Jane Austen (50 page)

On May 24th Jane said goodbye to Chawton Cottage and

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got into James' carriage for the drive to Winchester; with Cassandra beside her, she was perfectly comfortable, except that, as it was raining, she was constantly worried by the thought that Henry, who rode at one side of the carriage, and young William Knight on the other, would be getting wet.

The lodging taken by Mrs. Heathcote was one of a small lane of houses, which terminated in the buildings of the school. Its little bow-windowed drawing room overlooked the headmaster's garden

on the opposite side of the lane. In summer, the height of May, there could hardly be a pleasanter situation. Jane was very hopeful of getting better. Three days after her arrival she wrote to Steventon to thank Edward for the loving anxiety he had shown for her during her illness; she could only repay it by telling him how much she was improving, "I will not boast of my handwriting; neither that nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty, but in other respects I am gaining strength very fast. I am now out of bed from nine in the morning till ten at night--upon the sofa, 'tis true,--but I eat my meals with Aunt Cass in a rational way, and can employ myself and walk from one room to another." She added: "Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and if he fails, I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned and disinterested body." As Mr. Austen Leigh said on Mr.

Lyford's behalf, it was not his business to discourage his patient; but from the first moment of his seeing her in Winchester, he thought there was no hope. The fourteen-year-old Charles Knight was still at Winchester, and his Aunt Jane said they were to have him in to breakfast the next day, which was a holiday. "We have had but one visit yet from him, poor fellow, as he is in the sick room, but he hopes to be out tonight."

Old Mrs. Austen wrote notes to Anna, saying that though

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Jane's state was very precarious, there had been some good news of better nights; but James, who had come over from Steventon, wrote to Edward and said he must be prepared for any letter now to contain the worst news.

June passed into July, and James and Henry felt that it was their duty as clergymen to tell her she must face the fact that she might be going to die. She realized the significance of what they said, but she was "not appalled" by it. She was thankful that she had been able to remain in her right mind throughout the illness, and now she asked them to administer the communion service to her, before she might become too weak and wandering to follow it with all her faculties.

All her life she had said so little about religion, and shrunk so much from people who talked a great deal about their religious feelings, that Henry thought it impossible that ordinary acquaintances could have had any idea of how settled and devout her convictions were.

Mary Austen was with them now; she had promised Cassandra she

would come if she could be of any use, and as a nurse who had been got in did not quite please Cassandra, Mary had come to take her place. Jane had often in a private letter expressed herself as harassed by the peculiarities of Mary's temperament, but she did not find them trying now. On one occasion when Mary was doing something for

her she turned to her, and said: "You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary." One of the links with the outer world which lasted longest was the pleasure she got from reading Fanny's letters. They were as full, as loving, as amusing and enlivening as ever. Cassandra blessed her niece; she knew the effort it must have cost her to write in such a strain, but the pleasure it gave to Jane was inexpressible.

On Thursday evening, July 17th, Cassandra went into the town to fulfill something Jane was anxious to have done; and

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when she got back a little before six o'clock, she found that Jane had had an attack of faintness. She was recovered enough to tell

Cassandra about it, and was quietly talking to her as the clock struck six; but very soon afterwards the faintness came back again, and for half an hour she felt the actual pangs of death; she had no fixed pain, but she said she could not tell them what she suffered. "God, grant me patience!" she gasped. Such it was to die in pain without the alleviation of injections or drugs. Cassandra, waiting for Mr. Lyford, who had been sent for, tried to discover if there were anything she could do for her. Jane's voice was altered, but it was intelligible to the last. When Cassandra asked if she wanted anything, she replied:

"Nothing but death."

When Mr. Lyford came, he did something to relieve her, and by

seven o'clock she was in a state of quiet unconsciousness. She lay perfectly still except that every breath caused a slight motion of her head. For six hours Cassandra sat beside the bed with a pillow on her lap because Jane's head was nearly off the bed. Then Mary took her place for two hours and a half. At half-past three Cassandra came back again, and Jane died in her arms at half-past four on the morning of the 18th of July.

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THE FUNERAL was conducted in Winchester Cathedral; it had to

be very early because the morning service began at ten. Cassandra did not go to it. Fanny had written a long letter full of anguish and distress; she could not imagine how Cassandra would bear it.

Cassandra wrote back, comforting her: "I am perfectly conscious of the extent of my irreparable loss, but I am not at all overpowered."

"You know me too well," she said, "to be at all afraid that I should suffer materially from my feelings." Poor Cassandra's was not a nature that could find relief in an attack of nervous prostration; the only relief in her power was to give the details of the last night to Fanny. "My dearest Fanny, doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost." She gave the account, of which she said: "I could not write so to anybody else." There had been nothing in Jane's last appearance, she said, which gave the look of pain; "but for the continued motion of the head, she gave me the idea of a beautiful statue." Cassandra thanked God that she had been able to do everything for her at the end. Fatigue and grief had not impaired her faculties at all so long as she could be of any use; even when the funeral procession left the house for the cathedral, she did not break down. "I watched the

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little mournful procession the length of the street; and when it turned from my sight and I had lost her for ever, even then I was not overpowered, nor so much agitated as I am now in writing of it."

