Chapter 4 On Jane Austen

If Miss Cassandra Austen had her way, we would probably never have much more information about her than Jane Austen's novels.Only in letters to her sister Cassandra did Jane Austen freely confide her heart, and only to her sister did she confide her hopes and the only major disappointment in her life ( If the rumors of her lost love were true); but, when Miss Cassandra Austin grew old and her sister's growing reputation led her to suspect that someday strangers would come to supplicate and scholars would come to discuss her sister's letters, and she burned--for herself, it was a great sacrifice--every letter that could satisfy their curiosity, exempting only what she considered too trivial to interest people. that part of interest.

Therefore, what we know about Jane Austen is only from gossip, a few letters, and her novels.As for gossip, if it survives beyond its time, it is absolutely not to be despised; with a little rearrangement it may well suit our purposes.For example, Philadfia Austin Jr. said of her cousin that Jane was "not pretty at all, very prim, not like a girl of twelve, . . .And Mrs. Mitford, who had known the Austen girls as children, thought Jane "the most handsome, the most demure, the most affected, Husband's girl".Then there is Mrs. Mitford's unknown friend, "who visits her now, and says that Austen has ossified into the most rigid, taciturn celibate that ever existed, and that in society people treat her No more valued than a poker or a fire grate, until it came out, and showed what a precious treasure was contained in this cold and reserved shell....It is very different now," said the kindly The Madame went on, "She was still a poker—but a formidable poker.... She was a man of great intellect, a characterizer, and yet she silently No words, it's dreadful!" On the other hand, of course, there were the Austins, a family that rarely indulged in self-boasting, but nonetheless said that her brothers "liked her very much and were very fond of her." Proud of her. They adored and attached to her because of her genius, her virtues, her charming grace, and each loved afterward to imagine his own niece or daughter to be like that dear sister Jane, but they Never expecting to see someone who is exactly her equal."Charming yet rigid, loved by family and feared by strangers, sharp-tongued and soft-hearted—these contradictory elements are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to her novels, we see find that there we too are bewildered by the same complexity in the author.

To begin with, the prim, dreamy, affectated little girl who Philadelphia thought hardly looked like a twelve-year-old soon became an astonishingly not naive short story "Love and Friendship." , which, it is hard to believe, was written by Austen when he was fifteen.It was apparently written for the amusement of the school-mates; another short story in the collection is dedicated, with a mocking seriousness, to her brother; Use watercolors to clearly draw some human heads as illustrations.These are playful articles about games that one would think of as family treasures; interspersed with sarcasm that hits the nail on the head, as all the young Austins laugh at the "sighing, swooning couch The elegant ladies of ".

The brothers and sisters must have laughed as Jane read aloud the last sarcasm about that vice which they all loathed so much.She wrote: "The pain of losing Augustus has cost me my life. A fatal syncope has taken my life. You must be very careful not to faint, dear Laura. . . . as long as you please, you Although you can often go crazy, but don't pass out..." She hurried on, writing as fast as she could, so fast that she couldn't care about spelling correctly, in order to describe Laura and Sophia, The incredible adventures of Philander and Gustaves, and the gentleman who drove a stagecoach between Edinburgh and Stirling every other day, narrates the story of the theft of property kept in a desk drawer Passing by, portraying those starving mothers and playing McPace's son.There is no doubt that this story must have caused roars of laughter from the students in the classroom.Yet it is obvious that this fifteen-year-old girl, sitting in a hidden corner of a communal living room and writing, is not trying to impress her siblings or entertain her family.She was writing for everyone, for the insignificant, for our time, for her own time; in other words, even at that young age, Jane Austen was writing.One listens to the story, noticing the rhythm, symmetry, and rigor of the sentences. "She was nothing but a mild-mannered, well-bred, helpful young woman; as such it was almost impossible not to like her—but she was nothing more than an object of contempt," she writes The sentence is intended to keep it in people's memory after the Christmas holiday has passed.Lively, fluid, witty (and this rambling verge on absurdity)—Love and Friendship is what it's made of; What is the clear and sharp tone of this work?It was a laugh.The fifteen-year-old girl was laughing, laughing in her own corner of the world.

