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  walking about from one part of the house to the other-then came a fresh dinner in the breakfast-room for Charles and his wife, which Fanny and I attended--then we moved into the library, were joined by the dining-room people, were introduced and so forth--and then we had tea and coffee which was not over till past ten."

  The next day the gentlemen went out to shoot. Jane said: "I wish Charles may kill something, but this high wind is

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  against their sport." The coldness suited Edward very well; he was extremely cheerful, but Jane imagined that poor James at Steventon must be running his toes into the fire. Within doors Jane improved her acquaintance with her sister-in-law and her little niece. Mrs.

  Charles, née Palmer, had handed on a good deal of her family's appearance to little Cassy. "Poor little love," said her Aunt Jane. "I wish she were not so very Palmery, but it seems stronger than ever."

  Charles was so extremely devoted to his wife and children that he kept them on board with him; but Cassy had lately suffered so much from seasickness that her Mama was beginning to think she ought to be left on shore. The difficulty was, Cassy could not bear to leave her parents, and her Papa was most unwilling to part from her. He was so much engrossed with his family that it was quite difficult to get him out. Jane said to Cassandra on October 21st: "I think I have just done a good deed--extracted Charles from his wife and children upstairs and made him get ready to go out shooting, and not keep Mr. Moore waiting any longer."

  "Southey's Life of Nelson!" she exclaimed. "I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it." To Frank himself she sent, while at Godmersham, an interesting piece of family news: the

  temperamental Anna had become engaged again, this time in sober earnestness, to Mr. Ben Lefroy. Ben, the son of Mrs. Lefroy and brother of the present Rector of Ashe, was in many respects a good match for Anna Austen; he was sensible, religious, well connected and possessed of a moderate income. Anna's aunt said: "We are anxious to have it go on well, there being quite as much in his favor as the chances are likely to give her in any matrimonial connection."

  The family had not actually foreseen this event, but Anna's behavior had been such that they were kept in

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  a constant preparation for something. The chief drawback to the match that Jane could see was that "he hates company and she is very fond of it; this with some queerness of temper on his part and much unsteadiness on hers, is untoward."

  Mrs. Austen sent Jane a very "comfortable" letter, "one of her foolscap sheets quite full of little home news," saying among other things that Anna had been on a short visit to Chawton. Ben was to come over and meet his prospective grandmother-in-law, and Jane said this would be an excellent time to pay his visit, "now that we, the formidables, are absent." For Cassandra was in Henrietta Street.

  Henry's servant had given notice because he wanted a place in the country. When Jane first heard of his going, she was afraid Henry had been obliged to turn him off. Now she said: "I am glad William's going is voluntary and on no worse grounds. An inclination for the country is a venial fault. He has more of Cowper than of Johnson in him, fonder of tame hares and blank verse than of the full tide of existence at Charing Cross."

  Sense and Sensibility had gone into a second edition. Mary, who had been staying at Cheltenham, had heard it well spoken of there, and said that one of their acquaintance meant to buy it. Jane said: "I wish she may . . . I cannot help hoping that many will find themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it."

  The autumn was darkening into winter, and the party at

  Godmersham was cleared of the visiting family and the gentlemen who had been staying there to shoot. Fanny, as the mistress of the house, was necessarily occupied some part of the day about its concerns. There was a great deal of time and peace in which to work upon Mansfield Park.

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  At noon of a November day Jane broke off her writing with the

  words: "I did not mean to eat, but Mr. Johncock has brought in the tray, so I must--I am all alone. Edward has gone into his woods. At the present time, I have five tables, eight and twenty chairs and two fires all to myself."

  She had said of Pride and Prejudice that it was too light and bright and sparkling, that it wanted shade. Such a charge could never be brought against Mansfield Park. Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park stand to each other in something of the relation of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; the spirit of beauty which informs each book is in one case that of lively, and the other, pensive pleasure.

  When Henry Austen entitled the story of Catherine Morland

  Northanger Abbey, he was adopting a method his sister had already used; but Mansfield Park, on which she bestowed the name herself, is named with far greater justice than Northanger Abbey. Mansfield Park has not the powerful structure of the novels that immediately precede and follow it, but there is a unity imposed on its story by the fact that it takes place almost exclusively in the house and its immediate neighborhood. Mansfield Park itself is the matrix of the story to an extent that could not be claimed for Northanger, or Pemberley, or Hartfield, or Kellynch. We have, it is true, Fanny's excursion to Portsmouth; an eventful day is spent at Sotherton; there is a description of Edmund's Thornton Lacey; Fanny's brother comes ashore; Sir Thomas Bertram returns from a voyage to Antigua, in the course of which he was nearly nabbed by a French privateer; but for the greater part of the book we are conscious of no life, in village or town or distant county, except what is within Mansfield Park itself, and the Parsonage at one side of its part, and the White House at another. In the seclusion of this green retreat, where some of the characters are fixed, and from and

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  to which the others go and come, the heroine is, for the greater part of the book, immovably settled; as the lowest and the least, the fagger of errands for Mrs. Norris and the tacker-on of Lady

