Introduction to Jane Austen’s “Love and Freindship”, by G.K. Chesterton
In a recent newspaper controversy about the conventional silliness and sameness of all the human generations previous to our own, somebody said that in the world of Jane Austen a lady was expected to faint when she received a proposal. To those who happen to have read any of the works of Jane Austen, the connection of ideas will appear slightly comic. Elizabeth Bennett, for instance, received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did.
But in any case it may be amusing to those who are thus amused, and perhaps even instructive to those who thus need to be instructed, to know that the earliest work of Jane Austen, here published for the first time, might be called a satire on the fable of the fainting lady. “Beware of fainting fits … though at times they may be refreshing and agreable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution.” Such were the words of the expiring Sophia to the afflicted Laura; and there are modern critics capable of adducing THEM as a proof that all society was in a swoon in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the whole point of this little skit that the swoon of sensibility is not satirised because it was a fact, even in the sense of a fashion, but satirised solely because it was fiction. Laura and Sophia are made ludicrously unlike life by being made to faint as real ladies do not faint. Those ingenious moderns, who say that the real ladies did faint, are actually being taken in by Laura and Sophia, and believing them against Jane Austen. They are believing, not the people of the period but the most nonsensical novels of the period, which even the people of the period who read them did not believe. They have swallowed all the solemnities of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.
For if these JUVENILIA of Jane Austen anticipate especially any of her after works, they certainly anticipate the satiric side of Northanger Abbey. Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently; but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history. Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of “The Watsons,” and a finished story called “Lady Susan,” in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish. These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste; but I confess I think it a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as “Lady Susan” should have been printed already, while things so comparatively lively as “Love and Freindship” should never have been printed until now. It is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidently concealed. Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the wastepaper basket of a genius on the head of the public; and that there is a sense in which the wastepaper basket is as sacred as the grave. But without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste, I hope I may be allowed to say that I for one would have willingly left “Lady Susan” in the wastepaper basket, if I could have pieced together “Love and Freindship” for a private scrap-book; a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesques of Peacock or Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen left everything she possessed to her sister Cassandra, including these and other manuscripts; and the second volume of them, containing these, was left by Cassandra to her brother, Admiral Sir Francis Austen. He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the Rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs. Sanders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt; whom it might be misleading here to call her great great-aunt. Everyone will judge for himself; but I myself think she added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history; and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.
For “Love and Freindship,” with some similar passages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said; to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter of the young lady “whose feelings were too strong for her judgment,” and who remarks incidentally “I murdered my father at a very early period of my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister.” Personally I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. “The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay… for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.” Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her…she was only an object of contempt.” Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door.
“‘Yes (exclaimed I) I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.’”
“That is another point, (replied he) we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock…tho’ that some one DOES rap at the door I am partly convinced.” In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr. Bennett?
But there is a larger and critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr. Austen Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.
A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She had been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written “Emma” if they had had the mind.
There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; but she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.
If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. “No!” says the noble Youth in “Love and Freindship,” “never shall it be said that I obliged my father!” And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.
Introduction to Jane Austen’s “Love and Freindship”, by G.K. Chesterton
In a recent newspaper controversy about the conventional silliness and sameness of all the human generations previous to our own, somebody said that in the world of Jane Austen a lady was expected to faint when she received a proposal. To those who happen to have read any of the works of Jane Austen, the connection of ideas will appear slightly comic. Elizabeth Bennett, for instance, received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did.
But in any case it may be amusing to those who are thus amused, and perhaps even instructive to those who thus need to be instructed, to know that the earliest work of Jane Austen, here published for the first time, might be called a satire on the fable of the fainting lady. “Beware of fainting fits … though at times they may be refreshing and agreable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution.” Such were the words of the expiring Sophia to the afflicted Laura; and there are modern critics capable of adducing THEM as a proof that all society was in a swoon in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the whole point of this little skit that the swoon of sensibility is not satirised because it was a fact, even in the sense of a fashion, but satirised solely because it was fiction. Laura and Sophia are made ludicrously unlike life by being made to faint as real ladies do not faint. Those ingenious moderns, who say that the real ladies did faint, are actually being taken in by Laura and Sophia, and believing them against Jane Austen. They are believing, not the people of the period but the most nonsensical novels of the period, which even the people of the period who read them did not believe. They have swallowed all the solemnities of the Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.
