Jane was wholly in accord with the sentiment of these lines. In some verses—composed in 1807 for a family competition in producing rhymes with "rose"—which, but for the rhyming, are a burlesque of Cowper's style, we find a picture of a cottager, wherein, if the "poetry" be naturally of small account, are lines that would mark it, without the direct evidence of the name, as hers, and not Cassandra's or Mrs. Austen's.
"Happy the lab'rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft, with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage-rose,
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gayest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
Likes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows,
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close."
There is a letter of January 1758 from Johnson to Bennet Langton which, as Boswell remarks, shows its writer "in as easy and pleasant a state of existence, as constitutional unhappiness ever permitted him to enjoy." I cannot help quoting it here as evidence of an affinity of Johnson, in his happiest hours, with his constitutionally cheerful admirer, Jane Austen—
"The two Wartons just looked into the town, and were taken to see Cleone, where, David says, they were starved for want of company to keep them warm. David and Doddy have had a new quarrel, and, I think, cannot conveniently quarrel any more. Cleone was well acted by all the characters, but Bellamy left nothing to be desired. I went the first night, and supported it as well as I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone. I have left off housekeeping, and therefore made presents of the game which you were pleased to send me. The pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the bustard to Dr. Lawrence, and the pot I placed with Miss Williams, to be eaten by myself.... Mr. Reynolds has within these few days raised his price to twenty guineas a head, and Miss is much employed in miniatures. I know not anybody else whose prosperity has increased since you left them."
If the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one of Jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed "Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley, author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Langton pheasant is the author of Clarissa, another of Jane's favourites more than thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up.
Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth (after 1800), Scott (as poet), Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She had studied the essayists of Queen Anne's time and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "Mrs. Martin," she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers." Unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure.
The novels supplied by "Mrs. Martin" and others, forerunners of those which now go forth from the Strand and Oxford Street, are frequently referred to in Jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at the British Museum. There was, for example, Sarah Burney's Clarentine, which Jane and her mother read for the third time (in 1807), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is ... full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was Self-Control, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but which Jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her own work forestalled by it; there was the Alphonsine of Madame de Genlis, which "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure"; and there was Margiarna, which the Austens were reading in the winter of 1809, at Southampton, and "like very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain."
About the same time Cassandra tells of some romance which the Godmersham circle has been devouring, and Jane replies—"To set up against your new novel, of which nobody ever heard before, and perhaps never may again, we have got Ida of Athens, by Miss Owenson, which must be very clever, because it was written, as the authoress says, in three months. We have only read the preface yet, but her Irish girl does not make me expect much. If the warmth of her language could affect the body it might be worth reading in this weather."
We shall not find much criticism of books either in the novels or the letters. There is a passage in one of "Aunt Jane's" letters to her niece Anna, written in 1814, in which her point of view on one important question of style is clearly expressed. Anna, probably inspired by her aunt's example—for the authorship of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had leaked out in the family in spite of all precaution—had written a novel herself, and had sent the MS. to Jane for kindly consideration and advice. The result was not wholly encouraging—