Mr. Price's squalid household is redeemed by the tang of sea air that sweeps through it, given to us with particular strength in the description of the Sunday walk the Prices, accompanied by Henry Crawford, take on the ramparts.
"The day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky; the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound, produced
altogether such a combination of charms for Fanny, as made
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her gradually almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them."
But it is within the house that Jane Austen exhibits her capacity for a realism which reminds one of the French school.
"She was deep in other musing. The remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper, came across her. No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had indeed been three months there; and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlor, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare; a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never
thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it. Her father read his newspaper, and her mother lamented over the ragged carpet as usual, while the tea was in preparation, and wished Rebecca would mend it."
The Price family was drawn with a vigor which is the more arresting when one compares it with the delicate and sensitive nature of Fanny and the calm elegance and good breeding of the Bertram party.
The children, with the exception of Fanny, are conceived on a
robuster scale than any other in Jane Austen's work.
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There is William, "with spirits, curiosity and courage up to anything," at home equally in the elegance and comfort of Mansfield and the rough disorder of the house at Portsmouth; eagerly entering into his father's conversation about the ships and not forgetting an attempt to recommend Fanny to his indifferent kindness; "imposing on her as fast as he could" at speculation, bringing her home an amber cross, and, when got ready by the united exertions of the household, coming down to show himself to her in his lieutenant's uniform, and looking so proud and touching in it that she burst into tears as she kissed him. More vigorous still are the midshipman Sam and the schoolboys Charles and Tom. "The only interruption which thoughts like these received for nearly half an hour was from a sudden burst of her father's, not at all calculated to compose them. At a more than ordinary pitch of thumping and hallooing in the passage, he exclaimed: 'Devil take those young dogs! How they are singing out! Aye, Sam's voice louder than all the rest! That boy is fit for a boatswain. Holloa, you there? Sam, stop your confounded pipe, or I shall be after you.'"
"This threat was so palpably disregarded, that though within five minutes afterwards the three boys all burst into the room together and sat down, Fanny could not consider it as a proof of anything more than their being for the time thoroughly fagged, which their hot faces and panting breaths seemed to prove, especially as they were still kicking each other's shins, and hallooing out at sudden starts immediately under their father's eye."
Mansfield Park not only presents extreme opposites in character-drawing, and demonstrates a range of imaginative experience in Jane Austen which might otherwise have remained unsuspected; it also contains two statements which have a bearing of the first importance upon her art.
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They constitute, in fact a paradox; when she rounds off the
elopement of Maria and Henry Crawford with the sentence: "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can," she gives the impression, or she would give it, were the sentence divorced from its context, that she had no interest in anything but tranquility and joy; but she has actually given the whole emotional history of Maria's elopement; not, it is true, in the persons of the principal characters; she has shown it all in the demoralization of Mrs. Norris, the self-condemning wretchedness of Sir Thomas, the horror and anguish of Edmund and Fanny, and in the fact that the shock was such it had actually turned Lady Bertram from a slug into a human being. "By one of the suffering party within, they were expected with such impatience as she had never known before.
Fanny had scarcely passed the solemn-looking servants, when Lady Bertram came from the drawing-room to meet her; came with no
indolent step; and falling on her neck, said: 'Dear Fanny! Now I shall be comfortable!'" It is impossible to read Mansfield Park and feel that the episode of Maria Rushworth's adultery has been slighted; on the contrary, it constitutes so ugly a wound in the texture of the story one's only feeling is whether too much emotional significance has not, after all, been attached to it.
The other passage which has a great and as it were a technical interest, is her audacious sweeping aside of what might be supposed to be the novelist's duty--that of dealing at full length with the emotional climax of the novel.
When Edmund has confessed his love to Fanny and asked for hers in return, and been told that he has possessed it long since, the author says:
"It must have been a delightful happiness. But there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach. Let no one presume to give the feelings of a
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young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope."
Even Jane Austen's epigrams, torn from the strong and delicate weaving of their context, lose something of their lively sheen; but this passage, unless it be read exactly where it was intended to be read, is almost meaningless. But the reader who has enjoyed
Mansfield Park knows when he has come to that paragraph that it says all that need be said, and all that, without anti-climax, can be said. The story which has grown in slow intensity from the moment at which Edmund, in his holidays from Eton, finds Fanny, a child of ten, crying on the attic stairs, unable to write to William because she has no paper, to the point at which he comes to fetch her from Portsmouth, looking so ill that to see him once more and in such trouble absolutely takes away her power of speech, and she feels almost ready to faint, has become so deeply charged with Fanny's emotion, that even if Jane Austen could have described her
happiness she could have told us nothing we did not know already; the cup is so full, it could hold no more.
