JANE AUSTEN.

VII.

Their affairs being once more prosperous, a long-hoped-for dream became a reality, and they started on an expedition to Paris, a solemn event in those days and not lightly to be passed over by a biographer. One long war was ended, another had not yet begun. The Continent was a promised land, fondly dreamt of though unknown. 'At last in Paris; at last in the city which she had so longed to see!' Mrs. Opie's description of her arrival readslikea comment upon history. As they drive into the town, everywhere chalked up upon the walls and the houses are inscriptions concerning 'L'Indivisibilité de la République.' How many subsequent writings upon the wall did Mrs. Opie live to see! The English party find rooms at a hotel facing the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine, that token of order and tranquillity, was then perpetually standing. The young wife's feelings may be imagined when within an hour of their arrival Opie, who had rushed off straight to the Louvre, returned with a face of consternation to say that they must leave Paris at once. The Louvre was shut; and, moreover, the whiteness of everything, the houses, the ground they stood on, all dazzled and blinded him. He was a lost man if he remained! By some happy interposition they succeed in getting admission to the Louvre, and as the painter wonders and admires his nervous terrors leave him. The picture left by Miss Edgeworth of Paris Society in the early years of the century is more brilliant, but not more interesting than Mrs. Opie's reminiscences of the fleeting scene, gaining so much in brilliancy from the shadows all round about. There is the shadow of the ghastly guillotine upon the Place de la Concorde, the shadows of wars but lately over and yet to come, the echo in the air of arms and discord; meanwhile a brilliant, agreeable, flashing Paris streams with sunlight, is piled with treasures and trophies of victory, and crowded with well-known characters. We read of Kosciusko's nut-brown wig concealing his honourable scars; Masséna's earrings flash in the sun; one can picture it all, and the animated inrush of tourists, and the eager life stirring round about the walls of the old Louvre.

It was at this time that they saw Talma perform, and years after, in her little rooms in Lady's Field at Norwich, Mrs. Opie, in her Quaker dress, used to give an imitation of the great actor and utter a deep 'Cain, Cain, where art thou?' To which Cain replies in sepulchral tones.

We get among other things an interesting glimpse of Fox standing in the Louvre Gallery opposite the picture of St. Jerome by Domenichino, a picture which, as it is said, he enthusiastically admired. Opie, who happened to be introduced to him, then and there dissented from this opinion. 'You must be a better judge on such points than I am,' says Fox; and Mrs. Opie proudly writes of the two passing on together discussing and comparing the pictures. She describes them next standing before the 'Transfiguration' of Raphael. The Louvre in those days must have been for a painter a wonder palace indeed. The 'Venus de' Medici' was on her way; it was a time of miracles, as Fox said. Meanwhile Mrs. Opie hears someone saying that the First Consul is on his way from the Senate, and she hurries to a window to look out. 'Bonaparte seems very fond of state and show for a Republican,' says Mrs. Fox. Fox himself half turns to the window, then looks back to the pictures again. As for Opie, one may be sure his attention never wandered for one instant.

They saw the First Consul more than once. The Pacificator, as he was then called, was at the height of his popularity; on one occasion they met Fox with his wife on his arm crossing the Carrousel to the Tuìlerìes, where they are also admitted to a ground-floor room, from whence they look upon a marble staircase and see several officers ascending, 'one of whom, with a helmet which seemed entirely of gold, was Eugène de Beauharnais. A few minutes afterwards,' she says, 'there was a rush of officers down the stairs, and among them I saw a short pale man with his hat in his hand, who, as I thought, resembled Lord Erskine in profile….' This of course is Bonaparte, unadorned amidst all this studied splendour, and wearing only a little tricoloured cockade. Maria Cosway, the painter, who was also in Paris at the time, took them to call at the house of Madame Bonapartemère, where they were received by 'a blooming, courteous ecclesiastic, powdered and with purple stockings and gold buckles, and a costly crucifix. This is Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Bonaparte. It is said that when Fox was introduced to the First Consul he was warmly welcomed by him, and was made to listen to a grand harangue upon the advantages of peace, to which he answered scarcely a word; though he was charmed to talk with Madame Bonaparte, and to discuss with her the flowers of which she was so fond.' The Opies met Fox again in England some years after, when he sat to Opie for one of his finest portraits. It is now at Holker, and there is a characteristic description of poor Opie, made nervous by the criticism of the many friends, and Fox, impatient but encouraging, and again whispering, 'Don't attend to them; you must know best.'

VIII.

'Adeline Mowbray; or, Mother and Daughter,' was published by Mrs. Opie after this visit to the Continent. It is a melancholy and curious story, which seems to have been partly suggested by that of poor Mary Wollstonecraft, whose prejudices the heroine shares and expiates by a fate hardly less pathetic than that of Mary herself. The book reminds one of a very touching letter from Godwin's wife to Amelia Alderson, written a few weeks before her death, in which she speaks of her 'contempt for the forms of a world she should have bade a long good-night to had she not been a mother.' Justice has at length been done to this mistaken but noble and devoted woman, and her story has lately been written from a wider point of view than Mrs. Opie's, though she indeed was no ungenerous advocate. Her novel seems to have given satisfaction; 'a beautiful story, the most natural in its pathos of any fictitious narrative in the language,' says the 'Edinburgh,' writing with more leniency than authors now expect. Another reviewer, speaking with discriminating criticism, says of Mrs. Opie: 'She does not reason well, but she has, like most accomplished women, the talent of perceiving truth without the process of reasoning. Her language is often inaccurate, but it is always graceful and harmonious. She can do nothing well that requires to be done with formality; to make amends, however, she represents admirably everything that is amiable, generous, and gentle.'

