Sometimes we do hear of talks with poor women, as when Jane writes, "I called yesterday upon Betty Londe, who inquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, which I am sorry to have merited, and from which I will profit." We may well believe that Jane was no pioneer in "district visiting." Her services to humanity were of another kind. Almost alone among the greater novelists who have written the fiction of drawing-rooms, she was hardly less indifferent as a writer to the concerns of the governing class of her day than of the voteless class, unless, indeed, she was a hostile witness so far as her knowledge went. Among the worst-bred persons in the novels, with John Thorpe, Mr. Collins, and the ever-delightful Mrs. Bennet, are Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the hero whose manners are most open to reproach is Lady Catherine's nephew, Darcy—before he has been refused by Elizabeth.
Jane Austen's views on the claims of social position, as distinct from individual character, were much the same as Anne Elliot's. Mr. Elliot and Anne, we learn—
"Did not always think alike. His value for rank and connection she perceived to be greater than hers. It was not merely complaisance, it must be a liking to the cause, which made him enter warmly into her father's and sister's solicitudes on a subject which she thought unworthy to excite them.... She was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen—a wish that they had more pride.... Had Lady Dalrymple and her daughter even been very agreeable, she would still have been ashamed of the agitation they created; but they were nothing. There was no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding."
The Dalrymples and Lady Catherine de Bourgh do not lead one to suppose that Jane's acquaintance with their class was a fortunate one. Had it been, she would probably have given some happier examples of the titular aristocracy. Lord Osborne, in The Watsons, is in some ways a more amiable type, but too "sketchy" to be of much account as an antidote to such unpleasing people as the aunt of Darcy and the cousins of Anne Elliot.
If persons of artificial eminence are almost unknown in the novels, there is an even more complete dearth of men or women distinguished for their individual gifts or achievements. Sir John Middleton fills his too hospitable mansion with an endless supply of guests who keep his maid-servants hard at work in preparing spare bedrooms, that were occupied the night before, for fresh arrivals in the afternoon. He hardly allows time to speed the parting guests before he must turn to welcome their successors. But no statesman, or traveller, or professor, not so much as a rising politician or a poet, crosses those ever-open doors. They do not come, for one reason—and it seems a sufficient one—because they scarcely exist for the author, or if they do, the people who eat mutton and drink port and Madeira around the mahogany tables at Netherfield, or Barton, or Uppercross, know and care nothing whatever about them and their performances. "Each thinks his little set mankind" is as true of the characters in Jane Austen's books as in a sense it is true, one is sometimes inclined to think, of their author. The Morlands, and Musgroves, and Woodhouses, and Bennets have never travelled, unless an occasional visit to London may count as travel. They have been into some neighbouring county, they have been perchance to Bath. They have not so much as been to Paris. Emma had never seen the sea. Twenty years earlier it would have been different. Darcy at any rate would have known something of France had he been twenty years older. From the outbreak of the Revolution till the first exile of Napoleon, France was not a likely place for any but the most adventurous of squires to choose for a pleasure-trip, nor, after the rise of Napoleon's star, were the accessible parts of the Continent very attractive for any but soldiers of fortune and spies. Thus, not only are the conversations which Jane Austen offers devoid of any such elements of interest as are introduced, for example, by the appearance of Byron in Venetia, or of Shelley in Nightmare Abbey, but the opportunities of lively talk offered by reminiscences of foreign manners and scenes are not allowed to the author. On the other hand, we do not meet with any of those egotistical travellers who, as a contemporary of Jane Austen's declared, "If you introduce the name of a river or a hill, instantly deluge you with the Rhine, or make you dizzy with the height of Mont Blanc."
In any case, however much the fact may be due to want of opportunities for enlarging her knowledge, Jane, literature apart, took very little interest in anything outside the social and family life of her own class in the country. Her published correspondence has been described as "trivial" (as her novels have been, for that is what Madame de Staël meant by "vulgaire," and not "vulgar," as Sir James Mackintosh and others have supposed), and, in comparison with such contemporary letters as Byron's or Lamb's, her accounts of her dances and her bonnets are certainly weak tea for serious readers. They are, however, exactly such letters as she might have been expected to write. Her satire gives them an agreeable tartness which somehow suggests the syllabubs which were so common a feature of the supper-tables of her time. It is all, one may reasonably suppose, like the common talk of the drawing-room in a manor-house on an afternoon when the men are hunting or shooting—the choice of a winter frock, the prospects of a ball at some territorial magnate's, the errors of cooks and housemaids, the fatuity of this young man who is so rich, and the silliness of that young woman who is so pretty—enlivened by Jane's wit.
The dances, whether full-dress balls or merely "small and early hops" were among the favourite pleasures of Jane Austen. If you have read her letters you will feel that she is present when Fanny Price dances so prettily at Mansfield Park, or when Darcy declines to dance with Elizabeth because though she is "tolerable," she is "not handsome enough" to tempt him. "I danced twice with Warren last night, and once with Mr. Charles Watkins, and to my inexpressible astonishment I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however. We had a very good supper, and the greenhouse was illuminated in a very elegant manner." Such bits of news are common at all periods of Jane's correspondence. For example: "The ball on Thursday was a very small one indeed, hardly so large as an Oxford smack;" and again, "Our ball on Thursday was a very poor one, only eight couple, and but twenty-three people in the room"—just as it was when they got up the scratch dance at the Bertrams, "the thought only of the afternoon, built on the late acquisition of a violin player in the servants' hall."
On another occasion, at a public hall at the county town—
"The Portsmouths, Dorchesters, Boltons, Portals, and Clerks were there, and all the meaner and more usual etc., etcs. There was a scarcity of men in general, and a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much. I danced nine dances out of ten—five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute, and James Digweed, and four with Catherine. There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves."
Jane, from all we know of her, would almost as soon dance with another girl as with a man—it was the dancing she loved, and watching the behaviour of others, their flirtations, their love-making, their airs and affectations.