Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy

by W. H. Helm

It has been said already that Jane Austen was not a cynic. Yet it would be easy, by making Lady Susan one's text, and ignoring the rest of her writings, to show that she was as cynical as a Swift or an Anatole France. Of course I do not mean that her apparent cynicism in this case was exercised on the kind of subjects which is ridiculed in The Tale of a Tub or in L'Ile des Pingouins. But I know nothing, in its way, more cold-blooded in the presentation of "love" than the conclusion of that novel of Jane's springtime, which she herself, her own wise critic, withheld from publication. The rivalry of mother and daughter for the affections of the same man must always be an unpleasant subject, and the story of the conflict between Lady Susan Vernon and her daughter for the matrimonial prize represented by Reginald de Courcy, as told in letters among the characters concerned, is on a low plane. The morals of the "heroine" may not be suspect, but her tone is below suspicion.

What is the dénouement of Lady Susan? The mother's schemes to marry the man of the daughter's choice have ended in her own marriage to the wealthy noodle whom she had tried to force upon the daughter. "Frederica," says the author,—dropping the "correspondence" plan in order to wind up the book more readily—"was therefore fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt till such time as Reginald de Courcy could be talked, flattered and finessed into an affection for her which, allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her mother, for his abjuring all future attachments, and detesting the sex, might be reasonably looked for in the course of a twelve-month. Three months might have done it in general, but Reginald's feelings were no less lasting than lively. Whether Lady Susan was or was not happy in her second choice, I do not see how it can ever be ascertained...."

It is certain that to some considerable extent Lady Susan was a satire on several lady novelists of the period. All Jane Austen's novels are more or less satirical, from Northanger Abbey, which is full of burlesque passages, to Persuasion, in which they are so rare that it needs a hunt to discover any. Whether or not Lady Susan was intended to be taken more seriously than in jest, it is a dull performance. The whole plan and treatment of the book are artificial. It was not Jane's natural instinct or her finer art which was at work in its making. So foreign is it to herself that if the MS. had been found in some cupboard of a manor-house no occupants of which had been of known relationship to the Austens, I doubt if it would have been attributed to her by any one who had not made a meticulous comparison of its phraseology with her acknowledged works.

There is, I think, no surer evidence of Jane's fine taste, alike in character and in literature, than that, having brought this novel to completion, she deliberately suppressed it. Had she sold it to a publisher, and allowed it to run its chance of popularity like the rest of her finished novels, we should have had to revise our views on her nature and judgment to a considerable extent. As it is, the fact that having written a poor novel of disagreeable tendency she recognized the unsatisfactory thing that she had done in time to cancel it is much in her favour, and justifies the opinion that whatever defects of subject or of treatment we may find in Lady Susan were condemned by its author. It is for this reason that we need not regret the decision of her nephew and niece to publish, many years after their aunt's death, the book which she herself had withheld. Only, let us never forget as we read it that it was cancelled by the author.

The Watsons was produced, as far as can be ascertained, in that middle period of Jane's life when, after her father's resignation of the Steventon living he was spending his few remaining years at Bath with his wife and daughters. Having written three of her six novels in the nineties of the eighteenth century—the six novels by which she chose to be judged—at Steventon, she produced nothing more of her best until at Chawton, in the early years of the nineteenth century, she completed her life's work.

All her books that live by their own merits were written in the heart of the country. The book that comes nearest to the commonest fiction of her period was chiefly written in a town which, however staid and irreproachable in its tone at the present date, was in her time a centre of worldliness and frivolity.

The Rivals was first acted in the year of Jane Austen's birth, but the picture it offers of Bath society is almost as true of 1802 as of 1775. Dress had changed much in the intervening years, but in all else there seems to have been little change between the Bath of Sheridan the lover of Elizabeth Linley, and the Bath of Sheridan the friend of the Prince Regent. It was among Lydia Languishes and Captain Absolutes that Jane Austen walked in Milsom Street and danced at the Assembly-rooms in 1802-5, and it was in an atmosphere of social affectation and busy idleness that she found her powers unequal to any nobler performance than the account of the husband-hunting and silly young women who angle for Lord Osborne and his friends. The futilities of The Watsons form a remarkable interlude between Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.

The rural society into which Jane Austen takes us in all her novels marks a rapid development from the manners of the preceding age. If we regard the Squire Western of Fielding as representative of a considerable class of the country gentlemen of his time, we may wonder how it is that no such rude disturber of the peace bursts in among the Woodhouses and the Dashwoods. His nearest relation in Jane's novels is Sir John Middleton, and he, with all his noise and ignorance, is a quiet, well-bred person in comparison with the rude father of the delicious Sophia. Even the less rubicund and animal squire of the Hardcastle species is here unknown, and Squire Allworthy himself would have been strange in the drawing-rooms of Mansfield Park and Pemberley, or the parlours of Longbourn and Hartfield. There is less change to be seen in the "manners and tone" of the women, especially the younger women, than of the men. Sophia and Amelia would have used a few expressions, perhaps, that might have made Emma stare and cry "Good God!" or the fine colour deepen on Elizabeth's cheeks, and Marianne Dashwood would have confided to Elinor her astonishment that such otherwise attractive girls should be so ignorant of the poets, and of the proper arrangement of natural scenery. Had the girls become confidential on further acquaintance, Sophia might have wondered why Elizabeth said so little about the appearance of her lover, and so much about his intelligence. But Tom Jones and Booth would never have got on intimate terms with Knightley, or Darcy, or Edward Ferrars, until these Austen young men had drunk more port than anybody in Jane's novels—with the exception of John Thorpe as described by himself—could carry without disaster.

There are no "heroes" among these honest gentlemen of a hundred years ago. Wentworth has indeed won credit and fortune at sea. Bertram and Knightley do nothing to entitle them to the name, beyond marrying the heroine. Edward Ferrars merely behaves properly in keeping faith with Lucy as long as she wants him. Darcy is heroic in taking Mrs. Bennet for a mother-in-law; Henry Tilney makes fun of his chosen mate in a way that would have cost him her heart in a more conventional novel. "Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien," says Rochefoucauld, but of the evil-doing kind there are none here, unless, indeed, the effrontery with which, after jilting Marianne for a rich wife, Willoughby comes to her sister Elinor and asks for her sympathy for his sad fate, or the coolness of Wickham in the presence of the people he has wronged may be regarded as evidence of heroism.