They left Winchester the day after the funeral and went back to Chawton, to Steventon, to Bentley, to a family life that had lost its brightest ornament. Writing in middle life, one of the nieces said:

"It comes back to me now, how strangely I missed her. It had become so much a habit with me to put things by in my mind with a reference to her, and to say to myself, I shall keep this for Aunt Jane"; and one of the Godmersham nephews used to say that after the death of his Aunt Jane, his visits to Chawton were always a disappointment to him. "He could not help expecting to be particularly happy in that house; and never till he got there could he realize to himself how all its peculiar charm was gone."

Henry undertook the publication of her two remaining works:
Miss
Catherine
, on whose publication Jane Austen had not actually decided, he called
Northanger Abbey
, and to the last one he gave the title of
Persuasion
. The works were published in one set of volumes by Murray in 1818, and Henry prefixed to them the biographical notice of his sister which was the first account of any kind to be written of her.

Henry Austen's temperament made such an impression on the people who came in contact with him, that he is almost never mentioned without some exclamation on his charm and wit; but his liveliness did not transfer itself to the written word, and the essay on Jane Austen, though of unique value, is something of a disappointment.

His naturally solemn manner of writing, the fact that the essay was itself an elegy, and that the convention of the time

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prevented his putting before the public that sort of intimate portrait which, in conversation, no one could have given so well as he, have made his description of so dated a nature, that only the extreme interest of its subject makes it possible for us to read it with any degree of intelligent participation. Its expression is as foreign to us as a marble monument of a veiled urn, or a memorial ring, showing a weeping willow made of the departed's hair.

The memoir of Mr. Edward Austen Leigh will always remain, after her own writings, the reader's most thrilling contact with Jane Austen. In certain aspects it is as eloquent of the 1870's as his Uncle Henry's is of 1818; but Mr. Austen Leigh had two points in his favor: he knew that there was a public anxious to hear anything which he could tell, and had Henry Austen felt sure of this, it would have altered the scope of his work considerably; secondly, the Edward Austen who had been writing a novel that had pleased his aunt had something of the novelist's capacity to present a human being, and the little anecdotes and remarks he collected from his own

remembrance and that of his sisters, though they are so few in number, give one occasionally a sense almost of clairvoyance. He opens his memoir at the point at which the ordinary biography of Jane Austen must naturally close, and when one has read the account of Cassandra Austen's vigil until half-past four of a summer's morning, in the house opposite the headmaster's garden, and her saying that they took the coffin away so quietly that had she not been

"upon the listen," she would not have heard them, it is then that Mr.

Austen Leigh's opening words take on their true perspective. "More than half a century has passed away, since I, the youngest of the mourners, attended the funeral of my dear Aunt Jane in Winchester Cathedral." After the ceremony,

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he said: "Her brothers went back sorrowing to their several homes.

They were very fond and very proud of her . . . and each loved afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some niece or daughter of his own to the dear sister Jane, whose perfect equal they never yet expected to see."

Cassandra Austen returned to Chawton Cottage, where for ten years she lived looking after her mother. When it had become known that Jane's recovery was impossible, the family, in the midst of their own grief, had turned their thoughts to Cassandra with a dreadful

presentiment of horror; but, as Cassandra had said to Fanny Knight, she was not one to be overborne; she could suffer and go on living as before. As a very old lady, she was once seen at a family wedding, pale, with black eyes and a kind smile. Once when she was visited by a relation whose seventeen-year-old daughter had never seen Jane Austen, they were struck, when Cassandra spoke of her sister, by

"the accent of living love" in her voice.

There never was a time when Jane Austen's work was altogether

unrecognized. The appreciation that began in the mind of an older sister and extended to a family circle has spread through the channel of a small and cultivated group until the ordinary reader has become sufficiently familiar with the names of the books she wrote to be able to lay his hand on them naturally, and to feel on opening them that it was for him, after all, that they were originally written. Her fame has not only grown with immense rapidity in the last fifty years, but it is of such a nature as must increase and become more deeply founded as the number increases of people who have not time only but mental energy to read. Another circumstance which makes for the growth of her popularity is that her language offers no difficulty: for she possessed, through a happy combination of art and chance, a

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style composed of those elements of language which do not date.

One may say with tolerable certainty that in fifty years' time the work of those writers of today who make use of such expressions as

"plutocrat-flattering bunk" and "he thought he would go bughouse,"

will sound old-fashioned beside the conversation of Emma

Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley.

Another aspect of her work which, though an external one, has

considerable influence in keeping a writer's work free from the accretions of decay, is that it is notably unhampered by detail. Her characters reveal the fact that they were born in the first decades of the nineteenth century by some of the reasons they supply for the things they do, and by the fact that they call each other Mr. and Miss instead of using the Christian name: but these things are no more important in the reader's comprehension of them, than the fact that they ride in carriages instead of in cars and airplanes. Actually they seem to meet, not in time, but space.

This is not an age favorable to the development of aesthetic genius; it may be that for a time all forms of art will pass into the domination of those who think that a good picture can be painted only if the artist's political views accord with theirs, and that it is only possible to write a good novel provided the author follows the rules they have laid down.

But such a state of things would not endure in a race with such powers of imagination, so vigorous and independent as our own. If and when that period should arrive, we must remind ourselves:

This is no common waste, no common gloom,

But nature in due course of time, once more

Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

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Then the great writers of the past will come into their own more fully than before. So far from belonging to an outworn past, their work belongs to a future which will reveal more fully the beauty and the wonder of human nature, by recognizing more completely the rights of human existence.

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The Letters of Jane Austen
, Oxford Edition, ed. R. W. Chapman.

A Memoir of Jane Austen
, J. E. Austen Leigh.

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
, with a biographical notice of the author.