Memoir of Jane Austen - James Edward Austen-Leigh (some good books to read TXT) 📗

first sight of Mr. Elliot; to experience all the changes of each at the concert; to be miserable by the morning’s circumstantial report, to be now more happy than language could express, or any heart but his own be capable of.

He was very eager and very delightful in the description of what he had felt at the concert; the evening seemed to have been made up of exquisite moments.  The moment of her stepping forward in the octagon room to speak to him, the moment of Mr. Elliot’s appearing and tearing her away, and one or two subsequent moments, marked by returning hope or increasing despondency, were dwelt on with energy.

‘To see you,’ cried he, ‘in the midst of those who could not be my well-wishers; to see your cousin close by you, conversing and smiling, and feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match!  To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you!  Even if your own feelings were reluctant or indifferent, to consider what powerful support would be his!  Was it not enough to make the fool of me which I appeared?  How could I look on without agony?  Was not the very sight of the friend who sat behind you; was not the recollection of what had been, the knowledge of her influence, the indelible, immovable impression of what persuasion had once done—was it not all against me?’

‘You should have distinguished,’ replied Anne.  ‘You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different.  If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk.  When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here.  In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.’

‘Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus,’ he replied; ‘but I could not.  I could not derive benefit from the late knowledge I had acquired of your character.  I could not bring it into play; it was overwhelmed, buried, lost in those earlier feelings which I had been smarting under year after year.  I could think of you only as one who had yielded, who had given me up, who had been influenced by anyone rather than by me.  I saw you with the very person who had guided you in that year of misery.  I had no reason to believe her of less authority now.  The force of habit was to be added.’

‘I should have thought,’ said Anne, ‘that my manner to yourself might have spared you much or all of this.’

‘No, no!  Your manner might be only the ease which your engagement to another man would give.  I left you in this belief; and yet—I was determined to see you again.  My spirits rallied with the morning, and I felt that I had still a motive for remaining here.  The Admiral’s news, indeed, was a revulsion; since that moment I have been divided what to do, and had it been confirmed, this would have been my last day in Bath.’

There was time for all this to pass, with such interruptions only as enhanced the charm of the communication, and Bath could hardly contain any other two beings at once so rationally and so rapturously happy as during that evening occupied the sofa of Mrs. Croft’s drawing-room in Gay Street.

Captain Wentworth had taken care to meet the Admiral as he returned into the house, to satisfy him as to Mr. Elliot and Kellynch; and the delicacy of the Admiral’s good-nature kept him from saying another word on the subject to Anne.  He was quite concerned lest he might have been giving her pain by touching on a tender part—who could say?  She might be liking her cousin better than he liked her; and, upon recollection, if they had been to marry at all, why should they have waited so long?  When the evening closed, it is probable that the Admiral received some new ideas from his wife, whose particularly friendly manner in parting with her gave Anne the gratifying persuasion of her seeing and approving.  It had been such a day to Anne; the hours which had passed since her leaving Camden Place had done so much!  She was almost bewildered—almost too happy in looking back.  It was necessary to sit up half the night, and lie awake the remainder, to comprehend with composure her present state, and pay for the overplus of bliss by headache and fatigue.

* * * * *

Then follows Chapter XI., i.e. XII. in the published book and at the end is written—

Finis, July 18, 1816.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Last Work.

Jane Austen was taken from us: how much unexhausted talent perished with her, how largely she might yet have contributed to the entertainment of her readers, if her life had been prolonged, cannot be known; but it is certain that the mine at which she had so long laboured was not worked out, and that she was still diligently employed in collecting fresh materials from it.  ‘Persuasion’ had been finished in August 1816; some time was probably given to correcting it for the press; but on the 27th of the following January, according to the date on her own manuscript, she began a new novel, and worked at it up to the 17th of March.  The chief part of this manuscript is written in her usual firm and neat hand, but some of the latter pages seem to have been first traced in pencil, probably when she was too weak to sit long at her desk, and written over in ink afterwards.  The quantity produced does not indicate any decline of power or industry, for in those seven weeks twelve chapters had been completed.  It is more difficult to judge of the quality of a work so little advanced.  It had received no name; there was scarcely any indication what the course of the story was to be, nor was any heroine yet perceptible, who, like Fanny Price, or Anne Elliot, might draw round her the sympathies of the reader.  Such an unfinished fragment cannot be presented to the public; but I am persuaded that some of Jane Austen’s admirers will be glad to learn something about the latest creations which were forming themselves in her mind; and therefore, as some of the principal characters were already sketched in with a vigorous hand, I will try to give an idea of them, illustrated by extracts from the work.