Adeline Mowbray dies of a broken heart, with the following somewhat discursive farewell to her child: 'There are two ways in which a mother can be of use to her daughter; the one is by instilling into her mind virtuous principles, and by setting her a virtuous example, the other is by being to her, in her own person, an awful warning!'

One or two of Opie's letters to his wife are given in the memoir. They ring with truth and tender feeling. The two went to Norwich together on one occasion, when Opie painted Dr. Sayers, the scholar, who, in return for his portrait, applied an elegant Greek distich to the painter. Mrs. Opie remained with her father, and her husband soon returned to his studio in London. When she delayed, he wrote to complain. 'My dearest Life, I cannot be sorry that you do not stay longer, though, as I said, on your father's account, I would consent to it. Pray, Love, forgive me, and make yourself easy. I did not suspect, till my last letter was posted, that it might be too strong. I had been counting almost the hours till your arrival for some time. As to coming down again I cannot think of it, for though I could perhaps better spare the time at present from painting than I could at any part of the last month, I find I must now go hard to work to finish my lectures, as the law says they must be delivered the second year after the election.'

The Academy had appointed Opie Professor of Painting in the place of Fuseli, and he was now trying his hand at a new form of composition, and not without well-deserved success. But the strain was too great for this eager mind. Opie painted all day; of an evening he worked at his lectures on painting. From September to February he allowed himself no rest. He was not a man who worked with ease; all he did cost him much effort and struggle. After delivering his first lecture, he complained that he could not sleep. It had been a great success; his colleagues had complimented him, and accompanied him to his house. He was able to complete the course, but immediately afterwards he sickened. No one could discover what was amiss; the languor and fever increased day by day.

His wife nursed him devotedly, and a favourite sister of his came to help her. Afterwards it was of consolation to the widow to remember that no hired nurse had been by his bedside, and that they had been able to do everything for him themselves. One thing troubled him as he lay dying; it was the thought of a picture which he had not been able to complete in time for the exhibition. A friend and former pupil finished it, and brought it to his bedside. He said with a smile, 'Take it away, it will do now.'

To the last he imagined that he was painting upon this picture, and he moved his arms as though he were at work. His illness was inflammation of the brain. He was only forty-five when he died, and he was buried in St. Paul's, and laid by Sir Joshua, his great master.

The portrait of Opie, as it is engraved in Alan Cunningham's Life, is that of a simple, noble-looking man, with a good thoughtful face and a fine head. Northcote, Nollekens, Horne Tooke, all his friends spoke warmly of him. 'A man of powerful understanding and ready apprehension,' says one. 'Mr. Opie crowds more wisdom into a few words than almost anybody I ever saw,' says another. 'I do not say that he was always right,' says Northcote; 'but he always put your thoughts into a new track that was worth following.' Some two years after his death the lectures which had cost so much were published, with a memoir by Mrs. Opie. Sir James Mackintosh has written one of his delightful criticisms upon the book:—

The cultivation of every science and the practice of every art are in fact a species of action, and require ardent zeal and unshaken courage…. Originality can hardly exist without vigour of character…. The discoverer or inventor may indeed be most eminently wanting in decision in the general concerns of life, but he must possess it in those pursuits in which he is successful. Opie is a remarkable instance of the natural union of these superior qualities, both of which he possesses in a high degree…. He is inferior in elegance to Sir Joshua, but he is superior in strength; he strikes more, though he charms less…. Opie is by turns an advocate, a controvertist, a panegyrist, a critic; Sir Joshua more uniformly fixes his mind on general and permanent principles, and certainly approaches more nearly to the elevation and tranquillity which seem to characterise the philosophic teacher of an elegant art.

IX.

Mrs. Opie went back, soon after her husband's death, to Norwich, to her early home, her father's house; nor was she a widow indeed while she still had this tender love and protection.

That which strikes one most as one reads the accounts of Mrs. Opie is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of her nature. The deepest feeling of her life was her tender love for her father, and if she remained younger than most women do, it may have been partly from the great blessing which was hers so long, that of a father's home. Time passed, and by degrees she resumed her old life, and came out and about among her friends. Sorrow does not change a nature, it expresses certain qualities which have been there all along.

