But let us see, again, with more minuteness how completely she spins this gauze web of satire over every phase of life. Is learning in question? “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.” Or is she discussing family relations? “The possessor of one of the finest estates in England and of more worthless nephews and nieces than any other private man in the United Kingdom.” A prospective marriage is summarily disposed of. Mr. Blackall is “a piece of perfection—noisy perfection.... I could wish Miss Lewis to be of a silent turn and rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn, fond of cold veal pies, green tea in the afternoon, and a green window-blind at night.” Mrs. Austen is disturbed by receiving an unamiable letter from a relative. Miss Austen is not. “The discontentedness of it shocked and surprised her—but I see nothing in it out of nature.”
As to society she resembles her heroines in liking balls, and, like her heroines, she finds many drawbacks in them. “Our ball was chiefly made up of Jervoises and Terrys, the former of whom were apt to be vulgar, the latter to be noisy.... I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.” On beauty she comments freely. “There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck.” As in this passage, she often refers to dress and too often unkindly. “Mrs. Powlett was at once expensively and nakedly dressed; we have had the satisfaction of estimating her lace and her muslins; and she said too little to afford us much other amusement.” In regard to one special company she seems to express naïvely her general attitude. “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable.”
More intimate social relations and the sacred name of friendship are treated at least as lightly. “The neighborhood have quite recovered the death of Mrs. Rider; so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at it now; her things were so very dear! And Mrs. Rogers is to be all that is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendships of the world.”
And love? Persons who mock at nothing else mock at that. What should we expect, then, from the genius of mockery? Whether she rallied her young men to their faces, I do not know. Assuredly she rallied them behind their backs. One evening she expects an offer, but is determined to refuse, unless he promises to give away his white coat. The next she makes over to a friend all her love interest, even “the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me,” everything except Tom Lefroy, “for whom I don’t care sixpence.” And when, writing to her niece in later years, she sketches the man she might have loved, she ends by turning all into laughter. “There are such beings in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection, where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend and belonging to your own county.”
Also, as in the novels, she is perpetually laughing at religion and virtue, that is, of course, at those elements in religion and virtue which are undeniably laughable. Morals and immorals she can treat lightly in individual cases. “The little flaw of having a mistress now living with him at Ashdown Park seems to be the only unpleasing circumstance about him.” In their general phases she can jumble them happily with physical disorders. “What is become of all the shyness in the world? Moral as well as natural diseases disappear in the progress of time, and new ones take their place. Shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints.” On death she is inexhaustible. One would think she found it the most humorous thing in life—as perhaps it is. With what amiable, kid-gloved atrocity does she bury Mrs. Holder. “Only think of Mrs. Holder’s being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.” Apparently, even this supreme effort of Mrs. Holder’s was not successful, in fact embalmed her in spiced abuse forever. Other interments are quite as sympathetic as hers.
Most curious of all is Miss Austen on the death of a near relative, the trim decorum, the correct restraint, the evident fear of being either over-conventional or under-feeling. So in the first letter; but two days later she rebounds and trifles with her mourning. “One Miss Baker makes my gown and the other my bonnet, which is to be silk covered with crape.” Well could she say of herself, “I can lament in one sentence and laugh in the next.” Only she immensely mistook the proportion.
One bare strong phrase takes us right to the root of all the mocking and perversity. “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”
It is in this spirit that she makes fun even of her own art, novel writing, will not take it seriously, “the art of keeping lovers apart in five volumes,” will not take its professors seriously. She mocks at their machinery, their heroines, their landscape, their morals, and their language, “novel slang,” she calls it, “thorough novel slang, and so old that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.” Whatever pains she may have taken with her own work, she does not mention them, unless ironically, when some one praises her. “I am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room.” If money and profit are suggested as possible objects, she laughs at them. Fame is all she is thinking of. “I write only for fame and without any view to pecuniary emolument.” But when it is a question of glory, she laughs at that, and toils instead for pounds and shillings. “Though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter, too.” Yet at the getting of money, and at the keeping of it, and at the spending of it, and at the lack of it, still she laughs: “They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel, therefore, that we are not worth her acquaintance.”
One subject only is too sacred for mocking—the British navy. And even that seems sacred chiefly in connection with the Austens; for Sir Walter Elliot is allowed to say that all officers should be killed off after forty because of their weatherbeaten complexion. Miss Austen herself, however, appears to have been possessed, like Louisa Musgrove, with “a fine naval fervour,” which blossoms in Captain Wentworth’s rapturous praise of his calling and fruits in the charming conclusion of “Persuasion”: “She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in the domestic virtues than in its national importance.” A sentiment which would have delighted Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., though it would have obliged Nelson to turn away his face.
So, are we to set down this demure, round-faced chit of a parson’s daughter as one of the universal mockers, der Geist der verneint in petticoats, a sister of Aristophanes and Heine? It sounds ridiculous? How she would have shrunk from Das Buch Le Grand and shuddered with horror at Schnabelwopski! Yet would she?