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16
IN JANUARY of 1814 Jane Austen began her new novel, with the
heroine whom no one but herself was expected to like very much; but her absorption in the work did not diminish her interest in the one just completed. In March there was another visit to Henry; he and Jane journeyed together from Godmersham to Henrietta Street, and on the way Jane read Mansfield Park aloud to him. Henry was delighted; so far as they read in the carriage, Jane said "His approbation is equal even to my wishes." He said it was very different from Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but he thought it, in its own way, quite as good. When they got to town he took the manuscript into his own hands; he admired Henry Crawford very much; by the time he reached the third volume he was saying he liked it better and better; nor did his enthusiasm fall off; the last half of the third volume he found particularly interestin
g. His appreciation filled his sister with delight; now that her feelings on this very important point were set at rest, nothing remained but to enjoy the visit.
Fanny was with them; she slept with her aunt as before, and when Jane wrote to Cassandra before breakfast, she said: "Fanny, I left asleep.--She was doing about last night when I went to sleep a little after one." They went to the
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theatre, this time to see Kean as Shylock. Jane thought the Merchant of Venice a good play to take Fanny to, because there was nothing in it over which she could get too much wrought up. Kean's
performance Jane thought quite wonderful. "It appeared to me as if there were no fault in him anywhere, and in his scene with Tubal there was exquisite acting."
She had a lilac sarcenet gown--that color most becoming to the dark-haired--and an ermine tippet in which they told her she looked extremely well. In the house she took a delicate and tactful interest in the housekeeping. She spoke to Madame Perigord about making Henry a boiled pudding, and then it came out that Henry had no raspberry jam. Madame Perigord had some herself, "which," said Jane, "of course she is determined he shall have." But could not Cassandra bring up a pot from Chawton on her forthcoming visit?
While Henry had been occupied with Mansfield Park, Jane had been reading The Heroine. This novel by Eaton Stannard Barret was a skit, written eleven years after the composition of Northanger Abbey, upon Radcliffian romance; the heroine, Cherry, who alters her name to Cherubina, is positive that she cannot indeed be the daughter of Farmer Wilkinson, and that the latter must have
abducted her in childhood and concealed her true parentage from her. "'Were even my legitimacy suspected,' she exclaims, 'it would be a comfort, since in that case I should assuredly start forth . . . the daughter of a nobleman who lives retired and occasionally slaps his forehead.'" As it was, she felt that no explanation covered her circumstances except the theory of her abduction by Farmer
Wilkinson.
The adventures of Cherubina, who set off with a bandbox under her arm, containing a satin petticoat, a pair of
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satin slippers and her spangled muslin dress, form at almost every point a burlesque upon Mrs. Radcliffe's most popular characteristics; when she tries to discontent the rustic Mary with her way of life, and persuade her to become a heroine also, she says: "'And then, Mary, though your own cottage is tolerable, is it, as in Italy, covered with vine leaves, fig trees, jessamine, and clusters of grapes? Is it tufted with myrtle, or shaded with a grove of lemon, orange or bergamot?'"
"'But ma'am,' said Mary, 'it is shaded with some fine old elms.'"
"'True,' cried I, 'but are the flowers of the agnus castus there?'"
The Gothic portion of the tale is concerned with the heroine and her henchman, Jerry, taking possession of a ruined castle that stood in the grounds of somebody else's estate, and setting up an
establishment among bats, cobwebs and dirt.
Jane Austen said it was "a delightful burlesque, particularly on the Radcliffe style." On the evening of her arrival in town she wrote to Cassandra: "We have drank tea and I have torn through the third volume of The Heroine. I do not think it falls off." It was an astonishing tribute to Mrs. Radcliffe that nearly twenty years after the publication of Udolpho, so clever a young man as Eaton
Stannard Barret should choose to devote a full-length novel to the burlesque of her style, and that his work should be intelligible to the reading public of 1814 when he had done so. Crabbe also, in his Tales of the Borough of 1810, draws a contrast between the sordid hideousness of Ellen Orford's woes and the fantastic ones of the heroines in novels, and describes the latter in the vein of Mrs.
Radcliffe's school. He said he had often marveled at the vicissitudes of such ladies,
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Who hemmed with bands of sturdiest rogues about
Find some strange succour, and come, virgins, out.
The topic had already been treated, but it was characteristic of Jane Austen that, even in writing to Cassandra, her praise of The Heroine was not followed by any reference to the entombed Northanger Abbey.
In May, Egerton brought out Mansfield Park. Mrs. Austen's cousin, the Reverend Samuel Cooke, the Rector of Bookham, who was
Jane's godfather, thought the novel the most sensible he had ever read. Cassandra preferred it to Pride and Prejudice; Mrs. Austen did not like it so well; a Mrs. B. was "much pleased with it, particularly with the character of Fanny," and "thought Lady Bertram like herself"; but what is perhaps the most striking expression of opinion ever uttered on Jane Austen's works came from Mrs. B's daughter-inlaw, Mrs. Augusta B, who "owned that she thought S. and S. and P.
and P. downright nonsense, but expected to like M.P. better, and having finished the first volume, flattered herself she had got through the worst." Jane wrote it all down most carefully; there is no indication of what the public thought, except that the first edition of Mansfield Park was sold out by the autumn.
