Helm Jane Austen and her Country-house Comedy

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-7364-1932-2
Verlag: anboco
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 284 Seiten

DOMINANT QUALITIES Jane Austen's abiding freshness-Why she has not more readers-Characteristics of her work-Absence of passion-Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë-Jane in her home circle-Her tranquil nature-Her unselfishness-Compared with Dorothy Osborne-Prudent heroines-Thoughtless admiration EQUIPMENT AND METHOD Literary influences-Jane Austen's defence of novelists-The old essayists-Her favourite authors-Some novels of her time-Criticism of her niece's novel-Sense of her own limitations-Her method-Humour-Familiar names-Some characteristics of style-Suggested emendations-A new 'problem' of authorship-A 'forbidding' writer-'Commonplace' and 'superficial'-Thomas Love Peacock-Sapient suggestions CONTACT WITH LIFE Origins of characters-Matchmaking-Second marriages-Negative qualities of the novels-Close knowledge of one class-Dislike of 'lionizing'-Madame de Staël-The 'lower orders'-Tradesmen-Social position-Quality of Jane's letters-Balls and parties ETHICS AND OPTIMISM Dr. Whately on Jane Austen-'Moral lessons' of her novels-Charge of 'Indelicacy'-Marriage as a profession-A 'problem' novel-'The Nostalgia of the Infinite'-The 'whitewashing' of Willoughby-Lady Susan condemned by its author-The Watsons-Change in manners-No 'heroes'-Woman's love-The Prince Regent-The Quarterly Review THE IMPARTIAL SATIRIST What has woman done?-'Nature's Salic law'-Women deficient in satire-Some types in the novels-The female snob-The valetudinarian-The fop-The too agreeable man-'Personal size and mental sorrow'-Knightley's opinion of Emma-Ashamed of relations-Mrs. Bennet-The clergy and their opinions-Worldly life-Absence of dogma-Authors confused with their creations PERSONAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL The novelist and her characters-Her sense of their reality-Accessories rarely described-Her ideas on dress-Her own millinery and gowns-Thin clothes and consumption-Domestic economy-Jane as housekeeper-'A very clever essay'-Mr.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Helm, W. H.

Leseproben

II
EQUIPMENT; AND METHOD

Literary influences—Jane Austen's defence of novelists—The old essayists—Her favourite authors—Some novels of her time—Criticism of her niece's novel—Sense of her own limitations—Her method—Humour—Familiar names—Some characteristics of style—Suggested emendations—A new "problem" of authorship—A "forbidding" writer—"Commonplace" and "superficial"—Thomas Love Peacock—Sapient suggestions.

"I believe there is no constraint to be put upon real genius; nothing but inclination can set it to work," was one of the many sensible, if unoriginal, observations of the monarch in whose reign Jane Austen was born and died. But the inclination itself is usually started by external suggestions, and it is a mere truism that most books are written because others have appeared before them. Macaulay declared that but for Fanny Burney's example Jane Austen would never have been a novelist. Some of her early attempts at a complete novel did indeed take the epistolary form which was common in the preceding age, and was the method of her admired Richardson, who, I think, fired her ambition quite as much as Miss Burney. It would also seem that Mrs. Radcliffe's wild romances had induced in Jane the desire to do something that should please by the absence of every quality that had made them popular.

I doubt if there is any author of any period to whom the most famous remark of Buffon could be more justly applied than to Jane Austen. "Le style est la femme même" is a conviction which becomes more and more firm as one reads her novels and her letters, and reflects over their relationship. Her simple life and her limited opportunities, her genius being granted, are a sufficient explanation of her work. Part of that life, and a part more important, in proportion to the rest, than it would have been in the case of one who had lived less remote from the world of thought and action, was the reading of favourite books. Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison and Pamela influenced her strongly, but she avoided more than she took from them in the formation of her style. Miss Burney she now and then laughs at a little, as when, after John Thorpe has said to Catherine (who confesses she has never read Camilla): "You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not," Jane Austen adds that "the justness" of this critique "was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine." But where she loved she laughed. She appreciated her sister-novelist's work very highly, and she writes of a young woman whom she met at a neighbour's house: "There are two traits in her character which are pleasing—namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea."

Scott's poetry, of course, Jane read and enjoyed. Three of his most popular novels—Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary—appeared during her lifetime, and their authorship, like that of her own works, was not avowed until after her death. How wide-open was the "secret" of their origin from the very first, years before Scott's acknowledgment, we may see in one of Jane's letters of 1814, where she says: "Walter Scott has no business to write novels; especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but I fear I must." She herself declared, half jestingly, that she wrote for fame and not for profit. Neither, in any but shallow measure, was granted to her whilst she lived. She did not, like Robert Burns, "pant after distinction," nor was she of the "pushing" type. The offering-up of self-respect in the cause of self-interest was the least possible of sacrifices with her.

The machine-made horrors of Ann Radcliffe—"la reine des épouvantements" as she has been aptly called, in spite of her retiring disposition—were as familiar to Jane as were those, far less pouvantable, of Ainsworth to the girls of a later generation. The Radcliffe novels were published between Jane's fourteenth and twenty-third years, when she was most open to romantic influences, but however much she may have shuddered over them in her teens, she laughed at them in her twenties, and it is certainly to the desire to satirize the melodramatic sensations of the school of fiction which they represent that we chiefly owe Northanger Abbey, a pleasant mixture of a serious love-story and a burlesque, a motto for which might have been found in a sonnet of Shakespeare:

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
*****
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground."

It is in this novel that, leaving her characters for a page or two to take care of themselves, the author thus refers to the sorrows of the novel-making craft, and expresses her high appreciation of the work of Miss Burney and of Miss Edgeworth—

"Let us not desert one another—we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. 'I am no novel-reader.—I seldom look into novels.—Do not imagine that 'I often read novels.—It is really very well for a novel.' Such is the common cant. 'And what are you reading, Miss——?' 'Oh! it is only a novel!' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name! though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste; the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it."

This is a hard saying for those who count "Sir Roger de Coverley," "Mr. Bickerstaff," and many "Clarindas" and "Sophronias" among their friends. The age of the Regency may or may not have been as lax in its morality as some of its detractors have declared, but that it was one in which ladies could reasonably have been expected to blush over the pages of the Spectator is not easily to be believed.

The girls in the manor-houses and parsonages of those days formed their literary tastes on native productions without going abroad for their novels. They did not read French fiction as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done, or as their cousins in town still did in spite of such warnings as that of a contemporary critic who held it scarcely possible to read French "without contracting some pollution, so extensively and radically is its whole literature depraved." Times had changed since Dorothy Osborne discussed the voluminous romances of Calprenède and Mademoiselle de Scudéri with William Temple.

Another important branch of Jane's private and voluntary curriculum was her reading not only in the "coarse" journalism of Steele and Addison and their colleagues, but in the various successors of the Spectator and the Tatler which had their little days and died, particularly during the reign of George II. Not only in the Rambler and the Idler of the great man whom she so highly respected, but in the World, the Mirror, the Lounger, the Connoisseur, and other less remembered publications of their class, you may come upon characters and reflections and incidents which may have afforded fruitful suggestions to one who, after the manner of genius, could turn even the dulness of others into sparkling delight of her own.

Her favourite poet was Crabbe. She never met him, but she was so charmed by his work that, as her nephew has recorded, she used jokingly to say, "If she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs. Crabbe." Her appreciation of such poems as The Village and The Parish Register is suggestive. She herself made no attempt to illustrate the "simple annals of the poor." Born in a family which was itself a part of the landed gentry, in those days in its pride, she was obviously conscious of a lofty barrier between her own class and the...