any we possess in England. What English belles-lettres of the present day want more than anything else is a more widely diffused sense of obligation among the cultivators of them-obligation, if one must put it pedantically, to do the best a man can with his material, and to work in the presence of the highest ideals and achievements of his profession. her Henry, will feel that in one or two of these newly printed letters he comes very near to the secret of Catherine's manufac ture. Here, for instance, is a picture, pieced together from passages of different dates, of Jane Austen in a frame of mind which has something of Catherine Morland and something of Elizabeth Bennett in it, though it is a little too satirical and conscious for the one, and perhaps a trifle too frivolous for the other. Tom Lefroy, the hero of the little episode, lived to be chief justice of Ireland, and only died in 1854. The first extract occurs in a letter written from Steventon in January, 1796: "You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behave. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanly, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago. ... There are, however, in these volumes a few letters which were worth printing, and which do help to complete the picture already existing of Jane Austen. These are the letters written between 1796 and 1799, that is to say, during the period which witnessed the composition of "Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility," and "Northanger Abbey." Jane Austen at the time was a pretty, lively girl, very fond of dancing, deeply interested in dress, and full of the same naif interest in the other sex with which Catherine Morland started on her Bath travels. The whole tone indeed of this early correspondence with her sister reminds one of an older and shrewder Catherine, and the ways of seeing and describing to which they bear witness are exactly those to which we owe the unflagging liveliness and gaiety of the two famous books in which the adventures of Catherine and of Elizabeth Bennett are set forth. "Northanger Abbey especially, gay, sparkling, and rapid as it is from beginning to end, is the book in which the bright energy of Jane Austen's youth finds its gayest and freshest expression. "Pride and Prejudice "is witty and sparkling too, but it probably went through many a heightening and polishing process during the fifteen years which elapsed between the time when it was written and the time when it appeared in print; and although a great deal of it may represent the young Jane Austen, the style as a whole bears marks certainly of a fuller maturity than had been reached by the writer of "Northanger Abbey." It is in the story of Catherine Morland that we get the inimitable literary expression of that exuberant girlish wit, which expressed itself in letters and talk and harmless flirtations before it took to itself literary shape, and it is pleasant to turn from the high spirits of that delightful "I shall refuse him, however, unless book to some of the first letters in this he promises to give away his white coat. collection, and so to realize afresh, by... Tell Mary that I make over Mr. means of such records of the woman, the Heartley and all his estate to her for her perfect spontaneity of the writer. Any sole use and benefit in future, and not one who has ever interested himself in only him, but all my other admirers into the impulsive little heroine, who was as the bargain, wherever she can find them, nearly plain as any heroine dared to be even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to before Jane Eyre, but whose perfect good-give me, as I mean to confine myself in humor and frankness won the heart of future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I "After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same colored clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded. . . . Our party to Ashe tomorrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing without him), Buller, who is now staying with us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. don't care sixpence. Assure her also as a last and indubitable proof of Warren's indifference to me that he actually drew that gentleman's picture for me, and deliv- | ered it to me without a sigh! "Friday (the day of the Ashe ball). At length the day has come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea." Slight, however, as the relation was, it seems to have been more durable than the signs of frail vitality about it would have led one to expect. It is not till two years later that Jane Austen herself gives it its coup de grace in her light characteristic way. She describes a visit paid by Tom Lefroy's aunt to Steventon, in which the nephew's name was never once mentioned to Jane herself, "and I was too proud to make any inquiries; but on my father's asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London, on his way to Ireland, where he is called to the bar, and means to practise." And then alas! for the faithfulness of woman she flies off to describe the position in which things are with regard to an unnamed friend of Mr. Lefroy's, who had evidently taken his place in her thoughts, and was rapidly succeeding to that full measure of indifference which appears to have been the ultimate portion of all Jane's admirers. "There is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before," she says provokingly, describing a letter from this unknown aspirant —“and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceed ingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner." There are a good many other touches in these girlish letters that give one glimpses, as it were, into the workshop which produced the novels. "Mr. Richard Harvey," she says on one occasion, "is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, and only known to half the neighborhood, you must not mention it. The lady's name is Musgrave." Again, "We have been very gay since I wrote last, dining at Hackington, returning by moonlight and everything quite in style, including Mr. Claringbould's funeral which we saw go by on Sunday." Or, "If you should ever see Lucy, you may tell her that I scolded Miss Fletcher for her negligence in writing, as she desired me to do, but without being able to bring her to any proper sense of shame; that Miss Fletcher says in her defence, that as everybody whom Lucy knew when she was in Canterbury has now left it, she has nothing at all to write 66 to her about. By everybody, I suppose Miss Fletcher means that a new set of officers has arrived there. But this is a note of my own." Or again, with mocking reference to some of those pomposi ties of authorship which she ridicules in Northanger Abbey"-"I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last letter, for I write only for fame, and with out any view to pecuniary emolument." Her lively pen touches everybody in turn. One feels there may have been something formidable in a daughter who could put together with a few strokes so suggestive an outline as this: "My mother continues hearty; her appetite and nights are very