It is one of Jane's qualities as a writer that she shows little hospitality to the stock phrases of ordinary people. Lord Chesterfield told his son: "If, instead of saying that tastes are different, and that every man has his own peculiar one, you should let off a proverb, and say, that 'What is one man's meat is another man's poison.' ... everybody would be persuaded that you had never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids." Proverbial philosophy finds little encouragement from Jane, who places it in the mouths of her least agreeable characters, and one may believe, after reading her books and her letters, that she agrees with her own Marianne Dashwood, who, when Sir John Middleton has dared to suggest that she will be "setting her cap" at Willoughby, warmly replies: "That is an expression, Sir John, which I particularly dislike. I abhor every commonplace phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap' at a man, or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity." The offending Sir John "did not much understand this reproof," but he "laughed as heartily as if he did." Elizabeth Bennet's use of the saying, "Keep your breath to cool your porridge," gives us a worse shock than it can have given to Darcy, so unexpected is it from the mouth of a Jane Austen heroine. When one of Cassandra's letters had diverted Jane "beyond moderation," and she added: "I could die of laughter at it," she felt the banality of the phrase as keenly as Marianne would have done, and saved herself with "as they used to say at school."
Whatever the words and phrases she employed, it can never be held that she "spoke well" according to the test proposed by Catherine Morland when she said to Henry Tilney, "I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible," a remark which Mr. Tilney hailed with delight as "an excellent satire on modern language." Its origin may be found in that first volume of The Mirror which Catherine's mother brought down-stairs for her edification, where we are told that "many great personages contrive to be unintelligible in order to be respected."
A peculiarity of Jane Austen's vocabulary and manner is her fondness for negatives in "un," such words as "unabsurd," "unpretty," "unrepulsable," "unfastidious," "untoward," and "unexceptionable"—a pet fancy of hers, which occurs, I am told, at least eight times in Emma alone—being as common in her novels as "halidome" and "minion" in the older romances of Wardour Street. Some day, perhaps, a lost novel of hers, written during the apparently idle years of her residence at Bath, will be identified by the prevalence of "uns" in its text.
In clarity of meaning her style is usually of the purest, and there is reason to think that her few obscurities are as often due to carelessness as to defective art. Not that she was exempt from all the weaknesses that she discovers for our amusement in the generality of her sex. Henry Tilney's appreciation of women as letter-writers can hardly have been imagined without at least a moment's reflection by the author over her own achievements—
"'I have sometimes thought,' says Catherine, doubtfully, 'whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is, I should not think the superiority was always on our side.'
"'As far as I have had opportunity of judging,' replies Tilney, 'it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.'
"'And what are they?'
"'A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.'
"'Upon my word, I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment! You do not think too highly of us in that way.'