So Mrs. Opie came up to London once more, and welcomed and was made welcome by many interesting people. Lord Erskine is her friend always; she visits Madame de Staël; she is constantly in company with Sydney Smith, the ever-welcome as she calls him. LordByron, Sheridan, Lord Dudley, all appear upon her scene. There is a pretty story of her singing her best to Lady Sarah Napier, old, blind, and saddened, but still happy in that she had her sons to guide and to protect her steps. Among her many entertainments, Mrs. Opie amusingly describes a dinner at Sir James Mackintosh's, to which most of the guests had been asked at different hours, varying from six to half-past seven, when Baron William von Humboldt arrives. He writes to her next day, calling her Mademoiselle Opie, 'no doubt from my juvenile appearance,' she adds, writing to her father. It is indeed remarkable to read of her spirits long after middle life, her interest and capacity for amusement. She pays 4l. for a ticket to a ball given to the Duke of Wellington; she describes this and many other masquerades and gaieties, and the blue ball, and the pink ball, and the twenty-seven carriages at her door, and her sight of the Emperor of Russia in her hotel. When the rest of the ladies crowd round, eager to touch his clothes, Mrs. Opie, carried away by the general craze, encircles his wrist with her finger and thumb. Apart from these passing fancies, she is in delightful society.

Baron Alderson, her cousin and friend, was always kind and affectionate to her. The pretty little story is well known of his taking her home in her Quaker dress in the Judges' state-coach at Norwich, saying, 'Come, Brother Opie,' as he offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage. She used to stay at his house in London, and almost the last visit she ever paid was to him.

One of the most interesting of her descriptions is that of her meeting with Sir Walter Scott and with Wordsworth at a breakfast in Mount Street, and of Sir Walter's delightful talk and animated stories. One can imagine him laughing and describing a Cockney's terrors in the Highlands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, as is their North-country fashion. 'The gifted man,' says Mrs. Opie, with her old-fashioned adjectives, 'condescended to speak to me of my "Father and Daughter." He then went on faithfully to praise his old friend Joanna Baillie and her tragedies, and to describe a tragedy he once thought of writing himself. He should have had no love in it. His hero should have been the uncle of his heroine, a sort of misanthrope, with only one affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary gleam of sunshine lighting the dark tower of some ruined and lonely dwelling.'

'It might perhaps be a weakness,' says the Friend, long after recalling this event, 'but I must confess how greatly I was pleased at the time.' No wonder she was pleased that the great wizard should have liked her novel.

It would be impossible to attempt a serious critique of Mrs. Opie's stories. They are artless, graceful, written with an innocent good faith which disarms criticism. That Southey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh should also have read them and praised them may, as I have said, prove as much for the personal charm of the writer, and her warm sunshine of pleasant companionship, as for the books themselves. They seem to have run through many editions, and to have received no little encouragement. Morality and sensation alternate in her pages. Monsters abound there. They hire young men to act base parts, to hold villainous conversations which the husbands are intended to overhear. They plot and scheme to ruin the fair fame and domestic happiness of the charming heroines, but they are justly punished, and their plots are defeated. One villain, on his way to an appointment with a married woman, receives so severe a blow upon the head from her brother, that he dies in agonies of fruitless remorse. Another, who incautiously boasts aloud his deep-laid scheme against Constantia's reputation in the dark recesses of a stage-coach, is unexpectedly seized by the arm. A stranger in the corner, whom he had not noticed, was no other than the baronet whom Constantia has loved all along. The dawn breaks in brightly, shining on the stranger's face: baffled, disgraced, the wicked schemer leaves the coach at the very next stage, and Constantia's happiness is ensured by a brilliant marriage with the man she loves. 'Lucy is the dark sky,' cries another lovely heroine, 'but you, my lord, and my smiling children, these are the rainbow that illumines it; and who would look at the gloom that see the many tinted Iris? not I, indeed.' 'Valentine's Eve,' from which this is quoted, was published after John Opie's death. So was a novel called 'Temper,' and the 'Tales of Real Life.' Mrs. Opie, however, gave up writing novels when she joined the Society of Friends.

For some years past, Mrs. Opie had been thrown more and more in the company of a very noble and remarkable race of men and women living quietly in their beautiful homes in the neighbourhood of Norwich, but of an influence daily growing—handsome people, prosperous, generous, with a sort of natural Priesthood belonging to them. Scorning to live for themselves alone, the Gurneys were the dispensers and originators of a hundred useful and benevolent enterprises in Norwich and elsewhere. They were Quakers, and merchants, and bankers. How much of their strength lay in their wealth and prosperity, how much in their enthusiasm, their high spirits, voluntarily curbed, their natural instinct both to lead and to protect, it would be idle to discuss. It is always difficult for people who believe in the all-importance of the present to judge of others, whose firm creed is that the present is nothing as compared to the future. Chief among this remarkable family was Elizabeth Gurney, the wife of Josiah Fry, the mother of many children, and the good angel, indeed, of the unhappy captives of those barbarous days, prisoners, to whose utter gloom and misery she brought some rays of hope. There are few figures more striking than that of the noble Quaker lady starting on her generous mission, comforting the children, easing the chains of the captives. No domineering Jellyby, but a motherly, deep-hearted woman; shy, and yet from her very timidity gaining an influence, which less sensitive natures often fail to win. One likes to imagine the dignified sweet face coming in—the comforting Friend in the quiet garb of the Quaker woman standing at the gates of those terrible places, bidding the despairing prisoners be of good hope.

Elizabeth Fry's whole life was a mission of love and help to others; her brothers and her many relations heartily joined and assisted her in many plans and efforts.