Fifteen-year-old girls are always laughing.They laughed when Mr. Binney substituted salt for sugar at the table.Old Mrs. Tomkins sat down on top of the cat in the chair, and they nearly died laughing.But after a while, they cried again.They have no fixed home, and from that perspective they can see in human nature something that is always ridiculous, in men and women something that always excites our irony.They did not understand that Mrs. Greville's slight, and poor Maria's coldness, were a constant feature of every ball.But Jane Austen has known this since she was born.One of the fairies who guarded the cradle must have flown across the world with Jane when she was born.When Jane is put back in the cradle, she not only knows what the world looks like, but has chosen her own kingdom.She made a promise: if she could rule the realm, she would not covet anything else.Thus, at the age of fifteen, she had few illusions about others and no illusions about herself.Whatever she wrote, she embellished it, covered it, and put it in place in the universe, not in the vicarage.She is impersonal; she is uncanny.When the author Jane Austen records in one of the most brilliant sketches in that book a bit of Mrs Greville's conversation, there is nothing in it of the cold reception she received from the clergyman's daughter Jane Austen Shows signs of anger.Her gaze is directed toward its object, and we know exactly where that object lies on the map of human nature.We can know because Jane Austen kept her vow; she never went beyond her own boundaries.She had never, not even at the age of emotional fifteen, spilled her secrets in shame, erased irony in a pity, or blurred the outlines of a story in a haze of fantasies.She seemed to have said that passions and fantasies - she pointed with her stick - all ended there, and that the boundaries of her domain were perfectly clear.However, she also does not deny the existence of moons, mountains, and castles—existing beyond her domain.She even wrote a legendary novel of her own.It was written for the Queen of Scots.Austin really admired her very much.She called her "one of the foremost personalities in the world" and said, "She was a charming princess whose only friend at the time was the Duke of Norfolk, who is now friends with Mr Whittaker, Le Mrs. Froy, Mrs. Knight, and myself." With these words, her enthusiasm was confined within bounds, and boiled down to a fit of laughter.It is very amusing to recall and compare what words the young Bronte sisters would soon use in their northern vicarage to describe the Duke of Wellington.

The prim little girl grew up.She became what Mrs. Mitford remembered as "the most handsome, demure, most posing girl seeking a husband like a fluttering butterfly", and incidentally became the author of another novel called, The She hid in her room, quietly wrote the novel under the cover of a creaking door, and put it in a drawer for many years without publishing it.It is believed that shortly thereafter she began another novel, The Watsons, which, for some reason, she dissatisfied with and left it unfinished.The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they provide the best critical material for his masterpieces.Here, Austen's difficulties in writing are all the more conspicuous, and the means by which she overcomes them are less subtly concealed.For starters, the opening chapters are dull and dry, a testament to Austen's type of writer who lays out the facts straight up in their first drafts and then goes back again and again to embellish, flesh and atmosphere , so as to conceal the fact.How this is to be done--how restraint and addition, by what fine art--we cannot say.But the miracle has been wrought; the history of fourteen years of dreary family life has been transformed and presented in another delicate and smooth style; This forced her to write and revise these pages again and again, what a hard preparation she had done.Here we finally understand that Jane Austen was no magician after all.Like other writers, she had to create an atmosphere in which her own particular genius could bear fruit.Here she is groping; here she makes us wait.Suddenly, she was successful; now things finally turned out the way she liked.The Edwards family is going to the dance.The Tomlinsons' carriage was passing by; she could tell us, "They gave Charles a pair of gloves and told him to keep them on"; Tom Musgrave took refuge in a In the far corner, he was really comfortable.Her genius is free and lively.Immediately our perceptions are sharpened; we are captivated by that special depth that only Austen can give us.What constitutes this particular depth?Its constituent elements are a dance in a small country town; several couples meet and shake hands at the venue; they eat a little food and drink a few drinks; Snubbed by one young lady, he is favored by another.There is no tragedy and no heroism.Yet, for some reason, this little scene is animated, completely out of proportion to its outward solemnity.Austen shows us how thoughtful, how tender, how inspired by true affection, if Emma behaved in such a way at the ball, how, in the midst of the heavier crises of life, Austen This genuine feeling is manifested in himself; and all this inevitably comes before our eyes when we look at Emma.Jane Austen is thus a master of deeper feelings than she appears on the outside.She stimulates our imaginations and leaves us to fill in what she has not written.Outwardly she presents no more than a detail, but in this detail there is something expansive in the reader's mind, and she takes the most enduring aspects of apparently trivial scenes of life Form gives this factor.She always puts the emphasis on the characters.She left us to guess what Emma would do when Sir Osborne and Tom Musgrave called at two fifty-five, just as Mary was bringing in the plate and knife-box.It was an extremely embarrassing scene.Those two young men were used to far more refined etiquette.Emma is likely to present herself as uncultivated, vulgar, and unworthy.The twists and turns of the dialogue made us suspenseful and restless.Half of our attention is on the present and half on the future.At last, Emma behaves so well that we can expect so much from her that we are moved as if we had witnessed something of the utmost importance.Here, indeed, in this unpolished, important subplot, all the elements of Jane Austen's great qualities are contained.It has the timeless quality of literature.Leaving aside the apparent vivacity and lifelikeness, there remains a subtle discernment of human worth which affords us a deeper pleasure.If this is disregarded, one can savor with great satisfaction the more abstract art; in that ball scene the moods of the figures are so varied and the proportions of the parts so well proportioned. harmony, which makes it possible to appreciate that more abstract art, just as one appreciates poetry for its own beauty, not as a moment that leads the story in a certain direction .

