Jane Austen (45 page)

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had never known; she was, in fact, feeling "luxuriously low," as people sometimes incline to be tearful after a heavy meal. It was all perfectly natural; and such of it as could be respected by even the keenest observer was done full justice to by Captain Wentworth; but such striking clarity of vision exercised on a situation of which the component parts--poor old mother, son lost at sea--are enough to make most of us respond immediately without inquiring into the merits of the case, comes as a shock, particularly in a book so marked by tenderness of feeling. One cannot but remember how

Mrs. Musgrove is treated when she really is in anguish over the accident to Louisa. Henrietta was brought back from Lyme in a state of collapse, and Captain Wentworth left her in the carriage while he went in and broke the news to Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove, and did not go back to Lyme till "he had seen the father and mother quite as composed as could be hoped, and the daughter all the better for being with them."

When we realize that none of the other novels contains an angularity like the treatment of Dick Musgrove, we feel that what is alarming in it as it now stands, not only ought to have come out, but would have come out if death had allowed the time.

At the time of the actual composition of
Persuasion
she felt the strain that ill health put upon her powers, and it led her to do something which, from the impression it made on her immediate

family, shows that it was altogether unusual with her. When she had come to the crisis of the lovers' reconciliation, she felt that she had handled it in a manner that was not sufficiently at concert pitch; she finished the last chapter on July 18th, but in the days that followed she was weighed down by the sense that the climax was not fitted to crown the intensity of what led up to it. It was "tame and

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flat," she thought. One night she went to bed in such a state of depression as was altogether unusual to her; but the depth of her gloom was the turning point, for the next day she rewrote the whole episode, bringing the Musgroves to Bath, and creating the two

chapters in the course of which she gives that unequaled picture of the ecstasy of relief, and of happiness that is too acute to be felt at first except as pain.

Fortunately the canceled chapter has survived, and to read it after one has read
Persuasion
is to gain some of the interest and pleasure which the more fortunate were able to enjoy in persuading Jane Austen to tell them other things about the characters of her novels. It does not, indeed, bear comparison with the
tour de force
with which it was replaced. It is conceived on a much simpler scale, and the acute moment takes place when Anne and Captain Wentworth are by themselves in the drawing room of the Admiral's lodgings in Gay Street, so that the brilliantly varied comic background, which throws the state of their feelings into such relief, is absent; as also is the discussion on constancy between Anne and Captain Harville, which leads up to the climax with such effectiveness, but a good deal of the earlier version was incorporated into the later, and the original contains one descriptive touch upon Captain Wentworth which the reader would be sorry to miss. "His color was changing and he was looking at her with all the power and keenness which she believed no other eyes than his possessed."

The autobiographical significance of
Persuasion
is frequently debated, and one can but record the opinion once again that in essentials it has been very much overstressed. On the surface, it appears a matter for fruitful exploration. There is, for one thing, the fact of Jane Austen's own visit to Lyme twelve years before; the depth and vividness of her

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impression of its loveliness, as mirrored in her recollection. So present were her memories to her as she wrote, that she did not even view the beauties of the coast and sea through the eyes of the characters; she uttered her praise of them in her own person. Then there is the famous conversation in which Anne claimed for women the privilege "of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!" The words would stand for a dead lover as well as for a faithless one. The impression that when Jane Austen wrote of Anne Elliot she was writing of herself, has been much strengthened by the unnamed lady who was acquainted with her, and who said that Jane Austen was Anne Elliot, in her quietness, elegance and sweetness.

But directly we approach the idea of trying to identify the characters of the novel with those of real life, including Jane Austen herself, we receive a very different impression. Captain Harville, for example, was understood to have been in part a picture of Frank Austen.

Captain Frank Austen said many years afterward: "I believe that part of Captain Harville's character was suggested by my own," and it is easy to see what that part was, from the description of Captain Harville's domestic habits. He had immensely increased the

accommodation of the little house at Lyme by his "ingenious contrivances," and made the doors and windows proof against the roughest weather. "He drew, he varnished, he carpentered, he glued; he made toys for the children; he fashioned new netting needles and pins with improvements, and if everything else was done, sat down to his large fishing net at the corner of the room." The warm family affection of Captain Harville was certainly to be found in Captain Austen, but would the self-contained, undemonstrative Frank have comported himself so in that conversation with Anne Elliot? Would he have been so profoundly

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moved by Captain Benwick's falling in love again after the death of Fanny Harville? How exceedingly different Frank Austen's

temperament was from that of the emotional, eloquent Captain

Harville, may be judged from the anecdotes given by Lord

Brabourne. Sir Francis Austen was once on board, watching one of his officers taking a swim, when he saw that the bather was being pursued by a shark, and ejaculated with his usual precision: "Mr.

Pakenham, you are in danger of a shark--a shark of the blue

species!" From the Admiral's measured utterance, Mr. Pakenham thought he must be joking, and was only induced to come on board in the nick of time. On another occasion Sir Francis Austen took a chronometer back for inspection to the maker from whom he had

had it five years before. "Well, Sir Francis," said the maker complacently, "it seems to have varied none at all!""Yes," said Sir Francis, "it
has
varied--
eight seconds
!"