For Joseph John Gurney, the head of the Norwich family, Mrs. Opie is said to have had a feeling amounting to more than friendship. Be this as it may, it is no wonder that so warm-hearted and impressionable a woman should have been influenced by the calm goodness of the friends with whom she was now thrown. It is evident enough, nor does she attempt to conceal the fact, that the admiration and interest she feels for John Joseph Gurney are very deep motive powers. There comes a time in most lives, especially in the lives of women, when all the habits and certainties of youth have passed away, when life has to be built up again upon the foundations indeed of the past, the friendships, the memories, the habits of early life, but with new places and things to absorb and to interest, new hearts to love. And one day people wake up to find that the friends of their choice have become their home. People are stranded perhaps seeking their share in life's allowance, and suddenly they come upon something, with all the charm which belongs to deliberate choice, as well as that of natural affinity. How well one can realise the extraordinary comfort that Amelia Opie must have found in the kind friends and neighbours with whom she was now thrown! Her father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. Her own life of struggle, animation, intelligence, was over, as she imagined, for ever. No wonder if for a time she was carried away, if she forgot her own nature, her own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new revelation. Here was a new existence, here was a Living Church ready to draw her within its saving walls. John Joseph Gurney must have been a man of extraordinary personal influence. For a long time past he had been writing to her seriously. At last, to the surprise of the world, though not without long deliberation and her father's full approval, she joined the Society of Friends, put on their dress, and adopted their peculiar phraseology. People were surprised at the time, but I think it would have been still more surprising if she had not joined them. J. J. Gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently describes Mrs. Opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'Illustrations of Lying,' moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is henceforth allowed. 'I am bound in a degree not to invent a story, because when I became a Friend it was required of me not to do so,' she writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual. Miss Mitford's description of Mrs. Opie, 'Quakerised all over, and calling Mr. Haydon 'Friend Benjamin,' is amusing enough; and so also is the account of the visiting card she had printed after she became a Quaker, with 'Amelia Opie,' without any prefix, as is the Quaker way; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of embossed pink roses surrounding the name. There is an account of Mrs. Opie published in the 'Edinburgh Review,' in a delightful article entitled the 'Worthies of Norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence.

Amelia Opie at the end of the last century and Amelia Opie in the garb and with the speech of a member of the Society of Friends sounds like two separate personages, but no one who recollects the gay little songs which at seventy she used to sing with lively gesture, the fragments of drama to which, with the zest of an innate actress, she occasionally treated her young friends, or the elaborate faultlessness of her appearance—the shining folds and long train of her pale satin draperies, the high, transparent cap, the crisp fichu crossed over the breast, which set off to advantage the charming little plump figure with its rounded lines—could fail to recognise the same characteristics which sparkled about the wearer of the pink calico domino in which she frolicked incognito 'till she was tired' at a ball given by the Duke of Wellington in 1814, or of the eight blue feathers which crowned the waving tresses of her flaxen hair as a bride.

Doctor Alderson died in October 1825, and Mrs. Opie was left alone. She was very forlorn when her father died. She had no close ties to carry her on peacefully from middle age to the end of life. The great break had come; she was miserable, and, as mourners do, she falls upon herself and beats her breast. All through these sad years her friends at Northrepps and at Earlham were her chief help and consolation. As time passed her deep sorrow was calmed, when peaceful memories had succeeded to the keen anguish of her good old father's loss. She must have suffered deeply; she tried hard to be brave, but her courage failed her at times: she tried hard to do her duty; and her kindness and charity were unfailing, for she was herself still, although so unhappy. Her journals are pathetic in their humility and self-reproaches for imaginary omissions. She is lonely; out of heart, out of hope. 'I am so dissatisfied with myself that I hardly dare ask or expect a blessing upon my labours,' she says; and long lists of kind and fatiguing offices, of visits to sick people and poor people, to workhouses and prisons, are interspersed with expressions of self-blame.

The writer can remember as a child speculating as she watched the straight-cut figure of a Quaker lady standing in the deep window of an old mansion that overlooked the Luxembourg Gardens at Paris, with all their perfume and blooming scent of lilac and sweet echoes of children, while the quiet figure stood looking down upon it all from—to a child—such an immeasurable distance. As one grows older one becomes more used to garbs of different fashions and cut, and one can believe in present sunlight and the scent of flowering trees and the happy sound of children's voices going straight to living hearts beneath their several disguises, and Mrs. Opie, notwithstanding her Quaker dress, loved bright colours and gay sunlight. She was one of those who gladly made life happy for others, who naturally turned to bright and happy things herself. When at last she began to recover from the blow which had fallen so heavily upon her she went from Norwich to the Lakes and Fells for refreshment, and then to Cornwall, and among its green seas and softly clothed cliffs she found good friends (as most people do who go to that kind and hospitable county), and her husband's relations, who welcomed her kindly. As she recovered by degrees she began to see something of her old companions. She went to London to attend the May meetings of the Society, and I heard an anecdote not long ago which must have occurred on some one of these later visits there.