For if these JUVENILIA of Jane Austen anticipate especially any of her after works, they certainly anticipate the satiric side of Northanger Abbey. Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently; but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history. Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of “The Watsons,” and a finished story called “Lady Susan,” in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish. These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste; but I confess I think it a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as “Lady Susan” should have been printed already, while things so comparatively lively as “Love and Freindship” should never have been printed until now. It is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidently concealed. Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the wastepaper basket of a genius on the head of the public; and that there is a sense in which the wastepaper basket is as sacred as the grave. But without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste, I hope I may be allowed to say that I for one would have willingly left “Lady Susan” in the wastepaper basket, if I could have pieced together “Love and Freindship” for a private scrap-book; a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesques of Peacock or Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen left everything she possessed to her sister Cassandra, including these and other manuscripts; and the second volume of them, containing these, was left by Cassandra to her brother, Admiral Sir Francis Austen. He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the Rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs. Sanders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt; whom it might be misleading here to call her great great-aunt. Everyone will judge for himself; but I myself think she added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history; and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.
Introduzione a «Amore e amicizia» di Jane Austen, di G.K. Chesterton
In una recente polemica giornalistica sulla convenzionale sciocchezza e uniformità di tutte le generazioni umane precedenti alla nostra, qualcuno disse che nel mondo di Jane Austen ci si aspettava che una signora svenisse quando riceveva una proposta di matrimonio. A coloro che si danno il caso di aver letto una qualsiasi delle opere di Jane Austen, l’associazione di idee apparirà lievemente comica. Elizabeth Bennett, per esempio, ricevette due proposte da due ammiratori assai sicuri di sé e persino autoritari; e di certo non svenne. Sarebbe più vicino alla verità dire che svennero loro.
Ma in ogni caso può essere divertente per coloro che così si divertono, e forse persino istruttivo per coloro che così hanno bisogno d’essere istruiti, sapere che la primissima opera di Jane Austen, qui pubblicata per la prima volta, potrebbe dirsi una satira sulla favola della dama che sviene. “Guardati dagli svenimenti… per quanto a volte possano riuscire ristoratori e piacevoli, pure credimi finiranno, se troppo spesso ripetuti e in stagioni sconvenienti, per riuscire distruttivi per la tua Costituzione.” Tali furono le parole della morente Sophia all’afflitta Laura; e vi sono critici moderni capaci di addurre PROPRIO QUESTE come prova che tutta la società fosse in deliquio nel primo decennio del diciannovesimo secolo. Ma in verità è tutto il senso di questo piccolo scherzo che il deliquio della sensibilità non viene satireggiato perché fosse un fatto, neppure nel senso di una moda, ma satireggiato unicamente perché era finzione. Laura e Sophia sono rese ridicolmente diverse dalla vita proprio col farle svenire come le vere dame non svengono. Quei geniali moderni, che dicono che le vere dame svenivano davvero, si fanno in realtà abbindolare da Laura e Sophia, e credono a loro contro Jane Austen. Credono, non alle persone dell’epoca, ma ai più insensati romanzi dell’epoca, a cui neppure le persone dell’epoca che li leggevano credevano. Hanno mandato giù tutte le solennità dei Misteri di Udolpho, e non hanno nemmeno colto la burla di Northanger Abbey.