In June she paid a long-promised visit to the Cookes. The village of Bookham, in Surrey, is within easy distance of Leith Hill, and the fact that 1814 was the year of Emma's composition adds particular interest to the fact that there is a Randall's Road on the outskirts of Leatherhead, and in Leatherhead Church a memento that in 1761 a Mr. Knightley earned the thanks of the parish by remodelling the pulpit and reading desk at his own expense. Jane gave Anna high credit for thinking of so good a name as Newton Priors, and when she herself came upon two such plain, well-sounding
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words as Randalls and Knightley she caught them up at once. To attempt to identify Hartfield with a particular village in Surrey because it was near Leith Hill, and because the names of Randalls and Knightley are to be found in Leatherhead, seems as misguided and unprofitable as to try to establish an actual person as the original of one of her characters. She would have been at a loss what to say to someone who asked her to identify that particular village with its draper's shop and its baker's with the little bow window, its brick houses, sash windows below and casements above, with any one
actual village in Surrey.
People who would like to deduce from Jane Austen's novels the
story of her life are apt to be nonplussed when they consider those novels in their chronological order. There is of course ample reason for saying that in Persuasion she showed signs of a new method, and of a new sensibility; it forms, they feel, that fitting close towards which the trend of her development had set, and had she not been untimely lost, it might have been, not the close, but the new
beginning. This idea that her attitude to life was undergoing a radical alteration, that the pointed brilliancy of youth was maturing
gradually into the profounder, more tranquil vision of middle-age, would receive much greater stimulus were the order of her novels other than it is. Could we suppose that she declined from the
unclouded radiance of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, through the shadowed loveliness of Mansfield Park to the autumnal beauty of Persuasion, we should have a line of development so clear and so suggestive that it might not be beyond the bounds of common sense to build some theory upon it. But Jane Austen's achievement was not one to be explained by reference to a biography. We cannot say of her that her brilliant work was conceived before the tragedy of 1802, and that what was created
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after that shows the unmistakable influence of grief; because actually the novels run in the very disconcerting order of: Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and that glittering fragment, Sanditon.
Emma has been described as Jane Austen's most finished comedy.
One imagines that few of her admirers have the affection for it which they entertain for Pride and Prejudice; the author gave warning that she was about to choose a heroine whom nobody but herself would like very much, and if she thereby underrated Emma's claims,
scarcely anyone would maintain that Emma is as charming as
Elizabeth B
ennet. Nevertheless the books have more of an affinity with each other than either has with Mansfield Park or Persuasion.
The strong gold light, as of early midsummer, that illumines every corner of that world composed of a Surrey village and a couple of country seats, within a morning's drive of Box Hill, is even more cordial and revealing than in Pride and Prejudice. Emma has not the heavenly air of Elizabeth Bennet, nor has Mr. Knightley hidden qualities like those of Mr. Darcy; he kept his affections to himself, it is true, but no one meeting him, in any circumstances, could have formed an idea of him as mistaken as those to which Mr. Darcy's behavior gave rise. The one character who is invested with a secret is not a frail creature such as Fanny Price, "indomitable in her feebleness," but a sophisticated young woman, unfortunate, but quite capable of taking care of herself; and the mystery, when it is brought to light, is, though interesting, on a smaller and more homely scale than the real badness of Wickham. Considering that the whole of a highly complicated plot turns on mystification and
misunderstanding, it is extraordinary that the atmosphere of the book should be so brilliant and serene; when Emma said she loved things to be "decided and open" she seems, by
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a remarkable paradox, to have dictated the tenor of the book that bears her name.
The structure of Emma not only exemplifies Jane Austen's own
peculiar method of showing each character in relation to all the rest; it suggests that of a Chinese ivory ball, and has an intricacy no less complicated and distinct.
The heroine in her wrong-headed folly spins six separate,
interlacing, circles of delusion. On this highly formalized base the characters move to and fro with a naturalness that defies description.
In no other of her books do we so luxuriate in our ability to listen and to look. The triumph of Emma in a general sense is perhaps that although the plot is intricate and formal in so striking a degree, yet every phase of it springs inevitably from the characters of those concerned. Emma's own misapplied quickness and her selfconferred right to interfere with other people's concerns are of course the mainspring of the story; but it could not proceed as it does without the foolish ductility of Harriet Smith, the coarseness and conceit of Mr. Elton, the calm good nature of Mr. Knightley, the mercurial character and undignified lack of scruple of Frank Churchill, the poise of Jane Fairfax that even wretchedness cannot defeat.
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