One day when some people were sitting at breakfast at Samuel Rogers's, and talking as people do who belong to the agreeable classes, the conversation happened to turn upon the affection of a father for his only child, when an elderly lady who had been sitting at the table, and who was remarkable for her Quaker dress, her frills and spotless folds, her calm and striking appearance, started up suddenly, burst into a passion of tears, and had to be led sobbing out of the room. She did not return, and the lady who remembers the incident, herself a young bride at the time, told me it made all the more impression upon her at the time because she was told that the Quaker lady was Mrs. Opie. My friend was just beginning her life. Mrs. Opie must have been ending hers. It is not often that women, when youth is long past, shed sudden and passionate tears of mere emotion, nor perhaps would a Quaker, trained from early childhood to calm moods and calm expressions, have been so suddenly overpoweringly affected; but Mrs. Opie was no born daughter of the community, she was excitable and impulsive to the last. I have heard a lady who knew her well describe her, late in life, laughing heartily and impetuously thrusting a somewhat starched-up Friend into a deep arm-chair exclaiming, 'I will hurl thee into the bottomless pit.'

At sight of thee, O Tricolor,I seem to feel youth's hours return,The loved, the lost!

So writes Mrs. Opie at the age of sixty, reviving, delighting, as she catches sight of her beloved Paris once more, and breathes its clear and life-giving air, and looks out across its gardens and glittering gables and spires, and again meets her French acquaintances, and throws herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth and excitability. The little grey bonnet only gives certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted exuberance. She returns to England, but far-away echoes reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all the people for whom her regard is so warm. In August, 1830, came the news of a new revolution—'The Chamber of Deputies dissolved for ever; the liberty of the press abolished; king, ministers, court, and ambassadors flying from Paris to Vincennes; cannon planted against the city; 5,000 people killed, and the Rue de Rivoli running with blood.' No wonder such rumours stirred and overwhelmed the staunch but excitable lady. 'You will readily believe how anxious, interested, and excited I feel,' she says; and then she goes on to speak of Lafayette, 'miraculously preserved through two revolutions, and in chains and in a dungeon, now the leading mind in another conflict, and lifting not only an armed but a restraining hand in a third revolution.'

Her heart was with her French friends and intimates, and though she kept silence she was not the less determined to follow its leading, and, without announcing her intention, she started off from Norwich and, after travelling without intermission, once more arrived in her beloved city. But what was become of the Revolution? 'Paris seemed as bright and peaceful as I had seen it thirteen months ago! The people, the busy people passing to and fro, and soldiers, omnibuses, cabriolets, citadenes, carts, horsemen hurrying along the Rue de Rivoli, while foot passengers were crossing the gardens, or loungers were sitting on its benches to enjoy the beauty of the May-November.' She describes two men crossing the Place Royale singing a national song, the result of the Revolution:—

Pour briser leurs masses profondes,Qui conduit nos drapeaux sanglants,C'est la Liberté de deux mondes,C'est Lafayette en cheveux blancs.

Mrs. Opie was full of enthusiasm for noble Lafayette surveying his court of turbulent intrigue and shifting politics; for Cuvier in his own realm, among more tranquil laws, less mutable decrees. She should have been born a Frenchwoman, to play a real and brilliant part among all these scenes and people, instead of only looking on. Something stirred in her veins too eager and bubbling for an Englishwoman's scant share of life and outward events. No wonder that her friends at Norwich were anxious, and urged her to return. They heard of her living in the midst of excitement, of admiration, and with persons of a different religion and way of thinking to themselves. Their warning admonitions carried their weight; that little Quaker bonnet which she took so much care of was a talisman, drawing the most friendly of Friends away from the place of her adoption. But she came back unchanged to her home, to her quiet associations; she had lost none of her spirits, none, of her cheerful interest in her natural surroundings. As life burnt on her kind soul seemed to shine more and more brightly. Every one came to see her, to be cheered and warmed by her genial spirit. She loved flowers, of which her room was full. She had a sort of passion for prisms, says her biographer; she had several set in a frame and mounted like a screen, and the colour flew about the little room. She kept up a great correspondence; she was never tired of writing, though the letters on other people's business were apt to prove a serious burden at times. But she lives on only to be of use. 'Take care of indulging in little selfishnesses,' she writes in her diary; 'learn to consider others in trifles: the mind so disciplined will find it easier to fulfil the greater duties, and the character will not exhibit that trying inconsistency which one sees in great and often in pious persons.' Her health fails, but not her courage. She goes up to London for the last time to her cousin's house. She is interested in all the people she meets, in their wants and necessities, in the events of the time. She returns home, contented with all; with the house which she feels so 'desirable to die in,' with her window through which she can view the woods and rising ground of Thorpe. 'My prisms to-day are quite in their glory,' she writes; 'the atmosphere must be very clear, for the radiance is brighter than ever I saw it before;' and then she wonders whether the mansions in heaven will be draped in such brightness; and so to the last the gentle, bright,rainbowlady remained surrounded by kind and smiling faces, by pictures, by flowers, and with the light of her favourite prismatic colours shining round about the couch on which she lay.

1775-1817.

'A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.'—Pascal.

'I did not know that you were a studier of character,' says Bingley to Elizabeth. 'It must be an amusing study.'

'Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.'

'The country,' said Darcy, 'can in general supply but few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.'

'But people themselves alter so much,' Elizabeth answers, 'that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.'

'Yes, indeed,' cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by Darcy's manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood; 'I assure you that we have quite as much ofthatgoing on in the country as in town.'

'Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.'

