Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy

by W. H. Helm

Thus we can see that Jane knew exactly what her heroines were like, even if in their case, as in that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left to fill in details of colour and feature very much as he chooses. She was far more particular in describing the personal appearance of real people, and in her letters the handsome and the ugly are as clearly differentiated as the lively and the dull. "I never saw so plain a family"—she declares after calling on some people named Fagg—"five sisters so very plain! They are as plain as the Foresters, or the Franfraddops, or the Seagraves, or the Rivers, excluding Sophy. Miss Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family." Sometimes she attributed the blame for ill-looks to a definite part of the genealogical tree. "I wish she was not so very Palmery," she says of one of her nieces, "but it seems stronger than ever, I never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence." The Mrs. Palmer of Sense and Sensibility was not of that family. She was as pretty as she was foolish.

Even if it be true that Jane Austen only painted the life which she found immediately around her, and that she would almost as soon have attempted to depict the interior of a Thibetan lamassary as of an English country-house of the kind Disraeli loved to paint, yet do her characters "typify nothing?" If Mrs. Elton, and Sir John Middleton, and Mary Musgrove are not types, then I do not see why Sir Charles Grandison, or Mrs. Proudie, or Mr. Tulliver should be regarded as types. Perhaps they should not, but then, what are types? Most of Jane Austen's people may be common; there may be, in the flesh, a hundred Lady Russells for one Lady Camper, and five hundred John Willoughbys for one Willoughby Patterne. That is only to say that humanity is richer in one type than in another.

Jane was a realist, though Realism, in the sense in which we apply the term in the criticism of living writers, has little place in her novels. She assumes that her readers—the men and women of her own age—are neither blind nor unaccustomed to the ordinary resources of contemporary civilization. When her characters dine, they may usually, for all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a common dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after the manner of the nomads of the Asiatic Steppes; they may drink out of gourds like the Bushmen, while, after the custom of the Romans, they recline on raised couches in the attitude of Madame Récamier. We know that they sat round solid mahogany or oaken tables, covered with damask cloths during the meat and pudding service, that the silver was polished, and the glass bright, even though the supply of plates was perhaps not always equal to the number of courses; we have little doubt as to the kind of chairs whereon the diners sat, and we may wish we had more of them in our own dining-rooms.

As to the costumes of the men and women who sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress them as we like, and there is little doubt that many a modern reader has mentally pictured Darcy wearing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, Charles Musgrove in a golfing-cap and loose knickerbockers, and Mr. Collins or Mr. Elton in a stiff "round-about" collar of the kind usually worn by the Anglican clergy of to-day. For the ladies, the whirligig of time has brought back the modes of a century ago. In spite of the cry for the equality of the sexes, there are, as the Lord Chancellor and other eminent authorities have laid down, marked distinctions between the ways of women and of men. One of such distinctions may be found in the fact that the fashions of feminine dress move in a (very irregular and therefore theoretically impossible) circle, while those of masculine dress rarely cross the same point twice. Thus while, during the last few years, we have seen our sisters and aunts affecting "modes" that were in vogue in the periods of the Renaissance, the Directory, and the Empire, we have never seen our brothers and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the courtiers either of François premier or of the First Consul. A woman need not despair of wearing, without being followed by a crowd, almost any costume of any period of woman's history. A man need not look for the day when he may walk in the parks in the garb of Raleigh or of Burke without attracting more attention than will be agreeable to the modesty of any one but an actor-manager or the European agent of some American world-industry. The Misses Bertram, of Mansfield Park, might go shopping in Regent Street to-day without any one remarking that their dress, or their coiffure, was seriously out of date. But we only know how they dressed because we know the date of their birth, not because the author of a bit of their life-history has told us.

Who that has ever read Weir of Hermiston can forget the description of the heroine as she first appeared to Archie in the kirk? It was in the very year (1814) in which Fanny Price's story was related, and of Mary Crawford, if not of Fanny, a tale of town finery as bright as that of Kirstie might have been told. We know how alluring Kirstie looked to Archie in her "frock of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at the ankle," and "drawn up so as to mould the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between ... surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of primroses." Of some such charming pictures we get at least the preliminary sketches in Jane Austen's letters, but the finished works are never shown in the novels, and we may dress the pretty heroines to our own fancy so long as we keep to the style of their period, or, if our imaginations are feeble and our knowledge of Regency costume deficient, Mr. Brock will do the work for us in the more delightful of his coloured drawings, or Mr. Hugh Thomson in his lively illustrations in pen and ink.

This point—that the material factors of manners and habits are little noted by Jane Austen—will strike many readers, at first sight, as of quite trivial importance. But it is largely the reason why her novels have so modern an external air compared with those, let us say, of Scott, or even of Balzac, who only began to write when her short career was ending. If Jane Austen had described the conditions of life at Hartfield or Kellynch with the particularity with which Balzac describes the Grandets' house at Saumur, and the Guenics' at Guerande, or had given us such full accounts of the villagers on the estate of the Bertrams of Mansfield Park as Scott gave us of the smugglers and gipsies on the lands of the Bertrams of Ellangowan, we should see more clearly the changes that a hundred years have wrought in the habits of the English country.

Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to the cut and colour of her own clothing, however little she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. But when we read of "Jane Austen frocks" for bridesmaids in the accounts of modern weddings, they are copied from the illustrations of Mr. Thomson or Mr. Brock, or else are so-called merely because they are of the period of her novels, which is much the same thing. With the general subject of dress she deals as a novelist, we may almost say once for all, in a single paragraph of Northanger Abbey. The occasion was the dance at Bath which was to prove so momentous an event in Catherine's life.

"What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. This would have been an error in judgment, great though not uncommon, from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biassed by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better, for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."