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Table of Contents

Literary influences—Jane Austen's defence of novelists—The old essayists—Her favourite authors—Some novels of her time—Criticism of her niece's novel—Sense of her own limitations—Her method—Humour—Familiar names—Some characteristics of style—Suggested emendations—A new "problem" of authorship—A "forbidding" writer—"Commonplace" and "superficial"—Thomas Love Peacock—Sapient suggestions.

"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular.

I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. "Le style est la femme même" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has never read Camilla): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing—namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."

Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most popular novels—Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary—appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.

The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe—"la reine des épouvantements" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition—were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less pouvantable, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction which they represent that we chiefly owe Northanger Abbey, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red:

*****

I grant I never saw a goddess go—

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."

It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth—

"Let us not desert one another—we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'I am no novel-reader.—I seldom look into novels.—Do not imagine that 'I often read novels.—It is really very well for a novel.' Such is the common cant. 'And what are you reading, Miss——?' 'Oh! it is only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it."

This is a hard saying for those who count "Sir Roger de Coverley," "Mr. Bickerstaff," and many "Clarindas" and "Sophronias" among their friends. The age of the Regency may or may not have been as lax in its morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the pages of the Spectator is not easily to be believed.

The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their novels. They did not read French fiction as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it scarcely possible to read French "without contracting some pollution, so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." Times had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed the voluminous romances of Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéri with William Temple.

Another important branch of Jane's private and voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the Spectator and the Tatler which had their little days and died, particularly during the reign of George II. Not only in the Rambler and the Idler of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in the World, the Mirror, the Lounger, the Connoisseur, and other less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own.

Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to say, "If she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe." Her appreciation of such poems as The Village and The Parish Register is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born in a family which was itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the peasantry. George Crabbe, on the other hand, the son of lowly folk, was born and nurtured in poverty, and he never forgot that he had sprung from the sand-dunes of the East Coast. His pictures of the poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the most delightful of his verses; his ease in their society, his understanding of their minds and characters mark him off as clearly from Jane Austen as—to take a very modern instance—the admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in la Vendée offered in La Terre qui meurt distinguish M. René Bazin from M. Marcel Batilliat, who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence of the château in La Vendée aux Genêts. Jane found in Crabbe something that she missed in herself, a ready appreciation of all classes.

She loved Cowper too, both in his poems and his prose. There was much in The Task that could not but please her, though the humour must have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and the descriptions over-laboured. Cowper, though kindly to the rural poor, and often referring to their occupations, smiles derisively at those who pretend to envy the labourer's lot and to regard his cottage, if properly "rose-bordered," as preferable to any other kind of residence.

"So farewell envy of the peasant's nest! If Solitude make scant the means of life, Society for me! thou seeming sweet, Be still a pleasing object in my view; My visit still, but never mine abode."

Jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of these lines. In some verses—composed in 1807 for a family competition in producing rhymes with "rose"—which, but for the rhyming, are a burlesque of Cowper's style, we find a picture of a cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be naturally of small account, are lines that would mark it, without the direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not Cassandra's or Mrs. Austen's.

"Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes!

In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose,

And hat upon his head, to church he goes;

As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws

A glance upon the ample cabbage-rose,

Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,

He envies not the gayest London beaux.

In church he takes his seat among the rows,

Pays to the place the reverence he owes,

Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows,

Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,

And rouses joyous at the welcome close."

There is a letter of January 1758 from Johnson to Bennet Langton which, as Boswell remarks, shows its writer "in as easy and pleasant a state of existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy." I cannot help quoting it here as evidence of an affinity of Johnson, in his happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful admirer, Jane Austen—

"The two Wartons just looked into the town, and were taken to see Cleone, where, David says, they were starved for want of company to keep them warm. David and Doddy have had a new quarrel, and, I think, cannot conveniently quarrel any more. Cleone was well acted by all the characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. I went the first night, and supported it as well as I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone. I have left off housekeeping, and therefore made presents of the game which you were pleased to send me. The pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the bustard to Dr. Lawrence, and the pot I placed with Miss Williams, to be eaten by myself. … Mr. Reynolds has within these few days raised his price to twenty guineas a head, and Miss is much employed in miniatures. I know not anybody else whose prosperity has increased since you left them."

If the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one of Jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed "Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley, author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Langton pheasant is the author of Clarissa, another of Jane's favourites more than thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up.

Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth (after 1800), Scott (as poet), Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She had studied the essayists of Queen Anne's time and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "Mrs. Martin," she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers." Unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure.

The novels supplied by "Mrs. Martin" and others, forerunners of those which now go forth from the Strand and Oxford Street, are frequently referred to in Jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at the British Museum. There was, for example, Sarah Burney's Clarentine, which Jane and her mother read for the third time (in 1807), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is … full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was Self-Control, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but which Jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her own work forestalled by it; there was the Alphonsine of Madame de Genlis, which "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure"; and there was Margiarna, which the Austens were reading in the winter of 1809, at Southampton, and "like very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain."

About the same time Cassandra tells of some romance which the Godmersham circle has been devouring, and Jane replies—"To set up against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got Ida of Athens, by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather."

