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STYLE AND MISS AUSTEN
by Mary Augusta Ward (1884)
From Macmillans Magazine
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Style, especially since a century ago or more, has come to mean - especially when the word is used in relation to a woman - her couture and her related preferences. It takes time to dawn on one, a third of the way through, that this article isnt about hiw jane Austen dressed, or liked to dress.
Mary Augusta Ward is highly indignant with the publication of Letters of Jane Austen, and with Lord Brabourne for doing so, in a tone that would have us wonder if she too was his aunt or great aunt; what she says is a mixture of propriety and personal opinion ( the latter being about which letters should have been ok to publish, if at all), but there is nothing one could take exception to - it's almost as if she were one with the two sisters, Jane Austen and Cassandra.
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"By this publication of a newly discovered collection of Miss Austen's letters, Miss Austen's great-nephew has done her as ill a turn as it is in anybody's power to do to the author of "Pride and Prejudice." The name of one of the nimblest, quickest, and least tiresome of mortals has been perforce associated with two volumes of half-edited matter, with letters of which she herself would never have authorised the publication, with family pedigrees of which she would have been the first person to feel the boredom and the incongruity, and literary criticisms of a kind to have set that keen wit of hers moving in its most trenchant fashion. When Lord Brabourne came into possession of those bundles of his great-aunt's letters which Mr. Austen Leigh, her first biographer, believed to have been lost, the temptation to make use of them in some way was no doubt irresistible. The virtue of literary reticence is fast becoming extinct; we have almost indeed forgotten that it is a virtue at all. To be able to persuade oneself that the world could possibly do without information which it is in one's power to give it, implies now a strength of mind so abnormal and so rare, that a modern instance of it is scarcely to be found. And the old distinction between public and private life, which still held firmly in the days when Jane Austen and Miss Ferrier refused to give their names to any production of their pens — the old personal reserve, which still forms part of the continental idea of the typical Englishman — have been so rapidly swept away during the last generation, that it would be absurd nowadays to expect of any inheritor of a great writer's correspondence that he should form the same sort of strict judgment on its claims to publication which would have been natural and possible a hundred or even fifty years ago. Taste is laxer, the public easier to please, and book-making more profitable. A modern editor of unpublished documents, by the nature of things, approaches his task in a more prodigal frame of mind. The whole mood of the present day is one of greater indulgence towards what may be called the personal side of letters than used to be the case with our grandfathers; and the seven volumes which Mr. Froude has devoted to the Carlyles, and which, under all the circumstances, would have been a scandal in the days of Southey and Scott, will perhaps be accepted later on as marking the highest point of a tendency which has been long gathering strength and may not improbably soon have to fight against reaction.
"Lord Brabourne, then, hardly deserves serious blame for not deciding as Mr. Austen Leigh would have probably decided twenty years ago, that the newly discovered correspondence threw practically no fresh light on Miss Austen's personality, and, with half-a-dozen exceptions, which might have seen the light in a review, had therefore better be reserved for that family use for which it was originally intended; but he might at least have set some bounds to his confidence in the public. One small volume of these letters, carefully chosen and skilfully edited, would have been pleasant reading enough. They might have been used as illustrations of the novels, of the country society or the class relations of eighty years ago, and a few short explanations of the identity of the persons most frequently mentioned in them would have made them sufficiently intelligible to the general reader. As it is, the letters of the last fifteen years of Jane Austen's life dull the edge of whatever gentle enjoyment the reader may have derived from the sprightliness of the earlier ones, while the one literary merit which the collection possesses, its lightness and airiness of tone, is lost in the ponderous effect of the introductory chapters, with their endless strings of names and wandering criticisms on the novels. ... "
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" ... "Northanger Abbey" especially, gay, sparkling, and rapid as it is from beginning to end, is the book in which the bright energy of Jane Austen's youth finds its gayest and freshest expression. ... "
Northanger Abbey? Gay? Sparkling???? Good heavens, it's a horror story! Not a horror story on par with Hamlet, but quite halfway there!
"Miss Austen's novels are a well-worn subject. We have all read her, or ought to have read her; we all know what Macaulay and what Scott thought of her and the qualities of her humour, the extent of her range, have been pointed out again and again. Perhaps, after all, however, it may be still worthwhile to try and face the question which these disappointing letters bring home to one. How was it that, with all her lack of knowledge and of ideas, and with her comparative lack of passion, which so often supplies the place of both, Jane Austen accomplished work so permanent and so admirable? What is it, in a word, which makes "Pride and Prejudice" and "Northanger Abbey" English classics, while the books of her contemporaries, Miss Ferrier and Miss Edgeworth, have practically lost their hold upon our sympathies, and are retreating year by year into a dimmer background? ... "
It's unclear why, reading letters to a sister with intimate trivial details, one would judge Jane Austen to have been completely devoid of higher thought or ideas, concerns and more. All the more so since the publication was long after the sister had reportedly destroyed the parts she thought were private, after Jane Austen had departed and her fame being on the rise made Cassandra worry about privacy.
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"Another striking instance of this choosing instinct of hers is the description of Darcy’s place, Pemberley, in "Pride and Prejudice." There, although there is scarcely any description at all, every stroke of the pen is so managed that any reader with ordinary attention may realise, if he pleases, the whole lie of the park, the look of the house, as Elizabeth surveyed it from the opposite side of the ravine above which it stood, the relative positions of the lawns, stables, and woods. Anybody with a turn that way could sketch it with ease, and yet there is no effort, no intention to describe, nothing but a clear and vivid imagination working with that self-restraint, that concentration, which is the larger half of style. This self-restraint indeed is her important, her determining quality. In other ways she has great deficiencies. For fine instances of the qualities of expansion we must go elsewhere than to Jane Austen. Emotion, inspiration, glow, and passion are not hers; she is a small, thin classic. But classic she is; for her work is a typical English embodiment of those drier and more bracing elements of style in which French literature has always been rich, and our own perhaps comparatively poor."
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September 14, 2021 - September 14, 2021.
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