  Bertram's patterns, she has no gaieties to take her out, dances in neighboring great houses, or public balls at Northampton, or

  extended rides, since when the others took them, her horse was wanted for Mary Crawford. Edmund's determined efforts for her

  pleasure took her as far as joining the expedition to Sotherton and dining one evening at the Parsonage. All she sees and hears, all she thinks and feels and suffers for the important part of the book, is experienced in the radius of the house with its great and lofty rooms, the park, with its scattered trees and closer wood, the rose garden, the shrubbery and the lane. It is this characteristic that gives the book something of a spell, a legend; the sensation of faery is heightened by the fact that the heroine is, morally speaking, in a beleaguered castle, surrounded with fear and grief and loneliness and despair; placed at a disadvantage with the worldly by the insignificance of her position, and with almost everybody else by her own

  nervousness, and still further handicapped by a passion which she believes to be hopeless, she makes the appeal of the heroine in distress. Her story has the psychological attraction of Cinderella's.

  To be able to say so much of a novel invested with all Jane Austen's powers of realism, which contains, moreover, her strongest portrait of a truly hateful woman and her one contribution to the painting of squalid interiors, is to give some idea of the story's complex and subtle strength. Fanny Price wanders through forests and

  enchantments drear; she is also nagged by Mrs. Norris, and banished to her father's home, where her mother is perpetually whining about a torn carpet and the doors are slammed till her temples ache.

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  The character of Fanny is not of a kind to be generally popular, and yet there is, as Professor Bradley has pointed out, a select band of those who prefer Mansfield Park to Pride and Prejudice. The dissatisfaction which many people feel with her has perhaps been best explained by the suggestion of Lord David Cecil that Jane Austen has not exactly caught the lik
eness she meant to convey; and the people who like and are attracted by Fanny are those who can visualize the original from the somewhat imperfect portrait.

  The difference between Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park is epitomized in the difference between their heroines. Fanny possesses just those qualities which make a person an object of interest and sympathy rather than an object of desire. Her misfortunes are so keen that were not her fortitude quite equal to them, she would be a downright nuisance.

  But though a character like Fanny's, in a situation such as hers, does not constitute a spontaneous attraction to the opposite sex, it has a very great charm, and one which may, given favorable

  circumstances, create that feeling of affection and confidence and comfort out of which sexual love can naturally develop. And there is no more exquisite example of perfect probability than the course of Edmund's love; his immediate infatuation for Mary Crawford, the manner in which he suffered from the abortive effects of two such disparate natures to join in a mutually acceptable scheme of life, the ready way in which he turned for sympathy to Fanny, with a

  confidence in her that had been built up in the past eight years of her life at Mansfield, and the inevitable effect upon his sore heart of her affection and sympathy and her unconsciously spoken admiration.

  That he did very well for himself by falling in love with

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  her, few people would deny. Her character had a sensibility and depth that is most attractive, though it is not of the kind that will necessarily, as Lady Susan put it, "add a single lover to the list."

  Much of her sensibility is shown in nervousness and alarm, but her love for Edmund is sometimes shown with the intensity of poetry.

  Her passion for Edmund and the life-and-death importance of the struggle she made so that no one should suspect it are expressed at their highest pitch when she is leaving Mansfield for Portsmouth, and her feelings were in such a state that she "could neither speak nor look nor think when the last moment came with him," and she did not realize till it was over that he had kissed her goodbye.

  The extreme sensitiveness and timidity of Fanny's nature are

  agreeably contrasted by the robustness, both physical and mental, of William Price. William's affection for Fanny, and his vigorous enjoyment of dancing, and the bold manner in which he addressed Sir Thomas despite his gratitude and respect, and the eagerness with which he accepted Henry Crawford's offer of a horse, without, as a sailor, understanding either the mettle of a highly-fed hunter or the value of the loan, the admirable manner in which he related his adventures at sea, his despair in thinking he would never be

  promoted, and the splendid figure he cut in his uniform when

  Admiral Crawford had procured him his commission--all these form a picture not only of great historical interest, and of great interest in the biography of Jane Austen, but one which, first and foremost, adds a most striking variety to the whole in which it is placed. The influence of William's presence is reflected by the various

  characters, and nowhere is the varying nature of such an influence better expressed than in the actual moment of his

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  arrival at Mansfield. "Fanny . . . found herself. . . . watching in the hall, in the lobby, on the stairs, for the first sound of the carriage which was to bring her a brother.

  "It came happily while she was thus waiting; and there being neither ceremony nor fearfulness to delay the moment of meeting, she was with him as he entered the house and the first minute of exquisite feeling had no interruption and no witnesses, unless the servants chiefly intent upon opening the proper doors could be called such.

  This was exactly what Sir Thomas and Edmund had been separately conniving at, as each proved to the other by the sympathetic alacrity with which they both advised Mrs. Norris' continuing where she was, instead of rushing out into the hall as soon as the noises of the arrival reached them."

