This piece was published in the TLS of November 10, 1932
Miss Austen had no idea of what awaited Jane Austen. Within certain limits she
could perhaps forecast her contemporary's future; she must have known that
the novels would remain before the public for some years, and she would not
have been surprised by the tributes of the Austen Leighs and of Lord
Brabourne, for they were relatives, and might be expected to do what they
could for an aunt. But that the affair should go farther, that it should
reach the twentieth century and reach it in such proportions — of that she
could have had no premonition. She would have been amazed at Mr. Chapman's
magnificent and scholarly edition of the novels, published nine years ago,
and still more amazed at the interest shown over "Love and Freindship"
and "Sanditon," and the lid (for now we must be as modern as we
can) the lid would have been put on by this final achievement of Mr.
Chapman's, this monumental and definitive edition of the letters.
What would she have thought about it all? The question is not uninteresting,
though it is more important that we should think about it correctly
ourselves, that we should maintain critical perspective, that we should not
overwhelm by our superior awareness, and that Jane Austen, whom we know so
well, should not distort or overshadow Miss Austen, whom we cannot know,
because she died over a century ago at Winchester. Sitting up in our
thousands and taking notice, as we shall, we had better first of all listen
to the words of Cassandra, who was with her at the end: —
I have lost such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed —
she was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of
every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had
lost a part of myself.
We like these words of Cassandra's, and we had better read the words that
follow, which we may not like so well: —
I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious
that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of
others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the
justice of the hand that struck the blow.
In that union of tenderness and sanctimoniousness, let us leave her for a
moment to rest. She wrote letters. They have reappeared exactly as she wrote
them, but in a setting which makes them look strange to her, and we are part
of the setting. They do not draw distant ages together, like the letters
which were written at the same time by Keats. They were temporary and local
in their appeal, and their essential meaning went down with her into the
grave.
Now let us honour Mr. Chapman's edition. It is elaborate, but, as we may
expect from a scholar of his experience and taste, he makes us search for
his learning. The letters are printed without comment, and at the end of
each volume we find, if we choose, an abundance of notes and other
apparatus, together with illustrations which evoke the facts or the spirit
of the period. The text of the letters, apparently as simple as a rectory
garden, covers many little secrets, some of them only known to the children
and the servants, others almost peculiar to the hens; and all are here
patiently disinterred by the editor, while we look on with admiration, our
hands folded uselessly before us. For instance, when Miss Austen says: "If
there were but a coach from Hungerford to Chawton!" we do not guess
what lay beneath her wish, and as a matter of fact there was not very much;
still there was something, and we can find out what it is by referring to
the terminal note: —
Caroline Austen's Reminiscences show that Mrs. James Austen and C E. A. took
Caroline to Cheltenham via Kintbury, there picking up Mary Jane Fowle. In
their return they left M. J. F. at Kintbury and then diverged, Mrs. J. A.
returning to Steventon, C. E. A. taking Caroline to Chawton. J. A.'s sigh
for a coach from Hungerford is no doubt connected with this division of the
party.
Erudition can no further go, and we fling up our hands in amazement as far as
they will go in 1932. "How shall we ever recollect half the dishes for
grandmamma?" cried Miss Bates at the Highbury Assembly Rooms: but Mr.
Chapman can recollect them all, and grandmamma, the world crashing about her
ears, may regale herself upon no fewer than eight indexes, one of which
distinguishes the various generations of the Austen family by four types of
print—namely, AUSTEN, AUSTEN, Austen and Austen.
The tact and good temper of the editing are as admirable as its learning.
Naturally when one invests in a concern one comes to value it, and Mr.
Chapman is not exempt from this sensible rule. He has contended with the
subject manfully, like St. Paul at Ephesus; and would he have done so if it
was not worth while? He puts his plea endearingly, he does not thrust his
struggle down our throats, and he leads us with just the right combination
of honesty and circumspection past a very dubious spot in the rectory
garden. What's wrong in the garden? The drainage? No. The novels are good—of
that there is no doubt, and they are so good that everything connected with
the novelist and everything she wrote ought certainly to be published and
annotated. Of that, too, there is no doubt, and this elaborate edition is
thoroughly justified. But—and here comes the dubious spot —are the letters
themselves good? Very reluctantly, and in spite of Mr. Chapman's quiet
instigations to the contrary, one must answer " No."