These people belong to a whole world of familiar acquaintances, who are, notwithstanding their old-fashioned dresses and quaint expressions, more alive to us than a great many of the people among whom we live. We know so much more about them to begin with. Notwithstanding a certain reticence and self-control which seems to belong to their age, and with all their quaint dresses, and ceremonies, and manners, the ladies and gentlemen in 'Pride and Prejudice' and its companion novels seem like living people out of our own acquaintance transported bodily into a bygone age, represented in the half-dozen books that contain Jane Austen's works. Dear books! bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting.

Could we but study our own bores as Miss Austen must have studied hers in her country village, what a delightful world this might be!—a world of Norris's economical great walkers, with dining-room tables to dispose of; of Lady Bertrams on sofas, with their placid 'Do not act anything improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would not like it;' of Bennets, Goddards, Bates's; of Mr. Collins's; of Rushbrooks, with two-and-forty speeches apiece—a world of Mrs. Eltons…. Inimitable woman! she must be alive at this very moment, if we but knew where to find her, her basket on her arm, her nods and all-importance, with Maple Grove and the Sucklings in the background. She would be much excited were she aware how she is esteemed by a late Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is well acquainted with Maple Grove and Selina too. It might console her for Mr. Knightly's shabby marriage.

All these people nearly start out of the pages, so natural and unaffected are they, and yet they never lived except in the imagination of one lady with bright eyes, who sat down some seventy years ago to an old mahogany desk in a quiet country parlour, and evoked them for us. One seems to see the picture of the unknown friend who has charmed us so long—charmed away dull hours, created neighbours and companions for us in lonely places, conferring happiness and harmless mirth upon generations to come. One can picture her as she sits erect, with her long and graceful figure, her full round face, her bright eyes cast down,—Jane Austen, 'the woman of whom England is justly proud'—whose method generous Macaulay has placed near Shakespeare. She is writing in secret, putting away her work when visitors come in, unconscious, modest, hidden at home in heart, as she was in her sweet and womanly life, with the wisdom of the serpent indeed and the harmlessness of a dove.

Some one said just now that many people seem to be so proud of seeing a joke at all, that they impress it upon you until you are perfectly wearied by it. Jane Austen was not of these; her humour flows gentle and spontaneous; it is no elaborate mechanism nor artificial fountain, but a bright natural stream, rippling and trickling over every stone and sparkling in the sunshine. We should be surprised now-a-days to hear a young lady announce herself as a studier of character. From her quiet home in the country lane this one reads to us a real page from the absorbing pathetic humorous book of human nature—a book that we can most of us understand when it is translated into plain English; but of which the quaint and illegible characters are often difficult to decipher for ourselves. It is a study which, with all respect for Darcy's opinion, must require something of country-like calm and concentration and freedom of mind. It is difficult, for instance, for a too impulsive student not to attribute something of his own moods to his specimens instead of dispassionately contemplating them from a critical distance.

Besides the natural fun and wit and life of her characters, 'all perfectly discriminated,' as Macaulay says, Jane Austen has the gift of telling a story in a way that has never been surpassed. She rules her places, times, characters, and marshals them with unerring precision. In her special gift for organisation she seems almost unequalled. Her picnics are models for all future and past picnics; her combinations of feelings, of conversation, of gentlemen and ladies, are so natural and lifelike that reading to criticise is impossible to some of us—the scene carries us away, and we forget to look for the art by which it is recorded. Her machinery is simple but complete; events group themselves so vividly and naturally in her mind that, in describing imaginary scenes, we seem not only to read them, but to live them, to see the people coming and going: the gentlemen courteous and in top-boots, the ladies demure and piquant; we can almost hear them talking to one another. No retrospects; no abrupt flights; as in real life days and events follow one another. Last Tuesday does not suddenly start into existence all out of place; nor does 1790 appear upon the scene when we are well on in '21. Countries and continents do not fly from hero to hero, nor do long and divergent adventures happen to unimportant members of the company. With Jane Austen days, hours, minutes succeed each other like clockwork, one central figure is always present on the scene, that figure is always prepared for company. Miss Edwards's curl-papers are almost the only approach to dishabille in her stories. There are postchaises in readiness to convey the characters from Bath or Lyme to Uppercross, to Fullerton, from Gracechurch Street to Meryton, as their business takes them. Mr. Knightly rides from Brunswick Square to Hartfield, by a road that Miss Austen herself must have travelled in the curricle with her brother, driving to London on a summer's day. It was a wet ride for Mr. Knightly, followed by that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon in the shrubbery, when the wind had changed into a softer quarter, the clouds were carried off, and Emma, walking in the sunshine, with spirits freshened and thoughts a little relieved, and thinking of Mr. Knightly as sixteen miles away, meets him at the garden door; and everybody, I think, must be the happier, for the happiness and certainty that one half-hour gave to Emma and her 'indifferent' lover.

There is a little extract from one of Miss Austen's letters to a niece, which shows that all this successful organisation was not brought about by chance alone, but came from careful workmanship.

'Your aunt C.,' she says, 'does not like desultory novels, and is rather fearful that yours will be too much so—that there will be too frequent a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be sometimes introduced of apparent consequence, which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story….'

