Authors: Elizabeth Jenkins
declined."
They had all hoped that Cassandra would be rejoining them very soon, but, as usual, her visit at Godmersham was extending itself.
Frank and Mary wanted her advice on some of their final household purchases and told Jane to say that if she were not home in time to help them they would buy everthing to spite her, "knives that will not cut, glasses that will not hold, a sofa without a seat and a bookcase without shelves." Frank was waiting to hear whether he was to have the command of a frigate; in the meantime, he had a very bad cold, "for an Austen," and was employing himself indoors with making fringe for the drawing room curtains.
They had had a visit from James, and it had given rise to one of those very few criticisms of a brother that Jane Austen ever felt called upon to make. James had not fewer good qualities than the others; none of them was kinder to his mother, and Mrs. Leigh Perrot said he had been a perfect son to her in affection; but he had perhaps the least happy temperament. His face, with its sensitive mouth and brooding dark eyes, suggests it; he had not the brilliant insouciance of Henry, the untroubled good humor of Edward, or the strong-nerved, cheerful dispositions of Frank and Charles. He was a
scholar, and deeply interested in poetry, particularly poetry of the new school of sensibility, and in his
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contacts with daily life his inner self was sometimes concealed behind a mask of gaucheries and irritations, quite foreign to the social graces of his family. This time he drove even his devoted sister into saying: "I am sorry and angry that his visits should not give one more pleasure, the company of so good and so clever a man ought to be gratifying in itself; but his chat seems all forced, his opinions on many points too much copied from his wife's, and his time here I think is spent in walking about the house, banging the doors, and ringing the bell for a glass of water."
Indoors they were still occupied with the finishing touches to curtains and beds, carpets and sofa covers. They read aloud when they had time; and Mrs. Frank, who had not read so many books as her sister-in-law, was introduced to some that delighted her. They made one false start, however. "
Alphonsine
," said Jane, "did not do.
We were disgusted in twenty pages; as, independent of a bad
translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure."
The first twenty pages of Madame de Genlis'
Alphonsine
,
ou la
tendresse maternelle
, comprehend the flight of a lady who leaves a note for her husband, excusing her conduct on the ground that their marriage had never been consummated, and her subsequent
discovery, asleep in the arms of a page. As a girl, Jane had piqued herself on having a good eye at an adulteress in a ballroom, but she drew the line at reading this sort of thing aloud by the fire.
A little later she discovered Southey's
Espriella
, a collection of letters supposed to be written by a Spaniard and abusing English people and customs quite in the modern manner. Jane read the book aloud to the others by candlelight. Her comment on the stylish intellectualism of Mr. Southey was: "He deserves to be the foreigner he assumes."
In the meantime, they were laying out the garden. The
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gravel walk was bordered with roses and sweetbriar; the gardener said these shrubs were sickly, so they bought some stronger ones to plant among them. At Jane's "own particular desire," he bought them some syringas. She said, "I could not do without a syringa, for the sake of Cowper's line." She was thinking of the poet's Winter Walk, where he looked at the bare earth and longed for the beauty a few months would bring:
". . . laburnum, rich
In streaming gold, syringa, ivory pure."
She said they were thinking of a laburnum tree as well. Her sense of natural beauty was unusually fresh and strong. Her novels show it, and always in such a way that her brief descriptions heighten the emotional significance of the scene; but the descriptions are usually landscapes, and the only place where she mentions a flower which can compare with her syringa bush is the interesting little
conversation between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney, where she says to him: "I have just learnt to love a hyacinth."
Her love of children, like her love of Nature, has sometimes been ignored, and her description of the disagreeable children of Lady Middleton is made to symbolize her attitude to children as a whole.
Even if she had not mentioned children in any novel but
Sense and
Sensibility
, her portrayal of the young Middletons would not, one feels, constitute grounds for saying she disliked children. It is, as Dr.
Johnson would say, "no very cynical asperity" to think that noisy, insolent, greedy and deceitful children are disagreeable; most people think so, unless the children happen to be their own; but apart from such sympathetic studies of children as those of the little Gardiners and Fanny Price,
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Jane Austen displays what was, for the time, an unusually lenient attitude to spoiled children, in the passage where Emma says that little Anna Weston is certain to be spoiled, and what will become of her? To which Mr. Knightley replies: "Nothing very bad. The fate of thousands. She will be disagreeable in infancy, and correct herself as she grows older." Not the novels only, but her letters make one understand how very much surprised a child who had known Jane
Austen would be to hear, from what eminent authority soever, that she was unsympathetic with children and disliked them in the true spirit of an old maid.
Frank Austen brought the little daughter of one of his friends to spend the day with them. He brought her home after church, and as Jane was writing to Cassandra, she said: "She is now talking away at my side, and examining the treasures of my writing desk and
drawers, very happy I believe; not at all shy of course." Jane thought the modern child a great improvement on what she had been herself, but she was surprised at its ease. "What is become of all the shyness in the world? Moral as well as natural diseases disappear and new ones take their places--shyness and the sweating sickness have given way to confidence and paralytic complaints." She admired the child's manner--"all the ready civility one sees in the best children of the present day; so unlike anything that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment and shame." She was extremely grateful on this wet Sunday that they had a set of spillikins in the house: she thought the toy not the least important benefaction from the family of Knight to that of Austen.
In June of 1808 there was a large family gathering at Godmersham.
