"The proposal of dancing—originating nobody exactly knew where—was so effectually promoted by Mr. and Mrs. Cole that everything was rapidly clearing away, to give proper space. Mrs. Weston, capital in her country dances, was seated, and beginning an irresistible waltz; and Frank Churchill, coming up with most becoming gallantry to Emma, had secured her hand, and led her up to the top, (where) she led off the dance with genuine spirit and enjoyment."
The waltz was a novelty still in those days, and seems here to be classed as a country dance. It had been imported from Germany, where Mozart had done much to forward its triumph, after Jane Austen had written her earlier novels, and I cannot remember any other reference to it in her work. It was at first considered an "improper" dance, and one need not be surprised that a generation which had danced nothing more intimate than the "boulangeries" was at first a little flustered by the new fashion. Sheridan, watching the dancers in a ball-room, repeated the following lines of his own composition, which aptly suggest the contrast between the old dancing and the new as it struck the eyes of our great-grand-aunts about the time when Emma danced at the "Crown" and Jane Austen at Goodnestone.
"With tranquil step, and timid, downcast glance,
Behold the well-paired couple now advance.
In such sweet posture our first parents moved,
While, hand in hand, through Eden's bowers they roved,
Ere yet the Devil, with promise fine and false,
Turn'd their poor heads, and taught them how to waltz."
Little wonder, when a waltz was regarded as forbidden fruit, if Edmund Bertram, Fanny, and Sir Thomas were shocked at the very idea of play-acting by the family and guests at Mansfield Park. Not that there were wanting plenty of quiet souls who were in nowise personally distressed at the "impropriety" of the waltz on their own account, just as, in the other matter of amateur theatricals, and the choice of a play, when Lady Bertram asked her children not to "act anything improper," it was not because she had any personal objection to offer, but because "Sir Thomas would not like it."
The Bertrams' ill-fated theatricals, and the waltz which Mrs. Weston played, serve to emphasize the place which Jane Austen fills as an historian of the transition from the formal prudery of the sceptical eighteenth century to the broader liberties of the scientific nineteenth. "What is become of all the shyness in the world?" she asks her sister in 1807; "shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." Morals change but little as compared with moeurs. The girls who act in private theatricals every winter and dance twenty waltzes a night half the year round are no whit less virtuous than their great-grandmothers who were shocked at the waltz, and caught cold in clothes which were so thin that, as a close observer has recorded, you could "see the gleam of their garter-buckles" through the silks and kerseymeres as they danced, and altogether so suitable for a classical revival that a contemporary poet was moved to utter the quatrain—
"When dressed for the evening the girls now-a-days,
Scarce an atom of dress on them leave;
Nor blame them, for what is an evening dress
But a dress that is suited to Eve."
Thus the mother of mankind is accused by one poet of having danced the first waltz, and held responsible by another for the airy fashions of the Récamier period.
One of the principal differences of etiquette, we may note before passing on, between the customs of the ball-room a century ago and now, was that in the days when John Lyford was eluded with so much difficulty a girl danced two successive dances with the same partner as a matter of course, so that neither an imaginary John Thorpe nor a real John Lyford could be got rid of by the promise of one dance.
The scraps from the letters, given on the last few pages, help us to realize how clearly Jane Austen's own life is at times reflected in her books.