But, though the sins of a wandering story may be covered, the virtues of a well-told one make themselves felt unconsciously, and without an effort. Some books and people are delightful, we can scarce tell why; they are not so clever as others that weary and fatigue us. It is a certain effort to read a story, however touching, that is disconnected and badly related. It is like an ill-drawn picture, of which the colouring is good. Jane Austen possessed both gifts of colour and of drawing. She could see human nature as it was; with near-sighted eyes, it is true; but having seen, she could combine her picture by her art, and colour it from life. How delightful the people are who play at cards, and pay their addresses to one another, and sup, and discuss each other's affairs! Take Mr. Bennet's reception of his sons-in-law. Take Sir Walter Elliot compassionating the navy and Admiral Baldwin—'nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder at top—a wretched example of what a seafaring life can do, for men who are exposed to every climate and weather until they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age….' Or shall we quote the scene of Fanny Price's return when she comes to visit her family at Portsmouth; in all daughterly agitation and excitement, and the brother's and father's and sister's reception of her…. 'A stare or two at Fanny was all the voluntary notice that her brother bestowed, but he made no objection to her kissing him, though still entirely engaged in detailing further particulars of the "Thrush's" going out of harbour, in which he had a strong right of interest, being about to commence his career of seamanship in her at this very time. After the mother and daughter have received her, Fanny's seafaring father comes in, and does not notice her at first in his excitement. "Captain Walsh thinks you will certainly have a cruise to the westward with the 'Elephant' by —— I wish you may. But old Scholey was saying just now that he thought you would be sent first to the 'Texel.' Well, well, we are ready whatever happens. But by —— you lost a fine sight by not being here in the morning to see the 'Thrush' go out of harbour. I would not have been out of the way for a thousand pounds. Old Scholey ran in at breakfast time to say she had slipped her moorings and was coming out. I jumped up and made but two steps to the platform. If ever there was a perfect beauty afloat she is one; and there she lies at Spithead, and anybody in England would take her for an eight-and-twenty. I was upon the platform for two hours this afternoon looking at her. She lies close to the 'Endymion,' between her and the 'Cleopatra,' just to the eastward of the sheer hulk."'

'"Ha!" cried William, "that'sjust where I should have put her myself. It's the best berth in Spithead. But here is my sister, sir; here is Fanny, turning and leading her forward—it is so dark you do not see her."'

'With an acknowledgment that he had quite forgot her, Mr. Price now received his daughter, and having given her a cordial hug and observed that she was grown into a woman and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again.'

How admirably it is all told! how we hear them all talking!

From her own brothers Jane Austen learned her accurate knowledge of ships and seafaring things, from her own observation she must have gathered her delightful droll science of men and women and their ways and various destinations. Who will not recognise Mrs. Norris in that master-touch by which she removes the curtain to save Sir Thomas's feelings, that curtain which had been prepared for the private theatricals he so greatly disapproved of? Mrs. Norris thoughtfully carries it off to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize.

II.

The charm of friends of pen-and-ink is their unchangeableness. We go to them when we want them. We know where to seek them; we know what to expect from them. They are never preoccupied; they are always 'at home;' they never turn their backs nor walk away as people do in real life, nor let their houses and leave the neighbourhood, and disappear for weeks together; they are never taken up with strange people, nor suddenly absorbed into some more genteel society, or by some nearer fancy. Even the most volatile among them is to be counted upon. We may have neglected them, and yet when we meet again there are the familiar old friends, and we seem to find our own old selves again in their company. For us time has, perhaps, passed away; feelings have swept by, leaving interests and recollections in their place; but at all ages there must be days that belong to our youth, hours that will recur so long as men forbear and women remember, and life itself exists. Perhaps the most fashionable marriage on thetapisno longer excites us very much, but the sentiment of an Emma or an Anne Elliot comes home to some of us as vividly as ever. It is something to have such old friends who are so young. An Emma, blooming, without a wrinkle or a grey hair, after twenty years' acquaintance; an Elizabeth Bennet, sprightly and charming ever….

In the 'Roundabout Papers' there is a passage about the pen-and-ink friends my father loved:—

'They used to call the good Sir Walter the "Wizard of the North." What if some writer should appear who can write soenchantinglythat he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents? What if Mignon, and Margaret, and Goetz von Berlichingen are alive now (though I don't say they are visible), and Dugald Dalgetty and Ivanhoe were to step in at that open window by the little garden yonder? Suppose Uncas and our noble old Leather Stocking were to glide in silent? Suppose Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should enter, with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches? And dearest Amelia Booth, on Uncle Toby's arm; and Tittlebat Titmouse with his hair dyed green; and all the Crummles company of comedians, with the Gil Blas troop; and Sir Roger de Coverley; and the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the Knight of La Mancha, with his blessed squire? I say to you, I look rather wistfully towards the window, musing upon these people. Were any of them to enter, I think I should not be very much frightened….'

Are not such friends as these, and others unnamed here, but who will come unannounced to join the goodly company, creations that, like some people, do actually make part of our existence, and make us the better for theirs? To express some vague feelings is to stamp them. Have we any one of us a friend in a Knight of La Mancha, a Colonel Newcome, a Sir Roger de Coverley? They live for us even though they may have never lived. They are, and do actually make part of our lives, one of the best and noblest parts. To love them is like a direct communication with the great and generous minds that conceived them.