Poiché se questi JUVENILIA di Jane Austen anticipano in modo speciale una qualche delle sue opere successive, essi anticipano certo il lato satirico di Northanger Abbey. Del loro considerevole significato su quel lato qualcosa si potrà dire fra poco; ma sarà bene premettervi una parola sulle opere stesse in quanto oggetti di storia letteraria. Tutti sanno che la romanziera lasciò un frammento incompiuto, pubblicato in seguito col nome di “The Watsons”, e una storia compiuta intitolata “Lady Susan”, in forma epistolare, che ella stessa aveva apparentemente deciso di non pubblicare. Queste preferenze sono tutte pregiudizi, nel senso di questioni di gusto ingovernabile; ma confesso di ritenere un ben strano accidente storico che cose relativamente scialbe come “Lady Susan” siano già state stampate, mentre cose relativamente vivaci come “Amore e amicizia” non fossero mai state stampate fino a ora. È quantomeno una curiosità della letteratura che simili curiosità della letteratura siano state quasi accidentalmente celate. Senza dubbio si sentì assai giustamente che si può andare troppo oltre nel rovesciare il cestino della carta straccia di un genio sul capo del pubblico; e che vi è un senso in cui il cestino della carta straccia è sacro quanto la tomba. Ma senza arrogarmi in questa faccenda più diritto di quanto chiunque abbia sul proprio gusto, spero mi sia consentito dire che io, per parte mia, avrei volentieri lasciato “Lady Susan” nel cestino della carta straccia, se avessi potuto ricomporre “Amore e amicizia” per un album privato di ritagli; una cosa su cui ridere di nuovo e ancora come si ride sulle grandi parodie di Peacock o di Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen lasciò tutto ciò che possedeva alla sorella Cassandra, compresi questi e altri manoscritti; e il secondo volume di essi, contenente questi, fu lasciato da Cassandra al fratello, l’ammiraglio Sir Francis Austen. Egli lo diede alla figlia Fanny, che a sua volta lo lasciò al fratello Edward, il quale era il Rettore di Barfrestone nel Kent, e il padre della signora Sanders, alla cui saggia decisione dobbiamo la pubblicazione di queste prime fantasie della sua prozia; che qui sarebbe fuorviante chiamare la sua bis-prozia. Ognuno giudicherà da sé; ma io stesso penso che ella aggiunse qualcosa di intrinsecamente importante alla letteratura e alla storia letteraria; e che vi sono carrettate di materiale stampato, regolarmente riconosciuto e stampato tra le opere di tutti i grandi autori, che sono assai meno caratteristiche e assai meno significative di queste poche facezie da camera dei bambini.
For “Love and Freindship,” with some similar passages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said; to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter of the young lady “whose feelings were too strong for her judgment,” and who remarks incidentally “I murdered my father at a very early period of my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister.” Personally I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. “The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay… for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.” Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her…she was only an object of contempt.” Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door.
“‘Yes (exclaimed I) I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.’”
“That is another point, (replied he) we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock…tho’ that some one DOES rap at the door I am partly convinced.” In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr. Bennett?
But there is a larger and critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr. Austen Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.
A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She had been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written “Emma” if they had had the mind.
Poiché “Amore e amicizia”, con alcuni passi analoghi nei frammenti che l’accompagnano, è davvero una spassosa parodia; qualcosa di assai migliore di ciò che le dame del tempo chiamavano una gradevole chiacchierina. È una di quelle cose che si possono leggere con tanto più diletto in quanto furono scritte con diletto; in altre parole, è tanto migliore per il fatto d’essere giovanile nel senso d’essere gioiosa. Si dice che ella abbia scritto queste cose all’età di diciassette anni, evidentemente nel medesimo spirito con cui si redige una rivista di famiglia; poiché i medaglioni inclusi nel manoscritto erano opera della sorella Cassandra. L’intera cosa è piena di quella sorta di allegria che è sempre più alta in privato che in pubblico; come la gente ride più forte nella casa che nella strada. Molti dei suoi ammiratori non se lo aspetterebbero, forse molti dei suoi ammiratori non ammirerebbero, la sorta di spasso che si trova nella lettera della giovane dama “i cui sentimenti erano troppo forti per il suo giudizio”, e che osserva incidentalmente “Ho assassinato mio padre in un’epoca assai precoce della mia vita, da allora ho assassinato mia madre, e ora sto per assassinare mia sorella”. Personalmente la trovo ammirevole; non la condotta, ma la confessione. Ma vi è molto più che ilarità nell’umorismo, anche in questo stadio della sua crescita. Vi è quasi dappertutto una certa nitidezza nel nonsenso. Vi è non poco della vera ironia austeniana. “Il nobile Giovinetto ci informò che il suo nome era Lindsay… per particolari ragioni, tuttavia, lo celerò sotto quello di Talbot.” Qualcuno desiderava davvero che ciò sparisse nel cestino della carta straccia? “Non era nulla di più che una mera giovane donna di buon carattere, cortese e compiacente; come tale a malapena potevamo provare antipatia per lei… era soltanto un oggetto di disprezzo.” Non è forse questo qualcosa come il primo tenue tratto nella figura di Fanny Price? Quando un forte bussare si ode alla porta della Casetta Rustica presso l’Uske, il padre dell’eroina domanda la natura del rumore, e per caute tappe di inferenza essi giungono a definirlo come qualcuno che dal di fuori percuote la porta.
“‘Sì (esclamai io) non posso fare a meno di pensare che debba essere qualcuno che bussa per essere ammesso.’”
“Questo è un altro punto (replicò egli) non dobbiamo pretendere di determinare per quale motivo la persona possa bussare… benché che qualcuno DAVVERO batta alla porta io ne sia in parte convinto.” Nel esasperante agio e lucidità di quella risposta, non vi è forse il presagio di un altro e più famoso padre; e non udiamo forse per un istante, nella rustica casetta presso l’Uske, l’inconfondibile voce del signor Bennett?
Ma vi è una ragione più ampia e critica per trarre piacere dalla gaiezza di questi vari travestimenti e bagattelle. Il signor Austen Leigh pare averle giudicate non abbastanza serie per la reputazione della sua grande parente; ma la grandezza non è fatta di cose serie, nel senso di cose solenni. La ragione qui, tuttavia, è seria quanto egli o chiunque altro potrebbe desiderare; poiché riguarda la qualità fondamentale di uno dei più raffinati talenti delle lettere.
Un interesse psicologico assai reale, che quasi arriva a un mistero psicologico, si lega a qualsiasi opera giovanile di Jane Austen. E per quell’unica ragione, tra le altre, che è stata a malapena sottolineata a sufficienza. Per quanto grande fosse, nessuno era propenso a sostenere che ella fosse una poetessa. Ma era un esempio marcato di ciò che si dice del poeta; era nata, non costruita. Rispetto a lei, anzi, alcuni dei poeti furono davvero costruiti. Molti uomini che ebbero l’aria di dar fuoco al mondo hanno lasciato quantomeno una ragionevole discussione su ciò che diede fuoco a loro. Uomini come Coleridge o Carlyle avevano certo acceso le loro prime torce alle fiaccole di mistici tedeschi o speculatori platonici altrettanto fantastici; erano passati attraverso fornaci di cultura in cui persone anche meno creative avrebbero potuto essere infiammate alla creazione. Jane Austen non fu infiammata né ispirata né persino mossa a essere un genio; ella semplicemente era un genio. Il suo fuoco, per quanto ve ne fosse, cominciava con lei stessa; come il fuoco del primo uomo che sfregò insieme due bastoncini secchi. Qualcuno direbbe che erano bastoncini assai secchi quelli che ella sfregò insieme. È certo che ella, per proprio talento artistico, rese interessante ciò che migliaia di persone superficialmente simili avrebbero reso insipido. Non vi era nulla nelle sue circostanze, e neppure nei suoi materiali, che sembri manifestamente destinato alla formazione di un simile artista. Potrebbe sembrare un uso assai avventato della parola sbagliata dire che Jane Austen fosse elementare. Potrebbe persino sembrare un po’ arbitrario insistere che ella fosse originale. Eppure questa obiezione verrebbe dal critico che non considera realmente cosa si intenda per elemento o per origine. Forse la si potrebbe esprimere altrettanto bene in ciò che realmente si intende per individuo. La sua capacità è un assoluto; non può essere scomposta in influenze. È stata paragonata a Shakespeare; e in questo senso ella richiama davvero la burla dell’uomo che diceva di saper scrivere come Shakespeare, se solo ne avesse avuto l’ingegno. In questo caso ci sembra di vedere un migliaio di zitelle sedute a un migliaio di tavolini da tè; e tutte avrebbero potuto scrivere “Emma” se solo ne avessero avuto l’ingegno.
There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; but she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.
If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. “No!” says the noble Youth in “Love and Freindship,” “never shall it be said that I obliged my father!” And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.
Vi è dunque, anche nel considerare i suoi più rozzi esperimenti giovanili, l’interesse di guardare una mente e non uno specchio. Può darsi che non sia consapevole di essere se stessa; ma non è, come tanti imitatori più colti, consapevole di essere qualcun altro. La forza, al suo primo e più fioco apparire, viene da dentro e non soltanto da fuori. Questo interesse, che le appartiene in quanto individuo dotato di un istinto superiore per l’intelligente critica della vita, è la prima delle ragioni che giustificano uno studio delle sue opere giovanili; è un interesse per la psicologia della vocazione artistica. Non dirò del temperamento artistico; perché nessuno ebbe mai meno di quella noiosa cosa comunemente così chiamata di quanto ne avesse Jane Austen. Ma se questo soltanto sarebbe una ragione per scoprire come cominciò il suo lavoro, diventa ancor più pertinente quando abbiamo scoperto come cominciò davvero. Questa è qualcosa di più della scoperta di un documento; è la scoperta di un’ispirazione. E quell’ispirazione era l’ispirazione di Gargantua e di Pickwick; era la gigantesca ispirazione della risata.
Se parve strano chiamarla elementare, potrà parere altrettanto strano chiamarla esuberante. Queste pagine tradiscono il suo segreto; che è di essere stata per natura esuberante. E la sua potenza venne, come viene ogni potenza, dal controllo e dall’indirizzo dell’esuberanza. Ma c’è la presenza e la pressione di quella vitalità dietro le sue mille frivolezze; avrebbe potuto essere stravagante, se avesse voluto. Era l’esatto contrario di una zitella inamidata o affamata; avrebbe potuto essere una buffona come la Comare di Bath, se avesse scelto. È questo che dà una forza infallibile alla sua ironia. È questo che dà un peso sbalorditivo alle sue litoti. Anche in fondo a questa artista, reputata senza passioni, c’era passione; ma la sua passione originaria era una sorta di gioioso disprezzo e uno spirito combattivo contro tutto ciò che riteneva morboso e lasso e velenosamente sciocco. Le armi che forgiò erano così finemente rifinite che forse non l’avremmo mai saputo, se non per questi scorci della rozza fornace da cui uscirono. Infine vi sono due fatti ulteriori coinvolti, che lascerò ai critici moderni e ai corrispondenti dei giornali da meditare e spiegare a loro comodo. Uno è che questa realista, nel rimproverare i romantici, si preoccupa moltissimo di rimproverarli proprio per la cosa per cui il sentimento rivoluzionario tanto li ha ammirati; cioè per la loro glorificazione dell’ingratitudine verso i genitori e per la loro comoda presunzione che i vecchi abbiano sempre torto. «No!» dice il nobile Giovane in «Amore e Amicizia», «mai si dovrà dire che io abbia fatto un favore a mio padre!» E l’altro è che non v’è ombra d’indizio in alcun luogo che questo intelletto indipendente e spirito ridente fosse altro che appagato di una angusta routine domestica, in cui scriveva una storia domestica come un diario negli intervalli di torte e budini, senza nemmeno affacciarsi alla finestra per notare la Rivoluzione francese.