It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth—
"Let us not desert one another—we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'I am no novel-reader.—I seldom look into novels.—Do not imagine that 'I often read novels.—It is really very well for a novel.' Such is the common cant. 'And what are you reading, Miss——?' 'Oh! it is only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it."
This is a hard saying for those who count "Sir Roger de Coverley," "Mr. Bickerstaff," and many "Clarindas" and "Sophronias" among their friends. The age of the Regency may or may not have been as lax in its morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the pages of the Spectator is not easily to be believed.
The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their novels. They did not read French fiction as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it scarcely possible to read French "without contracting some pollution, so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." Times had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed the voluminous romances of Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéri with William Temple.
Another important branch of Jane's private and voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the Spectator and the Tatler which had their little days and died, particularly during the reign of George II. Not only in the Rambler and the Idler of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in the World, the Mirror, the Lounger, the Connoisseur, and other less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own.
Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to say, "If she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe." Her appreciation of such poems as The Village and The Parish Register is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born in a family which was itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the peasantry. George Crabbe, on the other hand, the son of lowly folk, was born and nurtured in poverty, and he never forgot that he had sprung from the sand-dunes of the East Coast. His pictures of the poor, their sorrows and joys, fill the most delightful of his verses; his ease in their society, his understanding of their minds and characters mark him off as clearly from Jane Austen as—to take a very modern instance—the admirable and sympathetic pictures of farm-life in la Vendée offered in La Terre qui meurt distinguish M. René Bazin from M. Marcel Batilliat, who has dealt so feelingly with the decadence of the château in La Vendée aux Genêts. Jane found in Crabbe something that she missed in herself, a ready appreciation of all classes.
She loved Cowper too, both in his poems and his prose. There was much in The Task that could not but please her, though the humour must have struck her as being exceedingly mild, and the descriptions over-laboured. Cowper, though kindly to the rural poor, and often referring to their occupations, smiles derisively at those who pretend to envy the labourer's lot and to regard his cottage, if properly "rose-bordered," as preferable to any other kind of residence.
"So farewell envy of the peasant's nest!
If Solitude make scant the means of life,
Society for me! thou seeming sweet,
Be still a pleasing object in my view;
My visit still, but never mine abode."