"Poor Mrs. Stent! It has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody."
"We (herself and Miss A.) afterwards walked together for an hour on the Cobb; she is very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging. She seems to like people rather too easily."
Of her own works, or rather of the characters of her own creation, her Elizabeths and Emmas, Jane speaks literally as a parent. They are her "dear children." "I must confess that I think her (Elizabeth) as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know." This is said in pure playfulness; there is nothing in the letters like real egotism or impatience of censure.
At the age of forty-two, in the prime of intellectual life, with "Emma" just out and "Northanger Abbey" coming, and in the midst of domestic affection and happiness, life must have been sweet to Jane Austen. She resigned it, nevertheless, with touching tranquillity and meekness. In 1816, it appears, she felt her inward malady, and began to go round her old haunts in a manner which seemed to indicate that she was bidding them farewell. In the next year, she was brought for medical advice to a house in the Close of Winchester, and there, surrounded to the last by affection and to the last ardently returning it, she died. Her last words were her answer to the question whether there was anything she wanted—"Nothing but death." Those who expect religious language in season and out of season have inferred from the absence of it in Jane Austen's novels that she was indifferent to religion. The testimony of her nephew is positive to the contrary; and he is a man whose word may be believed.
Those who died in the Close were buried in the cathedral. It is therefore by mere accident that Jane Austen rests among princes and princely prelates in that glorious and historic fane. But she deserves at least her slab of black marble in the pavement there. She possessed a real and rare gift, and she rendered a good account of it. If the censer which she held among the priests of art was not of the costliest, the incense was of the purest. If she cannot be ranked with the very greatest masters of fiction, she has delighted many, and none can draw from her any but innocent delight.
PATTISON'S MILTON
[Footnote: "English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley Milton. By
Mark Pattison B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." London,
Macmillan, New York: Harper & Bros., 1879]
John Bright once asked a friend who was the greatest of Englishmen and the friend hesitating answered his own question by saying, "Milton, because he above all others, combined the greatness of the writer with the greatness of the citizen." Professor Masson in his Life and Times of Milton, has embodied the conception of the character indicated by this remark, but he has run into the extreme of incorporating a complete narrative of the Revolution with the biography of Milton, so that the historical portion of the work overlays instead of illuminating the biographical, and the chapters devoted specially to the life seem to the reader interpolations, and not always welcome interpolations, in an intensely interesting history of the times. But now comes a biographer in whose eyes the life of Milton the citizen is a mere episode, and not only a mere episode but a lamentable and humiliating episode, in the life of Milton the poet. Milton's life, says Mr. Pattison "is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which 'L'Allegro,' 'Il Penseroso,' and 'Lycidas' are the expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems—'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and 'Samson Agonistes'—are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world." As to the struggle to which Milton, with Cromwell, Vane Pym, Hampden, Selden, and Chillingworth, gave his life, it is in the eyes of his present biographer, an ignoble "fray," a "biblical brawl," and its fruits in the way of theological discussion are nothing but "garbage." To write his Defence of the English People Milton deliberately sacrificed his eyesight, his doctor having warned him that he would lose his one remaining eye if he persisted in using it for book work. "The choice lay before me," he says, "between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. In such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary; I could not but obey that inward monitor, I know not what, that spoke to me from Heaven. I considered with myself that many had purchased less good with worse ill, as they who gave their lives to reap only glory, and I thereupon concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render." Mr. Pattison has quoted this passage, and no doubt he silently appreciates the heroism which breathes through it; but the "supreme duty" of which it speaks appears to him only a "prostitution of faculties" and a "poor delusion." Milton, he thinks, ought to have kept entirely aloof from the brawl and remained quiet either in the intellectual circles of Italy or in the delicious seclusion of his library at Horton, leaving liberty, truth, and righteousness to drown or to be saved from drowning by other hands than his. In "plunging into the fray" the poet miserably derogated from his superior position as a literary man, and the result was a dead loss to him and to the world. We are sure that we do not state Mr. Pattison's view more strongly than it is stated in his own pages.
The views of all of us, including Professor Masson, on such a question are sure to be more or less idiosyncratic, and those of the present biographer have not escaped the general liability. They seem, at least, aptly to represent a mood prevalent just now among eminent men of the literary class in England, particularly at the universities. These men have been tossed on the waves of Ritualism, tossed on the waves of the reaction from Ritualism; some of them have been personally battered in both controversies; they have attained no certainty, but rather arrived at the conclusion that no certainty is attainable; they are weary and disgusted; such of them as have been enthusiasts in politics have been stripped of their illusions in that line also, and have fallen back on the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics, and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into contact with the politics or theology of Milton's days is like that of a very seasick passenger at the sight of a pork chop. Nor does he fail to reflect the Necessarianism of the circle. "That in selecting a scriptural subject," he says, "Milton was not, in fact, exercising any choice, but was determined by his circumstances, is only what must be said of all choosing." Criticism fastidiously erudite, a study of art religiously and almost mystically profound, are fruits of this intellectual seclusion of chosen spirits from the coarse and ruffling world for which that world has reason to be grateful. It is not likely Milton would have chosen a writer of this school as his biographer, but few men would choose their own biographers well.
Milton has at all events found in Mr. Pattison a biographer whose narrative is throughout extremely pleasant, interesting and piquant, the piquancy being enhanced for those who have the key to certain sly hits, such as that at "the peculiar form of credulity which makes perverts (to Roman Catholicism) think that everyone is about to follow their example," which carries us back to the time when the head of Tractarianism having gone over to Rome, was waiting anxiously, but in vain, for the tail to join it. The facts had already been collected by the diligence of Professor Masson, but Mr. Pattison uses them in a style which places beyond a doubt his own familiarity with the subject. Through the moral judgments there runs, as we think, and as we should have expected, a somewhat lofty conception of the privileges of intellect and of the value of literary objects compared with others, but with this qualification the reflections will probably be deemed sensible and sound. The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and justice. The literary criticisms are of a high order and such as only comprehensive learning combined with trained taste could produce, whether you entirely enter into all of them or not (and criticism has not yet been reduced to a certain rule) you cannot fail to gain from them increase of insight and enjoyment. They are often expressed in language of great beauty: