JANE AUSTEN
The amusing parlour-game of Jane Austen topography is always being played somewhere. A few years ago there was a correspondence in theLiterary Supplementabout the precise position of Emma’s Highbury on the map. Some Austenites voted for Esher, others for Cobham, others again for Bookham. There has been another correspondence about Mansfield Park. Lady Vaux of Harrowden “identifies” it with Easton Neston, near Towcester. Sir Francis Darwin and the Master of Downing are for Easton in Huntingdonshire. People have consulted Paterson’s Roads about it. Mr. Mackinnon, K.C., points out that it must have been about four miles north of Northampton. But I like him best when he says, “I do not suppose any actual park was in Jane Austen’s mind.”Brigadier, vous avez raison!I do not suppose any actual place was in Jane Austen’s mind when she assigned her personages a home or a lodging. You might as well try to fix the number of the house in Gracechurch Street where Elizabeth’s uncle lived. Are we not shown the “real” Old Curiosity Shop? And the “real” Bleak House?And Juliet’s tomb at Verona? And the exact point of the Cobb where Louisa Musgrove fell?
It is easy to see why Jane Austen lends herself more readily than most writers to this topographical game. She was very fond of topographicalcolour, giving not only real place-names to the neighbourhood of the fictitious homes, but exact distances in miles. It was so many miles from Highbury to Kingston market-place, and so many to Box Hill. Yet she was always vague about the exact spot from which these distances were calculated. For there her imagination had its home, it was her private Paradise of Dainty Devices; she wanted a free hand there, unhampered by maps, road books, and other intrusions from the actual world. In fact, she did with real places just what Scott, say, did with historical people, kept them to surround the imaginary centre of the tale. You can “identify” Charles Edward, but not Waverley. You can “identify” Nottingham, but not Mansfield Park.
It is a mercy that Jane Austen never describes houses—never describes them, I mean, with the minute (and tedious) particularity of a Balzac—or the topographical game would have been supplemented by an architectural one, and we should have had the “real” Mansfield Park pointed out to us from its description, like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Indeed, she never, in the modern sense, describes anything, never indulges in description for its own sake. She never even expatiated onthe beauties of nature, taking them for granted and, indeed, on at least one famous occasion—when strawberries were being picked while the apple trees were still in bloom at Donwell Abbey—rather mixing them up. Her descriptions always had a practical purpose. If it rained in Bath, it was in order that Anne might, or might not, meet Captain Wentworth. We know that Sir Thomas’s “own dear room” at Mansfield Park was next to the billiard-room, because the novelist wanted us to know how he came plump upon the ranting Mr. Yates. But that detail, thank goodness, won’t enable us to “identify” Mansfield Park.
Doesn’t it argue a rather matter-of-fact frame of mind—I say it with all respect to the correspondents of theLiterary Supplement—this persistent tendency to “identify” the imaginary with the actual, the geographical, the historical? There is a notable instance of it in the Letters of Henry James. The novelist had described in “The Bostonians” a certain veteran philanthropist, “Miss Birdseye.” Forthwith all Boston identified the imaginary Miss Birdseye with a real Miss Peabody. “I am quite appalled,” writes Henry James to his brother William, “by your note in which you assault me on the subject of my having painted a ‘portrait from life’ of Miss Peabody! I was in some measure prepared for it by Lowell’s (as I found the other day) taking it for granted that she had been my model, and an allusion to the same effect in a notefrom aunt Kate. Still, I didn’t expect the charge to come from you. I hold that I have done nothing to deserve it.... Miss Birdseye was conceived entirely from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn.” It is odd that a man like William James, a professed student of the human mind and its workings, should have made such a mistake. I remember a saying attributed, years ago, to Jowett about the two brothers: one, he remarked, was a writer of fiction and the other a psychologist, and the fiction was all psychology and the psychology all fiction. Anyhow, I think if any one had written to Jane Austen to tax her with Highbury being Esher or Mansfield Park Easton Neston, she would have been able to reply that they were conceived entirely from her moral consciousness. And I fancy she would have smiled at her little trick of giving the exact mileage from her imaginary centre to real places having “sold” so many worthy people. Very likely she would have brought the topographical game into the Hartfield family circle, as a suitable alternative for Mr. Elton’s enigmas, charades, conundrums, and polite puzzles, or for Mr. Woodhouse’s “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which made him think of poor Isabella—who was very near being christened Catherine, after her grandmamma.
The truth, surely, is that this place-hunting, this seeking to “identify” the imaginary with the actual map-marked spot, is only a part of the largermisconception of imaginative work—the misconception which leads to a perpetual search for the “originals” of an author’s personages, especially when these personages have a full, vivid life of their own. Jane Austen has often been compared to Shakespeare, ever since Macaulay set the fashion. Well, it is naturally upon Shakespeare that this misconception has wreaked its worst. Commentators have gravely presented us with the “original” of Falstaff, of Sir Toby Belch, of Dogberry—nay, of Iago. Surely, the only “originals” of these people were Shakespeare himself? What were they but certain Shakespearean moods, humours, intimate experiences, temptations felt, but resisted, impulses controlled in actual life but allowed free play in imaginative reverie? No one that I know of has been foolish enough to charge Jane Austen with “copying” any of her characters from actual individuals, but, if you are in quest of “identifications,” is it not possible to “identify” many of them, the women at any rate—for, of course, her women bear the stamp of authentic reality much more plainly than her men—is it not possible to identify them with sides, tendencies, moods of Jane Austen herself? Here, I know, I am at variance with a distinguished authority, from whom it is always rash to differ. Professor Raleigh says:—“Sympathy with her characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patricianEmma, not even in Anne Elliot of ‘Persuasion,’ is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof.” Pass, for Emma and Elizabeth! But the “even” in the case of Anne gives me courage. We are not, of course, talking of identity in regard to external circumstances. Jane Austen was not the daughter of a Somersetshire baronet and did not marry a captain in the navy. But that Jane only “sympathized” with the heart and mind of Anne Elliot is to my thinking absurdly short of the truth. That the adventures of Anne’s soul, her heart-beatings, misgivings and intimate reassurances about Wentworth’s feeling for her had been Jane Austen’s own is to me as certain as though we had the confession under her own hand and seal. The woman who drew Anne’s timid, doubting, wondering love must have been in love herself and in that way. One short sentence settles that for me. The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling? And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir for evidence that she had a love affair? No, it is because there is most of Jane Austen’s spiritual“identity” in Anne that “Persuasion” is the sweetest, tenderest, and truest of her books. I apologize for having wandered from Mansfield Park and Easton Neston and the other engaging futilities of the parlour game.