On the question of Jane Austen's being identified with Anne Elliot, we need only ask, could Anne Elliot have written
Pride and
Prejudice
? Anne Elliot's charms did not include vivacity and brilliance; she was clear-sighted and sensible, but her powers of judgment did not take the form of a startling insight into other people's characters; she could never have maintained a conversation such as Emma had with Mr. Knightley, or laughed at and with

Captain Wentworth as Elizabeth's liveliness played over Mr. Darcy.

Then we have a glimpse of what Anne Elliot had been at school; when Mrs. Smith first knew her she was a "blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen." Jane Austen, as a child, was blooming, indeed; but neither silent nor unformed. At twelve she was annoying Phila Walter with her airs; at fourteen she was writing
Love and
Friendship
. But, at the same time, Jane Austen's own experience has left its mark on the

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book, though not through the method of being transferred to it. If she had never known what it was to love, she could not have known

what love meant to Anne Elliot, and the effort she had once been obliged to make so that no one but Cassandra should know how

desperately unhappy she was, had told her what fortitude meant, in a daily round that was lived through at home, in close family

intercourse, without the relief of outside employment. But she had recovered in a way that was not possible to such a nature as Anne Elliot's; it was true that she had refused Mr. Bigg Wither, as Anne had refused Charles Musgrove. But whereas Anne could never have loved again, Jane Austen in her own person boldly rebutted the idea that one could be blighted for life by such an incident. As she said to Fanny Knight: "It is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of disappointments kill anybody." She said of Anne Elliot that the "only thoroughly natural, happy and sufficient cure," a second attachment, had not been possible to her, because the limited society in which she moved did not provide anybody whom she

could love. The author therefore was prepared to believe that

circumstances made a second attachment impossible to Anne Elliot; but Anne herself did not believe that her actual marriage with Captain Wentworth would have cut her off from other men more

decidedly than her own feelings for him; and the differentiation between the character of the author and the creature of the author's mind is sealed by what Jane Austen said to Fanny about the novel:

"You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me."

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MR. JOHN MURRAY owned the
Quarterly Review
. He had

founded it in 1809, partly in opposition to the spirit of the
Edinburgh
Review
, which to the list of its victims and opponents had added Sir Walter Scott. The fact that John Murray had published
Emma
was no doubt responsible for the novel's being reviewed by Scott in the
Quarterly
, but Scott's own appreciation of Jane Austen made his tribute a willing one. The actual review of
Emma
, however, is not so enthusiastic but that one believes that Mr. Jeffreys, who had been kept up by the novel for three nights, might have treated it rather better in the Edinburgh. Scott's review took the form of a discussion of Jane Austen's work as a whole; he celebrated the fact that she had developed and crystallized by her art that form of fiction which, he said, "has arisen almost in our own time, and which draws the character and incidents introduced more immediately from the

current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel." Speaking particularly of
Emma
, he said that the novel showed the fault to which this form of fiction was liable: that though Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates were admirably presented, we saw

too much of them, and therefore they were apt to become as tedious as they

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would have been in real life. But though we may think the review deficient in appreciation, Jane Austen did not. For the first years of its appearance, Mr. Murray found it very difficult to produce the
Quarterly
at the date on which it should properly have appeared; and therefore, though Scott's review had been written in 1815, it did not appear till March of 1816. Murray sent Jane Austen a copy of the review, and on April 1st she returned it with her thanks, saying: "The authoress of
Emma
has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it"; but she was distressed that Scott, in referring as he did to
Sense and Sensibility
,
Pride and Prejudice
, and
Emma
, had omitted all mention of
Mansfield Park
. "I cannot but be sorry," she said, "that so clever a man as the reviewer of
Emma
should consider it unworthy of being noticed." But she leaves the topic immediately

"You will be pleased to hear," she goes on, "that I have received the Prince's thanks for the handsome copy I sent him of
Emma
.

Whatever he may think of my share of the work, yours seems to

have been quite right."

But, as not infrequently happens, the judgment of the critic when privately expressed is a good deal warmer than that which he permits himself to print. Nine years after Jane Austen's death Scott wrote in his diary the appreciative comment of her work which, rather than the
Quarterly
article, has become the accepted expression of his opinion. On March 14th, 1826, he recorded: "Read again for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of
Pride and
Prejudice
. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the

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description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!" When Mr. Edward Austen Leigh visited Abbotsford after Scott's death, he was shown Scott's own edition of Jane Austen's works; he noticed how well-worn the

volumes were; as "an unusual favor" he was allowed to take one of them into his hands.

When Scott referred to "that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting," he laid his finger on one of the most integral aspects of Jane Austen's art, and that one in relation to which the story of her life is the most important.

The occult power of creating human personality--the rarest form of literary genius--which invests Jane Austen's work with its

extraordinary nature, was a part of her with which, so to speak, she had nothing to do. Her conscious effort was merely directed to the exercising of it to what seemed to her the best advantage. The genius seems, in most cases, to be born with some self-protective

consciousness, which enables him to adopt the conditions necessary to the producing of his work. It may be that those conditions involve a complete overthrowing of the conventional régime of existence; or it may be that, as in Jane Austen's case, he escapes the interference of the world by so identifying himself with ordinary life that he avoids its observation altogether. However much the methods differ, the end is always the same. To keep yourself unspotted from the world is not only true religion before God; it is also one of the first necessities of art. The injunction does not imply a separation of the artist from the world, but quite the contrary; in fact it may be doubted whether those great souls who are obliged to retreat to uninhabited localities and shake off the restraints of civilization before they can put pen to paper have very much strength of creative impulse behind their work.