It is difficult, reading the novels of succeeding generations, to determine how much each book reflects of the time in which it was written; how much of its character depends upon the mind and the mood of the writer. The greatest minds, the most original, have the least stamp of the age, the most of that dominant natural reality which belongs to all great minds. We know how a landscape changes as the day goes on, and how the scene brightens and gains in beauty as the shadows begin to lengthen. The clearest eyes must see by the light of their own hour. Jane Austen's literary hour must have been a midday hour: bright, unsuggestive, with objects standing clear, without much shadow or elaborate artistic effect. Our own age is more essentially an age of strained emotion, little remains to us of starch, or powder, or courtly reserve. What we have lost in calm, in happiness, in tranquillity, we have gained in emphasis. Our danger is now, not of expressing and feeling too little, but of expressing more than we feel.

The living writers of to-day lead us into distant realms and worlds undreamt of in the placid and easily contented gigot age. Our characters travel by rail and are no longer confined to postchaises. There is certainly a wide difference between Miss Austen's heroines and, let us say, a Maggie Tulliver. One would be curious to know whether, between the human beings who read Jane Austen's books to-day and those who read them fifty years ago, there is as great a contrast. One reason may be, perhaps, that characters in novels are certainly more intimate with us and on less ceremonious terms than in Jane Austen's days, when heroines never gave up a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart in which some modern types are a little wanting. Whatever happens they could for the most part speak of quietly and without bitterness. Love with them does not mean a passion so much as an interest, deep, silent, not quite incompatible with a secondary flirtation. Marianne Dashwood's tears are evidently meant to be dried. Jane Bennet smiles, sighs and makes excuses for Bingley's neglect. Emma passes one disagreeable morning making up her mind to the unnatural alliance between Mr. Knightly and Harriet Smith. It was the spirit of the age, and, perhaps, one not to be unenvied. It was not that Jane Austen herself was incapable of understanding a deeper feeling. In the last written page of her last written book, there is an expression of the deepest and truest experience. Annie Elliot's talk with Captain Benfield is the touching utterance of a good woman's feelings. They are speaking of men and of women's affections. 'You are always labouring and toiling,' she says, 'exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all united; neither time nor life to be called your own. It would be too hard, indeed (with a faltering voice), if a woman's feelings were to be added to all this.'

Further on she says, eagerly: 'I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No! I believe you capable of everything good and great in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance so long as—if I may be allowed the expression—so long as you have an object; I mean while the woman you love lives and lives for you.All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not court it) is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.'

She could not immediately have uttered another sentence—her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed.

Dear Anne Elliot!—sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender-hearted—one can almost hear her voice, pleading the cause of all true women. In those days when, perhaps, people's nerves were stronger than they are now, sentiment may have existed in a less degree, or have been more ruled by judgment, it may have been calmer and more matter-of-fact; and yet Jane Austen, at the very end of her life, wrote thus. Her words seem to ring in our ears after they have been spoken. Anne Elliot must have been Jane Austen herself, speaking for the last time. There is something so true, so womanly about her, that it is impossible not to love her most of all. She is the bright-eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, softened, cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth and sweetness instead of bitterness and pain.

What a difficult thing it would be to sit down and try to enumerate the different influences by which our lives have been affected—influences of other lives, of art, of nature, of place and circumstance,—of beautiful sights passing before our eyes, or painful ones: seasons following in their course—hills rising on our horizons—scenes of ruin and desolation—crowded thoroughfares—sounds in our ears, jarring or harmonious—the voices of friends, calling, warning, encouraging—of preachers preaching—of people in the street below, complaining, and asking our pity! What long processions of human beings are passing before us! What trains of thought go sweeping through our brains! Man seems a strange and ill-kept record of many and bewildering experiences. Looking at oneself—not as oneself, but as an abstract human being—one is lost in wonder at the vast complexities which have been brought to bear upon it; lost in wonder, and in disappointment perhaps, at the discordant result of so great a harmony. Only we know that the whole diapason is beyond our grasp: one man cannot hear the note of the grasshoppers, another is deaf when the cannon sounds. Waiting among these many echoes and mysteries of every kind, and light and darkness, and life and death, we seize a note or two of the great symphony, and try to sing; and because these notes happen to jar, we think all is discordant hopelessness. Then come pressing onward in the crowd of life, voices with some of the notes that are wanting to our own part—voices tuned to the same key as our own, or to an accordant one; making harmony for us as they pass us by. Perhaps this is in life the happiest of all experience, and to few of us there exists any more complete ideal.

And so now and then in our lives, when we learn to love a sweet and noble character, we all feel happier and better for the goodness and charity which is not ours, and yet which seems to belong to us while we are near it. Just as some people and states of mind affect us uncomfortably, so we seem to be true to ourselves with a truthful person, generous-minded with a generous nature; life seems less disappointing and self-seeking when we think of the just and sweet and unselfish spirits, moving untroubled among dinning and distracting influences. These are our friends in the best and noblest sense. We are the happier for their existence,—it is so much gain to us. They may have lived at some distant time, we may never have met face to face, or we may have known them and been blessed by their love; but their light shines from afar, their life is for us and with us in its generous example; their song is for our ears, and we hear it and love it still, though the singer may be lying dead.

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