But the gossip says that Jane Austen was rigid and taciturn—“a poker that everyone dreaded.”There are hints of it in the novel, too; Austen can be very ruthless; of all writers she is a constant satirist. The stilted opening chapters of The Watsons prove that she was not a prolific genius; You can win people's favor.Humbly and cheerfully she gathers twigs and straw for building materials, and arranges them neatly together.The twigs and straw themselves were a bit dry and dusty.They constitute great mansions and small houses, tea parties, banquets, and occasional picnics; life is confined to the circle of valuable social connections and modest economic income, where there are muddy roads, Wet soles, and the ladies tire and tire easily; a little principle and influence underpins the world, and an education that upper-middle-class families in the countryside usually appreciate.Sin, adventure, and passion are banished from this world.Yet, of all these mundane and insignificant things, she avoided nothing, ignored nothing.She tells us patiently and precisely how her characters "traveled without stopping to Newbury, where a good meal combined lunch and dinner ended their day of pleasure and weariness."She doesn't just pay lip service to tradition; in addition to accepting traditional ideas, she believes in them.When she portrays a clergyman like Edmund Bertram, or especially a sailor, his sacred office seems to prevent her from using freely her chief instrument—her She's a comic genius -- so it's easy to get caught up in a situation where she's delivering a high-sounding eulogy or doing something factual.These, however, were exceptions; for the most part, her attitude recalled the wonder of the unknown lady: "She was a man of great intellect, a portrayer of character, and yet she was silent I say, it's terrible!" She wanted to transform nothing and destroy nothing; she was silent; and it was terrible indeed.One by one she created her fools, moralists and worldly ones, her Collinses, Sir Walter Elliots and Mrs. Bennetts.She drives them in a circle with the whip of words; the whip of words flies around them, cutting off their eternal figures.So they stayed there; no excuse was made for them, no mercy was shown.When she's done with the two figures, Julia and Maria Bertram, they leave no trace; the impression she made.Austin passed a kind of divine justice: Dr. Grant, after a fondness for tender goose, ended up "attending three great investigative feasts in the space of a week, and finally suffered a stroke and died."Sometimes her characters seem to have been created only for Jane Austen's supreme pleasure of cutting off their heads.She was perfectly content; she was content; and she would not move a hair on anyone's head, or move a brick, or a blade of grass, in a world that afforded her such wonderful pleasures.