The Castle Square household was represented by Jane this time; there came, besides, James and Mary with little Edward and his sister Caroline, aged three; Anna, on
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the other hand, was to stay in Castle Square with her Aunt
Cassandra. Anna was now fifteen; she adored her aunts, especially her Aunt Jane. In some ways she recalled what the latter had once been; she was lively and uncertain, what country people describe as
"easy cast up, easy cast down"; she had much of that sweetness which won upon the eye and ear of anyone who talked to her aunt; in Anna, it was a something at once wild and gentle. She had also a desire to write. She had shown it when, as a child of five, she had dictated stories to Jane in the dressing room at Steventon; and when, at seven, she had written down for herself a drama based on that favorite of her aunt's, Sir Charles Grandison. At the same time, she was a fashionable young lady; she dismayed Jane by arriving with her hair in the mode of the moment, cut short behind like a boy's.
Jane said she was reconciled to it only by the thought that two or three years would repair the damage.
At Godmersham, Jane was going to another niece who loved her as dearly as Anna loved her, and who, from her more equable
temperament, could be a genuine companion to her. Fanny Austen was the same age as Anna, but while Anna was a much-beloved
object of anxiety, Fanny was "almost another sister." Jane told Cassandra on this visit: "I did not think a niece would ever have been so much to me."
The welcome at Godmersham was more than satisfying. James, who had gone ahead to leave room for Jane in his carriage, was walking with Edward in front of the house when they drove up. Jane said it was not necessary to mention that she had a most kind welcome
from Edward, "but I do, you see, because it is a pleasure." She had been given the Yellow Room, and was writing her letter in it at that moment. Fanny saw her Aunt James to her room first, because
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Aunt James was the married lady; then she flew to Aunt Jane; she stayed while Jane was dressing, and was "as energetic as usual" in her wishes that her Aunt Cassandra could have come as well.
Elizabeth had been dressing when the party arrived, but she came to Jane's room now, bringing with her Marianne, Charles and Louisa, seven, five and four, and there was a rapturous welcome from
everybody. Elizabeth was breeding again, but she seemed quite well; indeed, unusually active for her size. Jane tried to find out from Fanny if her mother tired herself in looking after the younger children; Fanny did not think so but Jane determined to take them off her sister-in-law's hands whenever she could, and took over at once the business of hearing Louisa read in the mornings.
The days passed delightfully; they breakfasted at ten, then Jane heard Louisa read, after which she usually spent an hour or two in the Yellow Room. She rejoiced particularly in the luxury of the space, for she had recently been staying at Brompton with Henry and Eliza, who had been obliged to give her very cramped quarters. The park with its river and the steep wooded hills of Godmersham
afforded beautiful walks. They roamed about a good deal, and
Edward drove James further afield. Jane was glad of it; she thought it would do James good to see a new country with its fine views.
"Edward certainly excels in doing the honors to his visitors and providing for their amusement." Even the summer evenings were short, for they had not finished supper till ten, but when they had, in the coolness and the dusk James read
Marmion
to them. Jane could not but be interested in the poem, but she did not know whether she altogether liked it, as yet.
Mary was enjoying the visit very much; she found her sister-in-law's tribe of children "less troublesome than she
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expected"; and independently of them, as Jane observed, "there is certainly not much to try the patience or hurt the spirits at
Godmersham." But Mary always had something about which to be a little nervous or unhappy. She had written to Anna, and because when Anna wrote to Jane she did not include any message to her stepmother, Mary supposed that she was not going to answer the letter. This was the sort of thing that Jane found most exhausting.
The folly of Lady Saye and Sele's conversation had gone off her like water from a duck's back. There is poetry in such foolishness; but petty, useless, eating cares, which no sensible encouragement and advice can do away, because they grow like Hydra's heads, produce an effect on the victimized listener which is almost disintegrating.
Jane was fond of Mary, and her personal kindness and her beautiful manners must have made her a most acceptable receiver of Mary's woes; but by the time Mary had finished, the burden probably sat as heavily on Jane's shoulders as on her own.
Of the children, Edward was having a fine time; he had playfellows of about his own age in his cousins Charles and William, and his Uncle Edward "talked nonsense to him most delightfully." But his little sister, Jane thought, would be glad to get home; her cousins were too much for her.
In the meantime, she wanted to know everything that went on in Castle Square; she besought Cassandra to be minute. "You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me." Would they send word of Anna's exact height? Godmersham wanted to know
whether she or Fanny were the taller. Anna must not be surprised to hear that the idea of her hair's having been cut off was not at all popular. She was interested to hear that Cassandra had taken Anna over the Isle of Wight; but as they had had to embark at four in the morning, she was afraid Cassandra
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must have had an almost sleepless night. A plan had been set on foot to bring little Edward home with them to Castle Square for a visit; she hoped they could find the beds.
There was one incident which the letters discussed with unusual seriousness; its background has been elucidated by Dr. Chapman in his note to Letter No. 52. The
Morning Post
of June 18th records:
"Another elopement has taken place in high life. A Noble Viscount, Lord S, has gone off with a Mrs. P, the wife of a relative of a noble marquis"; and the issue of June 21st adds: "Mrs. P's
faux pas
with Lord S-----e took place at an inn near Winchester." Jane said: "This is a sad story about Mrs. Powlett. I should not have suspected her of such a thing. She stayed the Sacrament, I remember, the last time that you and I did."
Jane Austen often referred, in letters, to this or that gentleman in the neighborhood as having taken a mistress; her attitude in regard to such doings among people she did not know was satirical and light.
Elopements without benefit of clergy play an important part in the stories of
Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield Park
; and on both these occasions the differing attitudes of the surrounding characters are so vividly expressed that one is not exclusively conscious of a superimposed attitude, that of the author's own opinion. The better people in each novel regarded the episode as a guilty one, and an event to shock and mortify the family in which it occurred, but in each case there is a solid contribution of worldly common sense or even, in the case of Mary Crawford, fashionable cynicism, which prevents the reader's feeling that the dice have been loaded against the couple.
But just as Jane Austen, though she tossed off a flippant remark about an adulteress in a ballroom, would not read Madame de Genlis'