Oh yes, one can safeguard oneself against the Janeites, should they attack. Oh
yes, some of the letters are good, most of them contain something good,
Cassandra may have burnt the best, Cassandra, as Mr. Chapman himself
conjectures, may not have been an inspiring correspondent, and nearly all
the letters are addressed to Cassandra. One can qualify the unfavourable
verdict this way and that, but the verdict remains. Are not most of these
two volumes catalogues of trivialities which do nof come alive? They were
alive at the time, but they have not the magic that outlasts ink: they are
the letters of Miss Austen, not of Jane Austen: and Miss Austen would think
us silly to read them, for she knows that we have not and cannot have their
key. When the breath left her body it was lost, though a ghost of it
lingered for a time in the hands of those who had loved her. Cassandra
understood, her niece Fanny Knight understood, the Austen Leighs and Lord
Brabourne had some conception—but we students of to-day, unrelated to her by
blood, what part have we in this family talk, and whose triviality do we
expose but our own ?
It would be incorrect to say that the letters do not suggest the novels. They
suggest them constantly: the quiet houses, the miry lanes, the conundrums,
the absence of the very rich and the very poor, the snobbery which
flourishes where distinctions of incomes are slight—all are present, and
some of the characters are also present in solution. But never the finer
characters. These never seem to get uppermost when Miss Austen writes a
letter. They belong to another part of her mind. Neither Emma Woodhouse nor
Anne Elliot nor even Frank Churchill or Mary Crawford dominates her pen. The
controls are rather Lydia Bennet, Mrs. Jennings and Sir Thomas Bertram, a
bizarre and inauspicious combine. In the earlier letters Lydia Bennet is all
pervading; balls, officers, giggling, dresses, officers, balls, fill sheet
after sheet until every one except Kitty grows weary. Nothing came of it.
Nothing could have come of it except a husband. It has none of the
disinterested rapture which fills Catherine Mor-land in the pump room at
Bath, or Natasha Rostov in the far-distant universe of "War and Peace,"
dancing the polonaise, dancing, dancing, because she is young. The young
girl dances here and her eyes sparkle duly, but they are observant and hard;
officers, dresses, officers, giggling, balls, and it is no wonder that a
hostile critic (Miss Mitford) should compare her at once to a poker and to a
butterfly. And when Lydia Bennet retires we may catch the tread of Mrs.
Jennings, and that eighteenth-century frankness of hers which has somehow
strayed into too small a room and become unacceptable. In the novels, how
well advised was the authoress of " Sense and Sensibility " to
become a prude, and to cur-,, tail in its second edition the reference to a
natural daughter! In the letters, how Miss Austen's occasional comments on
expectant motherhood do jar ! She faces the facts, but they arc not her
facts, and her lapses of taste over carnality can be deplorable, no doubt
because they arise from lack of feeling. She can write, for instance, and
write it as a jolly joke, that "Mrs. Hall of Sherborne was brought to
bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a
fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband," Did
Cassandra laugh ? Probably, but all that we catch at this distance is the
whinneying of harpies.
And then we come to the serious moments. Mrs. Jennings follows Lydia Bennet
and Sir Thomas Bertram takes the stage, unapproachable, uncontrovertible.
Listen how his spirit, though not his style, sums up the merits and demerits
of Sir John Moore: —
I am sorry to find that Sir J. Moore has a mother living, but tho' a very
Heroick son, he might not be a very necessary one to her happiness.—Deacon
Morrell may be more to Mrs. Morrell. — I wish Sir John had united something
of the Christian with the Hero in his death.
And when an intimate sorrow comes (the death of her own father) she yields to
formalism and writes: "Your mind will already forestall the sort of
event which I have to communicate. — Our dear Father has closed his virtuous &
happy life, in a death almost as free from suffering as his Children could
have wished." It is adequate — Sir Thomas Bertram is always that: but
it gives no freedom to the heart, it has none of the outpour which we found
in that letter quoted above from Cassandra.
Triviality, varied by touches of ill breeding and of sententiousness,
characterizes these letters as a whole, particularly the earlier letters;
and certain critics of weight, Mr. Chapman among them, find the triviality
delightful, and rightly point out that there is a charm in little things.
Yes, when it is the charm of Cowper. But the little things must hold out
their little hands to one another; and here there is a scrappiness which
prevents even tartness from telling. This brings us to the heart of the
matter, to Miss Austen's fundamental weakness as a letter-writer. She has
not enough subject-matter on which to exercise her powers. Her character and
sex as well as her environment removed her from public affairs, and she was
too sincere and spontaneous to affect any interest which she did not feel.
She takes no account of politics or religion, and none of the war except
when it brings prize-money to her brothers. Her comments on literature are
provincial and perfunctory— with one exception, and a significant one, which
we shall cite in a moment. When she writes a letter she has nothing in her
mind except the wish to tell her sister everything; and so she flits from
the cows lo the currant bushes, from the currant bushes to Mrs. Hall of
Sherborne, gives Mrs. Hall a tap, and flits back again. She suffers from a
poverty of material which did no injury to the novels, and indeed
contributes to their triumph. Miss Bates may flit and Mrs. Norris tap as
much as they like, because they do so inside a frame which has been provided
by a great artist, and Merylon may reproduce the atmosphere of Steventon
because it imports something else—some alignment not to be found on any map.