The scene is laid at Sanditon, a village on the Sussex coast, just struggling into notoriety as a bathing-place, under the patronage of the two principal proprietors of the parish, Mr. Parker and Lady Denham.

Mr. Parker was an amiable man, with more enthusiasm than judgment, whose somewhat shallow mind overflowed with the one idea of the prosperity of Sanditon, together with a jealous contempt of the rival village of Brinshore, where a similar attempt was going on.  To the regret of his much-enduring wife, he had left his family mansion, with all its ancestral comforts of gardens, shrubberies, and shelter, situated in a valley some miles inland, and had built a new residence—a Trafalgar House—on the bare brow of the hill overlooking Sanditon and the sea, exposed to every wind that blows; but he will confess to no discomforts, nor suffer his family to feel any from the change.  The following extract brings him before the reader, mounted on his hobby:—

‘He wanted to secure the promise of a visit, and to get as many of the family as his own house would hold to follow him to Sanditon as soon as possible; and, healthy as all the Heywoods undeniably were, he foresaw that every one of them would be benefitted by the sea.  He held it indeed as certain that no person, however upheld for the present by fortuitous aids of exercise and spirit in a semblance of health, could be really in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year.  The sea air and sea-bathing together were nearly infallible; one or other of them being a match for every disorder of the stomach, the lungs, or the blood.  They were anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-bilious, and anti-rheumatic.  Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength.  They were healing, softening, relaxing, fortifying, and bracing, seemingly just as was wanted; sometimes one, sometimes the other.  If the sea breeze failed, the sea-bath was the certain corrective; and when bathing disagreed, the sea breeze was evidently designed by nature for the cure.  His eloquence, however, could not prevail.  Mr. and Mrs. Heywood never left home. . . .  The maintenance, education, and fitting out of fourteen children demanded a very quiet, settled, careful course of life; and obliged them to be stationary and healthy at Willingden.  What prudence had at first enjoined was now rendered pleasant by habit.  They never left home, and they had a gratification in saying so.’

Lady Denham’s was a very different character.  She was a rich vulgar widow, with a sharp but narrow mind, who cared for the prosperity of Sanditon only so far as it might increase the value of her own property.  She is thus described:—

‘Lady Denham had been a rich Miss Brereton, born to wealth, but not to education.  Her first husband had been a Mr. Hollis, a man of considerable property in the country, of which a large share of the parish of Sanditon, with manor and mansion-house, formed a part.  He had been an elderly man when she married him; her own age about thirty.  Her motives for such a match could be little understood at the distance of forty years, but she had so well nursed and pleased Mr. Hollis that at his death he left her everything—all his estates, and all at her disposal.  After a widowhood of some years she had been induced to marry again.  The late Sir Harry Denham, of Denham Park, in the neighbourhood of Sanditon, succeeded in removing her and her large income to his own domains; but he could not succeed in the views of permanently enriching his family which were attributed to him.  She had been too wary to put anything out of her own power, and when, on Sir Harry’s death, she returned again to her own house at Sanditon, she was said to have made this boast, “that though she had got nothing but her title from the family, yet she had given nothing for it.”  For the title it was to be supposed that she married.

‘Lady Denham was indeed a great lady, beyond the common wants of society; for she had many thousands a year to bequeath, and three distinct sets of people to be courted by:—her own relations, who might very reasonably wish for her original thirty thousand pounds among them; the legal heirs of Mr. Hollis, who might hope to be more indebted to her sense of justice than he had allowed them to be to his; and those members of the Denham family for whom her second husband had hoped to make a good bargain.  By all these, or by branches of them, she had, no doubt, been long and still continued to be well attacked; and of these three divisions Mr. Parker did not hesitate to say that Mr. Hollis’s kindred were the least in favour, and Sir Harry Denham’s the most. The former, he believed, had done themselves irremediable harm by expressions