We shall not find much criticism of books either in the novels or the letters. There is a passage in one of "Aunt Jane's" letters to her niece Anna, written in 1814, in which her point of view on one important question of style is clearly expressed. Anna, probably inspired by her aunt's example—for the authorship of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had leaked out in the family in spite of all precaution—had written a novel herself, and had sent the MS. to Jane for kindly consideration and advice. The result was not wholly encouraging—

"Your Aunt C. (Cassandra) does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort. … I have scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank, and when Mr. P. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the Honourable. That distinction is never mentioned at such times, at least I believe not."

Of a later novel of Anna's, which Jane "read to your Aunt Cassandra in our own room at night, while we undressed," she tells the girl that "Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a 'vortex of dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened. … "

Mrs. Austen had said, and Jane agreed with her, that Anna had allowed a married couple in the novel to be too long in returning a visit from the Vicar's wife, and Jane had ventured to expunge, as "too familiar and inelegant," the "Bless my heart" in which Sir Thomas, one of the characters, indulged. Jane's own Emma might say "Good God!" when she pleased, but Anna's Sir Thomas might not even bless his heart!

A last criticism on Anna's book is worth quoting for its direct bearing on the critic's own method. "You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left."

Jane's estimate of her own manner of work is modest enough. "The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour," she says. With this phrase of her own as a text she has been called a "miniaturist," but if authors and artists are to be compared, there is quite as much of the selection and the richness of a Gainsborough in her work as of the minuteness of a Metzu or a Meissonier.

In her reply to the amazing proposal of the librarian at Carlton House that she should compose an historical romance founded on the records of the Saxe-Coburg family, she writes, not without a touch of her gentle satire—

"I am fully sensible that (such a romance) might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."

Her limitations of subject are clear to her own mind. Even of the "domestic life in villages" she would only deal with the side where the daily bread was provided out of income, not out of retail profits or weekly wages. It is a suggestive fact, to which I have already alluded, that she never even tried to draw a peasant's family. Her heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a cottage to inquire after a sick child or leave a charitable gift, but of the conditions under which the labouring classes lived, during the hard times of the French wars, we learn nothing at all from her writings. The nearest approaches to such subjects are the account of the Prices' home at Portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, I think not unjustly, to be as vivid in its suggestion of impecuniosity and discomfort as anything written by Zola), and the similar, but far less effective, picture of the Watsons' family life.

Her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and so, in comparison with that of "stylists," it certainly is. She had stored her mind with good literature while still in her teens, and no doubt most of her limpid sentences flowed freely from her pen. But the consistent absence of superfluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence that she had consciously formed an ideal of composition, and that she thought out the means of producing her effects is clear from several passages in her letters. To her niece who addressed her as "Dear Miss Darcy," and wanted her to answer in that character, Jane replied—"Even had I more time I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss D. would write." She had studied her art till she could analyze its qualities, as we may see from a letter written from Chawton in 1813. Mrs. Austen had been reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to Jane and Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austens), and Jane tells Cassandra that—

"Though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling, it wants shade—to be stretched out here and there … an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style."

Happily she did not provide the conventional "shade," which would have been on a par with the "brown tree" that, according to Sir George Beaumont, was an indispensable feature of every properly composed landscape painting. Shade, however, did appear in several chapters of Persuasion, which, for a certain suggestion of melancholy, stands apart from the other novels, though not as markedly as Northanger Abbey stands apart for its exuberant frivolity.

Macaulay declared of Fanny Burney's later style that it was "the worst that has ever been known among men." Jane Austen's style, in its happy hours, is so admirably adapted to its purpose that, while we may not call it "the best," a term which advertisement has rendered meaningless as a standard of excellence, it has never been surpassed as a means to a desired end. It seems trite to say that the first point to consider in any question of style is the intended result, but it is a point so frequently overlooked that much criticism about art and letters, as about politics or agriculture, is vitiated by the hopeless effort to set up an abstract ideal applicable to all cases, like a universal watch-key.

The result for which Jane Austen worked can scarcely be put in question. She was impelled to make her little world live in fiction, not precisely as she saw it and heard it, but as she could most attractively present it to minds possessing the indispensable modicum of humour, without which the charm is lost at least as nearly as the charm of a Turner sunset by a person whose optic nerve is irresponsive to the red rays. Apart from her prevailing humour, the modesty of her style is a continual beauty. There is none of that florid eloquence which depends more on sound than sense for its effect, nor of that forcing of strange phrases which in these days so often passes for literary excellence. There is no preciosity about her books; the narrative is easy, the incidents are probable; the dialogue, with few exceptions, is natural, the bright people being differentiated from the dull by their talk, and not, as in most novels, by the author's assurances. If Mr. Meredith was right when he declared that "it is unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better than they should be," there must be many "unwholesome" pages in Jane Austen's work for the tolerably large class to which he referred. Neither in real life nor in the life of her books did she "suffer fools gladly," and so far as the men of her creation are concerned she is on the whole more successful in representing the foolish than the wise. Her chief failure is in the realization of such a young man as one of her heroines would have been likely to admire. Most of the younger men are sketchily drawn, and we who are men would fain believe that she did not understand the nature of a man's heart, seeing that she never found one worth accepting. Knightley and Bertram seem to have been favourites of hers, but they are not lively people, nor sufficiently wanting in priggishness. The liveliest of them all is Henry Tilney, whatever his qualities of mind. The Jane Austen touch is charmingly varied, and it is felt in some of its happy strokes in the talk between this mercurial young rector and the girl whose early-budding affections he so speedily returns.