good, but she sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a liver disorder." And it is characteristic that even her letters of grief, after the death of a favorite sister-in law, are broken within the first fortnight by some flashes of terse satire on the affairs of the neighborhood. But Some little pleasure and entertainment then may be gleaned, by those who already know their Miss Austen, from the first dozen letters or so of this collection. They fill up a gap in Mr. Austen Leigh's book. The turn of phrase is generally light and happy; and they enable us to realize something of that buoyant and yet critical enjoyment of life, of which the six novels were the direct outcome. after all, there is very little personal or literary distinction in them; the judgment of an unfriendly Frenchman would proba bly find that note of "commonness" in them which Madame de Staël insisted in attributing to "Pride and Prejudice." And commonness indeed there is, using the word, that is to say, not in any strong or disagreeable sense, but simply as opposed to distinction, charm, aroma, or any of those various words by which one tries to express that magical personal quality of which Madame de Sévigné is the typical representative in literature. even the gaiety and moderate felicity of phrase which beguiled one through the earlier letters disappears from the later correspondence. The writer of it indeed is the same kindly, blameless, and gentle humorous person as the Jane Austen of 1796, but whereas at twenty-one Jane Austen's letters were like her novels, and therefore may be said to possess some slight claim to belong to literature, by thirty-one they had become the mere ordinary chit-chat of the ordinary gentlewoman, with no claims whatever to publication or remembrance beyond the family circle. Lord Brabourne's book indeed only im And presses upon us with fresh force what was already fairly well known that broadly speaking, the whole yield of Jane Austen's individuality is to be found in her novels. There are a certain number of facts about her which help to explain her books, and which are of use to the student of the psychological side of letters, but these were already within everybody's reach, so that the collection printed by Lord Brabourne is as a whole neither amusing, nor sufficiently instructive to make in worth publication! Hampshire, with their county families, their marryings and christenings, their dancings and charities, are the only world she knows or cares to know. She never seems to have had a literary acquaintance, or to have desired to make one. While Miss Ferrier's wits were quickened by the give and take of Edinburgh society in its best days, and Miss Edgeworth found herself welcomed with extravagant flattery on the Continent as the representative of English culture, all the literary influence that Jane Austen ever experienced was due to her father, and all the literary influence she ever personally exerted was brought to bear upon a novel-writing niece. No doubt if she had lived a little longer things would have been different. When she died, at the age of forty-one, her books had already brought her some fame, and friends would have followed. As it was, her circle of interests, both intellectual and personal, was a narrower one than that of any other writer we can remember with the same literary position. In spite, however, of her narrow Weltanschauung, and her dearth of literary relationships, Jane Austen is a classic, and "Pride and Prejudice" will probably be read when "Corinne," though not its author, is forgotten. Her life is a striking proof that a great novelist may live without a philosophy, and die without ever having belonged to a literary coterie. But out of the stuff of which the life was com posed it was impossible to make a good letter-writer. To be a good letter-writer a man or woman must either have ideas, or sentiments strong enough to take the place of ideas, or knowledge of and contact with what is intrinsically interesting and important. Jane Austen had none of these. The graphic portraiture of men and women seen from the outside, in which she excelled, was not possible in letters. It required more freedom, more elbow-room than letters could give. Jane Austen, in describing real people, found herself limited by the natural scruples of an aimable and gentle nature. There was a short time when the exuberance of her talent overflowed a little into her correspondence. But it soon came to an end, and for the rest of her life Jane Austen's letters were below rather than above the average in interest, point, and charm. The triviality of the letters is easily explained. No circumstances were ever less favorable than Jane Austen's to good letter-writing. She possessed one literary instrument which she used with extraordinary skill and delicacy- the instrument of critical observation as applied to the commoner types and relations of human life. Within the limits fixed for her by temperament and circumstances she brought it to bear with unrivalled success, success which has placed her amongst English classics. But she was practically a stranger to what one may call, without pedantry, the world of ideas. The intellectual and moral framework of her books is of the simplest and most conventional kind. The author of "Corinne," placed as she was in the very centre of the European stress and tumult, might well think them too tame and commonplace to be read. Great interests, great questions, were life and breath to Madame de Staël as they were to her successor George Sand. She realized the continuity of human history, the great fundamental laws and necessities underlying all the outward tangle and complication. And it was this insight, this far-reaching symyathy, which gave her such power over her time, and made her personality and her thoughts "incalculably diffusive." Meanwhile Jane Austen, in her Hampshire home, seems to have lived through the stormiest period of modern European history without being touched by any of the large fears and hopes, or even strongly impressed by any of the dramatic characters or careers in which it abounded. Though the letters extended from 1796 to 1817, there is barely a mention of politics in them, except in some small personal connection, and of the literary forces of the time-Goethe, Byron, Wordsworth - there is hardly a Miss Austen's novels are a well-worn trace. Even when she comes to London, subject. We have all read her, or ought though we have an occasional bare record to have read her; we all know what Maof a visit to a theatre, we still hear of caulay and what Scott thought of her; nothing except sisters, cousins, neighbors, and the qualities of her humor, the extent the price of Irish," and the new fashions of her range, have been pointed out again in caps. And for the rest, Kent and and again. Perhaps, after all, however, it TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. TEIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded ar, free of postage. mittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of 1 & Co. le Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. 686 |