  Another of those scenes, which most authors would treat from one aspect only, but which gain indescribably from being presented, as only Jane Austen does present them, with light converging upon them from a variety of angles, is the episode of Sir Thomas'

  encountering the altogether unexpected resistance of Fanny to his desire that she should accept Henry Crawford's proposal. The scene occurs in the East Room, where Mrs. Norris long ago stipulated that Fanny should never have a fire. "She was all attention . . . in placing a chair for him, and trying to appear honored; and in her agitation had quite overlooked the deficiencies of her apartment, till he, stopping short as he entered, said, with much surprise: 'Why have you no fire today?'"

  "'There was snow on the ground and she was sitting in a shawl. She hesitated. 'I am not cold, sir; I never sit here long at this time of year.'"

  "'But you have a fire in general?'"

  "'No, sir.'"

  Sir Thomas is much annoyed at this evidence of Mrs. Norris'

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  interference, whose existence he had never suspected; but the

  question is lost sight of in the interview that follows: in which Fanny reveals that unexpected strength concealed in a nature at once gentle and moral, and Sir Thomas, putting as well as it can be put, the case for considering the feelings of other people besides one's own on the question of a marriage, feels that she has behaved extremely badly and reads her a lecture that reduces her to hopeless crying. He leaves her in great displeasure, advising her to try to control herself by taking a walk in the shrubbery; "she was struck, quite struck, when, on returning from her walk and going into the East Room again, the first thing which caught her eyes was a fire lighted and burning. A fire! it seemed too much; just at that time to be giving her such an indulgence was exciting even painful gratitude. She wondered that Sir Thomas could have leisure to think of such a trifle again; but she soon found, from the voluntary information of the housemaid, who came in to attend it, that so it was to be every day. Sir Thomas had given orders for it."

  In Mansfield Park, beauty and brilliance are not the adornments of virtue.

  The two most fascinating characters of the book occupy what would be, in a novel less true to life, the positions of villain and villainess.

  The Crawfords are not villainous; but though each had "the moral good taste" to appreciate the integrity of Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, they were both by nature coarse-grained and unscrupulous.

  Fanny knew that it was so; when she suspected that Mr. Crawford had some share in the trick of the necklace, "She could not be convinced that he had not, for Miss Crawford, complaisant as a sister, was careless as a woman and a friend." Mary Crawford is amusing enough when she meets the Bertram brothers, and finding that she at first preferred Tom,

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  she reflects: "She had felt an early presentiment that she should like the eldest best. She knew it was her way." But her letter to Fanny when she believes Tom on the point of death, and jokes about the possibility of Edmund's becoming Sir Edmund Bertram, is

  distasteful to a degree. So is her behavior on her last interview with Edmund after the elopement of Maria and Henry. Her own attitude to adultery is much more that of the present day than Edmund's was; but that is beside the point. She knew--at least, she should have known--that Edmund was in very great distress, and she treated him without one impulse of sympathy, or even of common tact; and after their interview had become stormy and he had left her in

  disillusionment and grief, she put her head out of the door and called him back, with "a saucy, playful smile." The insensitiveness that could turn their delightful gaiety and humor into something horrible, like the grin of a mermaid over dead men's bones, is characteristic of both brother and sister. Henry shows his complete inability to understand Fanny Price until he set himself to do so, by the way in which he jokes about the desirability of adverse weather for Sir Thomas' homeward journey, and his suggestion that he and Fanny should come to the first service conducted by Edmund, that they might stare him out of countenan
ce.

  The best part of Mary's character is associated with her charm, her spontaneous good nature, her readiness in the interests of those she is fond of; and her liveliness and grace are particularly interesting to us, since we have the authority of the Austen family for believing that the character, in some respects, is modelled on that of Eliza de Feuillide. The idea is a delightful one, but even with such sanction, one must take care not to build too much upon it. In the first place, Henry Austen himself said that, contrary to what

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  might have been supposed, his sister never copied from life, but only took suggestions from it. Eliza died in 1813, and the following year Jane performed the famous journey to London with the widower,

  reading Mansfield Park aloud to him in the coach. When one considers that the judgment on Mary Crawford is on the whole

  markedly unfavorable, and that the best that even her lover can say for her is that she might have been very different had she not been ruined by bad training, one cannot imagine that Jane Austen would have read all this aloud to her favorite brother within a year of his wife's death, if he had supposed, or if she had conceived the

  possibility of his supposing, that Mary Crawford was intended for a picture of that wife. The point is perhaps worth elaborating, because it illustrates once more the sort of error those people are constantly falling into who attempt to find originals, rather than suggestions, for Jane Austen's characters among her family and friends.

  The points of similarity between Eliza de Feuillide and Mary

  Crawford are that Eliza was said to have refused James Austen on the ground that he was a clergyman, and Mary expressed great

  dislike of Edmund's taking orders; that they were both very fond of private theatricals, and both "somewhat small" but very lively and dashing; that Eliza was rather fonder of pleasure than some of the Austens liked, and Edmund very much regretted the frivolous tone of Mary's mind and manners.