The letters lack direction. What an improvement when she is startled, an elm
falls, they have to go to the dentist! Then her powers of description find
fuller play, and to the affection which she always feels for her
correspondents she adds concentration, and an interest in the
subject-matter.
The improvement becomes more noticeable in the second volume, that is to say
after 1811. She had received a series of pleasant surprises. Her novels,
which had always found favour in private readings, began to get published
and gain wider audiences. Warren Hastings admired them, and " Emma "
was dedicated to the Prince Regent shortly after his victory at Waterloo.
She went to London oftener, perhaps saw Mr. Crabbe in the distance, and had
a note from Mrs. Hannah More. While rating these joys at their proper worth,
she could not but gain the notion of a more amusing and varied world ; and
perhaps she is one of the few country writers whom wider experience and
consort with the literary would not have ruined.
Meanwhile her success reacted on her family. Her seven brothers (with the
exception of a mysterious George who is never mentioned), her sister, her
sisters-in-law, her nephews and, most of all, her nieces were deeply
impressed. One of the nieces, Anna, took to scribbling on her own, and sent
Aunt Jane from time to time instalments of a novel to read aloud to Aunt
Cassandra. Miss Austen's replies are admirable. She is stimulated because
the writer is a relation, and she pours out helpful criticisms, all put in a
kindly, easy way. Most of them are connected with "getting things right"
—always a preoccupation with English novelists, from Defoe to Arnold
Bennett. Times, places and probabilities must be considered, but Anna must
beware of copying life slavishly, for life sometimes gets things wrong: —
I have scratched out Sir Thos: from walking with the other Men to the Stables &ct
the very day after breaking his arm—for though 1 find your Papa did walk out
immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to
appear unnatural in a book—& it does not seem to be material that
Sir Thos: should go with them.—Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles
distant from Dawlish & would not be talked of there.—I have put
Starcross instead. If you prefer Exeter, that must be always safe.
Thursday. We finished it last night, after our return from drinking tea at the
Gt House.—The last chapter does not please us so well, we do not thoroughly
like the Play: perhaps from having had too much of Plays in that way lately.
And we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to
Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there you had better not go
with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to
Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home.—Your Aunt C. does
not like desultory novels and is rather fearful yours will be too much so,
that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to
another, & that circumstances will be sometimes 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—&
think Nature and Spirit cover many sins of a wandering story.
Here, again, the English school of fiction speaks, and puts its case amiably
and privately, as it should. Manifestos belong to abroad. Aunt Cassandra
likes a book to be neat and tidy : Aunt Jane does not much mind. And Anna,
receiving these letters, in which detailed comment is mixed with sound
generalizations, must have been delighted; she must have found her novel
much better than she thought and yet been stimulated to correct in it what
was wrong. We share the enthusiasm. It sounds a lovely novel, and we turn to
the terminal notes to see what more Mr. Chapman has to tell us about it.
Alas; he can tell us too much: —
The story to which most of these letters of Aunt Jane's refer was never
finished. It was laid aside because my mother's hands were so full. . . The
story was laid by for years, and then one day in a fit of. despondency
burnt. I remember sitting on the rug and watching its destruction, amused
with the flames and the sparks which kept breaking out in the blackened
paper.
Thus writes Anna's daughter; and Anna's novel, with the Portmans and
Foresters, who seemed so fascinating, has gone up the chimney for ever. But
the tiny flicker of light which it casts backwards is valuable. We see Miss
Austen and Jane Austen for a moment as one person. The letter-writer and the
novelist have fused, because a letter is being written to a niece about a
novel. Family feeling has done the trick; and, after all, whatever opinion
we hold about her, we must agree that the supreme thing in life to her was
the family. She knew no other allegiance; if there was an early love affair
in the west of England, and if her lover died, as did her sister
Cassandra's, she never clung to his memory, unless she utilizes it in "Persuasion."
Intimacy out of the unknown never overwhelmed her. No single person ever
claimed her. She was part of a family, and her dearest Cassandra only the
dearest in that family. The family was the unit within which her heart had
liberty of choice; friends, neighbours, plays and fame were all objects to
be picked up in the course of a flight outside and brought back to the nest
for examination. They often laughed over the alien trophies, for they were a
hard humorous family. And these letters, however we judge them on their own
count, are invaluable as a document. They show more clearly than ever, that
Miss Austen was part of the Austens, the Knights, the Leighs, the Lefroys.
The accidents of birth and relationship were more sacred to her than
anything else in the world, and she introduced this faith as the groundwork
of her six great novels.