We really don't want to.For, even if the anguish of violent vanity or the excitement of spiritual rage urged us to improve a world of rancor, intolerance, and folly, the task is beyond our reach.That's how people are--the fifteen-year-old girl knew it; the mature woman proved it.At this moment a certain Mrs. Bertram was preventing Berger from running into the garden; she called Chapman to help Miss Finney, but it was too late.Austen's discernment is so perfect, her sarcasm so well-placed, that while the irony is always there, we barely notice it.There is not a single stroke of parochialism, not a single hint of resentment that would jolt us out of our absorbed reading.Joyful mood and our enjoyment of reading are strangely combined.The radiance of beauty illuminates the foolish characters.

In fact, that elusive quality is often composed of disparate parts, and it takes a special genius to bring those disparate parts together.Jane Austen's ingenuity is complemented by her perfect taste.Her fool is a fool, and a snob is a snob, because such a character is alien to her ideal of sanity and sanity, and even when she makes us laugh, she makes clear that We communicated that.No novelist has made more full use of his flawless intuitions about human values.She reveals a departure from kindness, loyalty, sincerity, the most endearing qualities of English literature, against a flawless heart, a faithful taste, and an almost austere morality.She uses this device entirely to portray the flawed Mary Crawford.She let Mary go on chattering against the clergyman, or in favor of a baronet of ten thousand pounds a year, with as much bliss and gaiety as she could; Loud, but in full tune, so that while Mary Crawford's rapping still amuses us, it sounds flat.As a result, her scenes have a depth, beauty and complexity.From this contrast arose a beauty, even a majesty, which was not only as great as her intelligence, but was an inseparable part of it.In The Watsons, she gives us a foretaste of this power; she makes us wonder: how could an ordinary act of kindness become so meaningful when she portrays it?In her masterpieces this talent is developed to perfection.Here, nothing is out of place.At noon, in Northampton, a dull young man and a rather feeble young woman were talking on the stairs, as they were going upstairs to dress for a party, when the maids passed them by.However, their conversation suddenly changed from trivial to meaningful, and for both of them, it became the most memorable moment of their lives.It is full of meaning in itself; it emerges before us radiantly and vividly; it is deep, vibrating, and it hangs there peacefully for a second; then the maid passes them by, and so The drop that brings together all the happiness of life falls softly and becomes part of the ebb and flow of everyday life again.

With this insight into things, what could be more natural than that Jane Austen chose as her subjects the mundane details of everyday life, social gatherings, picnics, and country dances?No "proposal to change her writing style" from the Regent and Mr. Clarke could tempt her; no romance, adventure, politics, or intrigue could compare with what she saw on the stairs of her country house.The Prince Regent and his librarians have indeed encountered terrible obstacles; they are trying to shake an imperishable conscience, and interfere with an unerring judgment.The girl who wrote such beautiful sentences at fifteen never stopped writing, and she never wrote for the Prince Regent or his librarians, she wrote for the whole world.She knows exactly what her strengths are, and what they are suited to as subjects to which a writer of high ultimate standards should deal.Some impressions existed outside her domain; some emotions could not be contained by any exaggeration or artifice of her own intellect.She couldn't get a girl to talk glowingly about flags and churches, for example.She can't sink her heart and soul into a single romantic moment.She has ways of avoiding scenes of passion.She approaches natural beauty in her own insinuating way.When she described the beautiful night, she never mentioned the bright moon in the sky.Nevertheless, when we read the well-proportioned phrases "the brilliance of the cloudless night sky contrasted with the shade of the trees," we immediately feel that the night is indeed as "majestic and serene" as she says it is. , lovely", very simply, that night was exactly what it was.

