"By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he chose Fordyce's Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages she interrupted him with—
"'Do you know, mamma, that my Uncle Phillips talks of turning away Richard; and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him? My aunt told me so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.'
"Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue; but Mr. Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said—
"'I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit. It amazes me, I confess; for certainly, there can be nothing so advantageous to them as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin.'
"Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist at backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing that he acted very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling amusements."
The mephistophelian delight of the father in the unconscious absurdity of his sententious guest, the rudeness of the younger daughters, and the attempts of the elder girls to enforce the observance of ordinary good manners, could not well be realized with finer effect, and no description of accessories would heighten it.
It is not only material accessories and necessaries, furniture, dress, and so on that are slighted by Jane Austen. Incidents that are of positive value to her plan are not allowed to linger a moment after they have served the turn. The adventure of Harriet Smith (in Emma) with the gipsies, ending in her rescue by Frank Churchill, fills just half a page. It would have filled a chapter in a novel by Scott or Dickens. One possible reason for this brevity is clear enough. The author knew little about gipsies, they were to her merely low ruffians and drabs, horse-stealers and pilferers, and of their fascination for the student of character she had no idea at all. There were hundreds and hundreds of genuine Romany about the country in those days. Borrow was not yet at work, and few people had taken the trouble to discover what manner of mind the "Egyptians" possessed, and how they spent their time when they were not robbing henroosts or swindling housemaids. Scott felt something of the mysterious charm of this ancient and nomadic race, but he was romantic, and romance, in Jane Austen's way of thinking, was very nearly a synonym for absurdity. So it is, therefore, that the gipsies in the Highbury lane appear for half a page, speak no word that is reported, and then vanish from our ken. The author implies that they hurried away to avoid prosecution. Perhaps she was almost as glad to see the last of them as were the inhabitants of Highbury. Thus is a fine opportunity for a "picturesque" scene thrown away. Undeveloped as it is, the adventure stands absolutely alone in the novels as the sole occasion whereon any of the characters has reason to fear violence at the hands of ill-disposed persons. It was only in imagination that Catherine Morland was carried off by masked men, though a spirited illustration of Mr. Hugh Thomson's did once mislead a too hurried critic into regarding the affair as an event in the heroine's life.
There are, in fact, very few digressions in these books. Fielding "digressed" by whole chapters at a time, Sterne's digressions filled more space than his tale in his one "novel." Jane Austen keeps to the road, and leaves the by-lanes unexplored. It is a pleasant road, old, and bordered here and there with attractive-looking houses into which we may enter by her kindly introduction, but if we wish to go off to that hamlet on the right, or that coppice on the left, we must go alone. She will sit on a stile till we return to pursue the direct route. It is to her effort to avoid all but the essential factors in achieving her object that the general absence of landscape and topographical detail of all kinds in her work is to be attributed. In the case of a Dickens, a Balzac, a Hardy or a Meredith, you can constantly identify the places where the scenes are laid. In Lincoln's Inn Fields you can watch Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows; at Rochester you can see the very room where Mr. Pickwick slept; at Nemours you can gaze at the house where The Minoret-Levraults (in Ursule Mirouet) lived; at Woolbridge you can find the manor house where the unhappy Tess passed her bridal night. Down in Surrey you can take a photograph of the Crossways House which was almost the whole fortune of Diana, at Seaford you can see the "Elba Hall" of The House on the Beach sheltering beneath the downs, and as in these instances so in scores of others. But in connection with the Austen novels, save for the London streets and squares, there are only Bath and Lyme Regis and Portsmouth where one can truly feel sure that such or such an incident in one or other novel "occurred" on this very spot.
If, however, there is no special "Jane Austen country" to be traced out by the diligent seeker for visible associations, there are scattered spots where her presence is still to be felt. At Steventon, where the earlier works were produced, the house of the Austens no longer stands, having given place long since to a rectory on the other side of the valley, more convenient and comfortable than that wherein the father wrote his sermons and the daughter her novels—sermons and novels which at the time seemed equally likely to achieve enduring fame. Only the well and the pump remain to mark the site. The surroundings are not all new—how should they be in a thinly populated parish? There are still farms and cottages that were old before Jane was born. The church is in better trim, but, externally at least, it is much the same.
Probably with scenery as with men and women Jane Austen did not usually draw from models, and when she did, she gave the models their own names. The one real bit of description of a place named in her work is the account of the environs of Lyme Regis, which is so obviously written from personal interest that some of her biographers have supposed that her own experiences during her visits there had included a Captain Wentworth or at least a Captain Benwick.