BOOKS
Sweet are the uses of morali
A. N. Wilson
JANE AUSTEN AND THE CLERGY by Irene Collins The Hambledon Press, 102 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8HX, £25, pp. 242 The Rev. George Austen, Jane Austen's father. A miniature painted in 1801. This delightful and punctilious work of scholarship will be enjoyed by all those for whom the novels of Jane Austen provide not merely amusement and edification but also a happy escape into an England as yet unblemished by the Great Reform Bill. Miss Collins conducts us into a country made more conservative by the horrific example of revolutionary France, in which the social hierarchy was stronger than it had been in previous generations, in which advancement — in the Church as well as in the armed forces or the civil service depended upon patronage; in which learn- ing derived almost wholly from the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; in which crown and aristocracy seemed unshakably secure; in which the population was still largely rural, rather than industrialised and urban: and in which no one could have predicted the rapid havoc and change which would come when the Napoleonic wars were ended.
In this world, the clerical caste, into which Jane Austen herself was born, was rather more than a decorative feature or a parasitic addition. True, Miss Collins makes us think, once again, how delightful life must have been in a parsonage at this date. Of the Reverend George Austen's house at Steventon, she writes,
the building was . . . considered gracious in its time, with its balanced Georgian front expressing dignity, order and restraint and its fashionable bow window providing both space and light at the back.
Even if one were as comparatively poor as George Austen, who needed to take in pupils in his attic, how enviable his life must seem to any contemporary clergyman today. His modest library of 500 volumes was housed in Hepplewhite bookcases Jane's letters reveal a particular delight in furniture — and, when his own shrubbery and gardens appeared too modest, the fam- ily could always enjoy the spacious park- land and sumptuous architecture in which their grander relations resided. Mrs Austen's cousin, the Reverend Thomas Leigh, lived in splendour at Adlestrop Park, whose distinguished garden had been landscaped by Humphrey Repton; Jane Austen's brother Edward, adopted by a cousin of their father, Thomas Knight, was destined to be the master of Godmersham House in Kent, and the owner of the house and estate at Chawton in Hampshire.
Edmund Bertram, who was born into just such a grand house, Mansfield Park, reflects that a clergyman
has the charge of all that is of the first impor- tance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally.
He goes on to describe the clergy as 'the arbiters of good breeding, the regulators of refinement and courtesy'. Miss Collins's achievement is to show, not merely that this view of the clergy is central to Jane Austen's moral outlook, but also, that it is fundamental to our understanding of England at this period. Jane Austen is sometimes criticised by foolish readers who suppose that she is only concerned with trivia, or who believe that her novels are cut off from the realities of things because they barely allude to the Napoleonic wars. By concentrating on the clergy — both the clerical characters in the novels and the English clergy in general at this date Miss Collins will surprise some readers into recognising the plausibility of Edmund Bertram's claim.
Jane Austen's religion, and that of her father, and that of the better parsons in her books, is of an unobtrusive character, but that does not mean that it was superficial (witness the piety revealed in her privately- written prayers and the dignity of her death), nor without social consequence.
In 1803 William Jones complained in his journal that on those rare occasions when the parish clergy deigned to preach — 'the name of Christ is scarce ever heard . . . the watchword or catchword . . is "Morality"'. Having read Miss Collins's book, one realises, however, that if one had to isolate one reason alone why the likes of Mr Darcy and Sir Thomas Bertram did not die on a guillotine, it was because of the `morality' of the good parsons such as Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram. Miss Collins examines the life and practice of the English parson from every angle — his education, his place in society, his depen- dency on patronage, his house, his garden, his form of worship and his beliefs. A parish church in Jane Austen's day would have been an austere place. Hymns would have been left to chapel-ranters. Psalm- chant would only have been heard in a cathedral. The sober diet of The Book of Common Prayer — Mattins with Ante- Communion in the morning and Evensong in the afternoon — were what sustained Jane Austen and her generation. No doubt our own Archbishop of Canterbury would think it, by comparison with the Taize com- munity, a trifle dull.
John Henry Newman, years before his conversion to Rome, derided Jane Austen for having no romance, none at all. What vile creatures her parsons are! She has not a dream of the high Catholic ethos ...
One wonders whether Jane Austen would have been more shocked or amused by this humourless judgment. When she went into Alton from Chawton, did she ever set eyes on the boy Newman who went to live there in 1816 when his father got a job, managing the brewery? Had she lived to see the gen- eration of High Church and Catholic clergy inspired by Newman, Jane Austen might well have found them, in her turn, to be 'vile creatures'. Seeing it through the eyes of Miss Collins (a wiser and wittier guide than her clerical namesake in Pride and Prejudice) one sees the 'Catholic revival' as but one in a string of harbingers — rail- ways, Corn Laws, the Gothic revival, the extension of suffrage, the Maynooth Grant — which heralded the end of those well- ordered days when Jane Austen was alive, and when England was in fact, not dream, a demi-Paradise. Theirs was the last pre- Darwinian generation for whom 'reason- ableness' did not demand Rationalism.
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