Her talents are exceptionally perfectly balanced.None of the novels she's ever written have been a failure, and there are few examples of chapters she's written that are below her average.However, after all, she died at only forty-two years old.She died at the peak of her powers.She is still subject to changes which often make the last phase of a writer's career the most interesting.She was exuberant, irrepressible, and her gifted creativity had such great vitality that there is no doubt that if she had lived she would have written so much more that one wonders whether she would have used Different ways to write.Her borders are clear; the moon, mountains, and castles are beyond her borders.But is she sometimes tempted to temporarily overstep her boundaries?Did she begin to plan a little exploratory voyage in her own brisk and sublime way? Let us take Persuasion, her last complete novel, as an example of what she might have written if she had lived.There is a special beauty and a special monotony in Persuasion.This tedium is often a sign of a transitional phase between two different periods.That writer is a little jaded.The modes of action in her world had become too familiar to her; she no longer recorded them with freshness.There was a piercing tone in her comedy; it reminded her that she had hardly found the vanity of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliot amusing.That irony is raw, that comedy is crude.She was no longer aware of the amusingness of everyday life with such a fresh sense.Her thoughts are not entirely centered on the object of her observation.Yet when we sense that Jane Austen has done this before, and better, we also sense that she is trying to do something she has never tried before.There is a new element in "Persuasion," perhaps the very quality that thrills Dr. Sewell and insists that it is "the most beautiful of her books."She begins to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she used to imagine.We feel that what she said of Anne applies to herself as well: "As a boy she had to be cautious, and as she grew older she learned a romantic attitude—a semblance of an unnatural beginning." The consequences of nature.” She often details the beauty and sentimentality of nature, and where she usually describes spring, she details autumn.She speaks of "the effect of autumn in the country being so sweet and sad".She described "yellow autumn leaves and withered hedges".She noted that "people do not feel less attached to a place because they have suffered in the past".But it is not only a new sense of nature that makes us aware of the change in Austen.Her attitude toward life itself changed too.For most of the book she sees life through the eyes of a woman who is unhappy herself and who has a peculiar sympathy for the happiness and misery of others, and by the end, Austen This particular sympathy has to be evaluated in silence.Her observations, therefore, are less factual and more sentimental than usual.In that concert scene, and in this famous conversation about the constancy of women's love, there is a sentiment expressed which not only proves a biographical fact that Jane Austen was in love, And it proves an aesthetic fact that she's no longer afraid to express it.The experience of life, if it was a serious experience, had to sink deep into memory, to be purified by the passage of time, before she could allow herself to express it in fiction.By 1817, however, she was ready.Outwardly, there was another change that was imminent in her situation.The growth of her reputation used to be very slow.Mr. Austin Leigh wrote: "I doubt it is possible to name another famous writer whose personal story is so completely hidden in obscurity." This year, all this will change.She would live in London, attend dinners and lunches, meet famous people, make new acquaintances, read books, travel widely, and bring her accumulated observations of life back to the peaceful cottage, where she would spend her free time. Enjoy it to the fullest. What will all this do to the six other novels that Jane Austen has yet to write?She will never write about crime, passion or adventure.She would never, without a second thought, become sloppy and insincere because of a publisher's nagging or a friend's flattery.However, she must know more.Her sense of security must be shaken.Her comedy is bound to suffer.She must rely less on her characters' dialogue (as seen in "Persuasion") and rely more on contemplative reflection to give us a sense of her characters.In a few minutes of small talk, those marvelous little conversations summed up for us all that is necessary to know forever an Admiral Croft or a Mrs Musgrove, that shorthand It would be too much of a way to express what she now understands about the complexities of human nature in a way that may or may not hit the mark and contain chapters of character analysis and psychological description. Too rough to be helpful.She must invent a new way, as lucid and deliberate as the old one, but deeper and more reserved, and she will use it not only to express what has been said, but to express They have not revealed their hidden inner thoughts, not only to portray people's faces, but also to write the true meaning of life.She would stand further away from her characters, observing them more as a group than as individuals.Her sarcasm is no longer as voluptuous as it used to be, but has become harsher and harsher.She would be the forerunner of Henry James and Proust - but enough has been said.These empty speculations are vain; the most perfect artist of women, the writer who wrote immortal masterpieces, died "at the very moment when she was just beginning to feel confident in her own success."