Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy

by W. H. Helm

"She is a complete angel. Look at her. Is not she an angel in every gesture? Observe the turn of her throat. Observe her eyes, as she is looking up at my father. You will be glad to hear (inclining his head, and whispering seriously) that my uncle means to give her all my aunt's jewels. They are to be new set. I am resolved to have some in an ornament for the head. Will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?"

Such raptures as these are rarely permitted to the Austen lovers. In their affairs of the heart, as in the general conduct of their lives, plain living and quiet thinking reflect the simple habits of the people among whom Jane passed her own smoothly-ordered life.

To the simplicity of that life we owe one of her peculiar charms. If she had been the famous, sought-after literary woman who is the necessary complement of a dinner-party in a house of cultured luxury, and whose name is found in the index of every volume of contemporary reminiscences, she would not have been half so attractive to the type of mind that most enjoys her novels. Yet when all possible allowance has been made for her lightness of expression her own predilections were certainly for the conditions of "opulent leisure" rather than of decent comfort, for the amenities of Mansfield Park and Pemberley rather than for those of Fullerton Rectory or the Dashwoods' cottage. "People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world," she wrote from Steventon to her sister at Godmersham, "that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there."

This was written early in her life. In the year before she died, writing to her niece Fanny, she said: "Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with you, pretty dear."

Contempt for poverty is expressed by several characters in her work. "Be honest and poor, by all means"—says Mary Crawford to Edmund Bertram—"but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich."

Perhaps neither the real Jane nor the imaginary Mary is to be taken quite literally, but that Jane would have freely assented to a disbelief in the wisdom of marrying on a small income, however little she approved of Mary's "too positive admiration for wealth," is certain from all that we know of her opinions on the essentials of happiness.

Godmersham is in Kent, and it was in that spacious, well-provided house of her brother Edward, amid all the charms of parks and beechwoods, of home comforts and "elegances" that marked the life of the large landowner in those days, that she usually found herself most contented. Then was the time when the squire was not driven to find an income by letting his manor to a company promoter to whom the difference between an oak and an elm is scarcely known, and whose chief object in hiring a mansion in rural surroundings is to fill it with week-end parties who play bridge indoors on summer afternoons and leave the beauties of the gardens and the park to the peacocks and the deer.

With such a modern plutocrat Jane would have had little in common, but she would have had less with the modern Socialist. Landed property stood for everything stable and dignified in her days, and those critics of Pride and Prejudice who unkindly emphasized the fact that Elizabeth Bennet only decided to marry Darcy after she had seen the glories of Pemberley and its park and gardens, while they implicitly libelled the girl, were not so unfair to the general sentiment of her period. Sir Walter Scott, by the way, was one of those who regarded Elizabeth Bennet's change of feeling towards Darcy as the result of her visit to the fine place in Derbyshire. Surely such a view connotes a failure to appreciate the humour of the conversation on this point between Jane Bennet and her sister. The elder girl asks the younger how long it is since she has felt any affection for Darcy, and Elizabeth replies: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began; but I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Even Jane Bennet, whose humour sense was not strongly developed, asks her to give a serious answer.

This much may be admitted, that the idea of marrying the curate never presented itself to any one of the maidens who brighten the novels of Jane Austen with their charms of mind and appearance. Elinor Dashwood seems to have regarded about £600 a year (with sure prospect of increase) as the minimum on which married life could hopefully be entered upon, and I fancy Jane would have agreed with her. The majority of novel-readers may still prefer the hero and heroine whose love will triumph over all obstacles of position, and opposition, of want of sympathy on the part of others or of sense on their own, and there have actually been readers who thought Lydia Bennet more "interesting" than Elizabeth! The prudence of the heroines may to some small extent account for the failure of Jane Austen's work to captivate the "great heart of the public." In any case her fame is far from universal. She has never been, and never will be, popular in the sense in which the men and women whose publishers cheerfully print first editions of a hundred thousand copies are popular. Her appeal, in her own lifetime, when her name was unknown, was not to "the general," and it is only much less restricted now because of the enormous increase in the reading public. Actually it is immensely greater; relatively, its increase is evidently small. One cannot, as in the case of some authors, describe her work as being enjoyed only by the cultured class, and neglected, because misapprehended, by the rest. True culture is always discriminating, even in the presence of its divinities. Mr. Anthony Hope said not long ago, referring to literary snobbishness: "There are certain companies in which to suggest, even with the utmost humility, that certain parts of Jane Austen's novels are less entertaining than other parts is thought considerably worse than drawing invidious distinctions between various passages of Holy Writ."

With those who regard Jane Austen's work as equally excellent in every part, no patience is possible. The reader who finds it easy to get as much enjoyment from Sense and Sensibility or Northanger Abbey as from Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park must be blessed with a comfortable absence of discrimination. Those who see no degree of superiority in the presentation of the characters of Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot as compared with Elinor Dashwood and Catherine Morland might be expected to regard Blanche Amory and Mrs. Jarley as the equals respectively of Becky Sharp and Mrs. Gamp.