was brought, not without some latent misgiving that she might be throwing herself away, to marry Henry Austen. Their courtship had been most characteristic of Eliza, and perhaps of the kind exactly calculated to increase the ardor and determination of a man so volatile and light-hearted. The handsome, brilliant, amusing Henry had to be serious, perhaps even distraught, for once in his life, before he could be "immeasurably enlarged into a husband" and Madame de Feuillide permitted herself to dwindle into a wife. To woo

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Eliza was like attempting to hold the wind in a net. Eliza wrote to Phila Walter on the subject: "I do not believe the parties will ever come together; not, however, that they have quarelled; but one of them cannot bring her mind to give up dear Liberty and yet dearer Flirtation. After a few months' stay in the country she sometimes thinks it possible to undertake sober matrimony, but a few weeks'

stay in London convinces her how little the state suits her taste." But in December of 1797 the marriage took place; Eliza announced it in a letter to Warren Hastings, in which she mentioned that Henry was fond of little Hastings de Feuillide, and, she was sure, would make him a good father. She said that the courtship in which she had at last acquiesced had been going on for two years.

Henry at the time of the wedding was a Captain in the Oxfordshire Militia, but he presently turned his attention to a more lucrative profession, and five years afterwards he was established as the partner of a brother officer named Maunde, as a banker and army agent with offices in Albany Street; he and Eliza lived in Upper Berkeley Street, and Mrs. Henry Austen continued, if on a slightly smaller scale, the social existence of the Comtesse de Feuillide. In the month of their marriage she was still writing a reference to Henry as "my
cousin
," adding, "I have an aversion to the word husband, and never make use of it." But in fact she and Henry were very happy. James had once wanted to marry Eliza, and she had refused him on the ground that he was a clergyman; such was her ostensible reason, but a profound instinct lay behind it. James, deeply

emotional though of a quiet disposition, and of an earnest turn to his whole nature, that sometimes made him awkward and ungracious in his behavior, would never have endured Eliza's manner of life when the first enchantment of her presence had worn

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off; nor would Eliza, quick and cool, have felt equal to the demands of James' grave, romantic nature; but to Henry, who liked society and shone in it, who was naturally cheerful and whose feelings were acute rather than deep, she was ideally suited. There was nothing in him that she could torment him upon, and for being perverse and cross with no reason at all, she herself was too rational, too elegant, with too much
savoir vivre
.

The only cloud upon the happiness of her second married life was that in 1801 poor little Hastings de Feuillide died of epilepsy.

Warren Hastings had been acquitted at the close of his seven years'

trial, six years before, but he was still a figure of public interest, and the death of his small namesake was recorded in
The Gentleman's
Magazine
.

In the next year Jane began a story of a young girl who, having been brought up in a remote country parsonage, was taken for a season to Bath. This city was well known to Jane, because Mrs. Austen's