JANE AUSTEN AS A GIRL.
ALL readers of Miss Austen are looking forward eagerly to' a literary event which is to take place this spring. Two hitherto unpublished novels and a short history of England written in her teens are to be given to the world. How eagerly her devoted admirers will look forward, to these books I In one sense, of course, they may expect disappointment. Her superlative gift was not of the kind which develops very early. But these early stories cannot fail to throw a light upon her personality apart from her genius, and whatever the moralists may say we do instinctively long to know the writers who charm us. This is true, we think, in an exceptional degree of Miss Austen, because her character is so sharply impressed upon all her work. We see as we read that she must have been one of the most companionable people who ever lived—a companion not for the great moments of life—they are short—but for the long stretches of every day in which we all get tired of ourselves. This is a born quality as subtle as it is delightful ; and whereas with Miss Austen experience developed it to the point of genius, one cannot but be curious to trace it from its inception.
In accordance with the fashion of her day, all Miss Austen's heroines except one are young in years, not more than twenty at the most. In reality, however, only Catherine Morland and Fanny Price are quite girls. Eliza- beth Bennett and Emma are finished women of the world ; the cool sense which is Eleanor Dashwood's chief character- istic is incredible under four- or five-and-twenty, and Maryanne (the "Sensibility" of the story), though she is supposed to be only seventeen, had developed her own sentimentality to a pitch which could hardly have been attained at that lively age. We cannot by studying them discover what was Miss Austen's mental picture of a typical girl in her teens. The autobiographical touches which we may imagine ourselves to distinguish point to a mature experience. With Catherine Morland the case is different : she is throughout the story what might now be called " a little girl." We are introduced to her first not yet even in her teens in the midst of a sensible and affec- tionate family. She plays cricket with her brothers, rolls down the banks in the parsonage garden, shirks her needle- work, scamps her lessons, and is always perfectly happy. Her appetite for happiness, something far more rare than an appetite for pleasure, makes her from the first cheerful chapter to the last entirely charming. She makes ready to fall in love with the same zest that she makes ready to go to a ball, and accepts the condescending return which Henry Tilney concedes to her childish devotion with an adorable simplicity and gratitude of which the present generation is wholly incapable. Her frank talk upon every subject from art to matrimony, from history to morals, is never exactly interesting, and yet it is vastly entertaining. She was far more companionable than a far cleverer person might have been. That was why Henry Tilney decided to marry her and why the reader would do so also had he the chance. Miss Austen avoids all temptation to give her any beauty but the " beaute du diable," and therein shows her consciousness of her own power. There must be something autobiographical about Catherine. Miss Austen betrays herself in the innocent satire which from time to time she puts into the child's mouth, a satire which did not know itself for such and which after it had matured into genius she may have looked back upon as child's play.. Speaking of history, she says to Mr. Taney : " I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me. Yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." Will the short. history of England that we are to read in a few weeks' time remind us of this immortal saying ? Miss Tilney, it will be remembered, replies to the sally in perfect good faith ; indeed her remarks on the subject seem to be of the nature of an author's comment. Historians, she admits, sometimes " display imagination without arousing interest." She adds however that in the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records which may be as much depended upon, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation, and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments and I like them as such.' It would appear that Miss Austen herself was not a very profound historian at any age.
Considering how very intimately we all know Elizabeth and Emma, it is strange how little we know about their childhood. Lady Catherine de Burgh wondered how on earth Elizabeth got her education, how she came out of that household the highly accomplished young woman that she was. The reader wonders too, but the matter is never explained. Indeed the reader, who knows how Lydia Bennett, aged only fifteen, was allowed to romp off to ruin without apparently provoking any feeling more profound than chagrin even in her father, is more puzzled than Lady Catherine. Perhaps the sensible aunt who turned to and read Lydia a lecture when it was too late was partly responsible for the upbringing of Elizabeth and Jane, who, we are told, never went to school and never had a governess. It is odd that Miss Austen never seems in the least sorry for Lydia, though she makes her extreme youth very apparent. The reader cannot forbear to feel a moment's pity, though he is never asked for any, when Lydia rejoices over the number of people and parcels to be packed into one small carriage, remarking that it is so much more fun " to be crammed in " ; that and her pleasure at being allowed to make the salad at the inn might have been turned into pathetic incidents had Miss Austen felt more tenderness for youth as youth than her novels ever evince. To return to . Emma We know that at the ago of twelve she governed her governess, and that once in a fit of naughtiness she addressed Mr. Knightly as " George," but that is all.
A good many pages are devoted to Fanny's childhood, but she is so horribly shy and shrinking that the reader, however much he may intend to like her, fails just as her uncle failed, to make friends with her, and if she had not soon grown up would have lost interest in her altogether. Her little sister Susan, who is not introduced till the story is three-parts told, is carefully drawn and is a real girl in her teens. Fanny, brought up with rich relations at Mansfield Park, comes home to find .her family strangers. She likes her sister, though " the determined character of her general manners had astonished and alarmed her " at first. Susan does her best to manage a shiftless mother and several rough little brothers. " She saw that much was wrong at home and wanted to set it right. That a girl of fourteen acting only on her own unassisted reason should err in the method of reform was not wonderful ; and Fanny soon became more disposed to admire the natural light of the mind which could so early distinguish justly, than to censure severely the faults of conduct to which it led. Susan tried to be useful where she could only have gone away and cried."
Of all portraits which delight us in these wonderful novels perhaps the least lifelike is that of a blue-stocking. Mary Bennett gives all her time to reading books in order to quote them and to studying " the instrument " in order to perform. She takes no pleasure in amusement, and -she is very selfish. Her folly excites her father's contempt and her sisters' annoyance. Overlooked by her mother and disliked by everyone else, she is obviously depressed. Eminently suited to Mr. Collins, who never apparently thinks of proposing to her as one feels he would have done when he failed of her two elder sisters, she remains with her parents when all the rest are gone, and her oreator cannot even be bothered to reform her as she reforms Kitty upon the last page. Whatever the new MSS. suggest about the novelist's girlhood they will not, we are sure, suggest that she was a blue-stocking. She may have been a Catherine, later in life she was no doubt an Eliza- beth, but it is, as we have said, a sheer impossibility to imagine Elizabeth a child. If the new stories which we are to see reveal to us a Catherine Morland of latent genius, then we who love Jane Austen may prepare for a renewal of our devotion, indeed for a " grande passion."
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