What Would Jane Say?

WAS it not Jane Austen, most scrupulous and also most aristocratic of artists, who dared to reply to the Prince Regent’s request for an historical novel, that she did not feel it possible to undertake work outside the limits of her own observation? Disloyal, and yet most loyal, Jane! who said much of forms and respect, whose heads of families are ’looked up to’ by circle upon circle of kinsmen and neighbors, who said less than little of Art and Structure and Theme, but who could, upon occasion, daintily and distinctly make her choice between deferences, and follow the voice of her artistic conscience. Why is there not more of Jane with us? with us who make and buy many editions of her and write essays upon her, deliver lectures upon her, construct synopses of her, and wring the withers of the undergraduate by sternly bidding him note that, at his age, Miss Austen had finished Pride and Prejudice.

It is good for criticism that it be personal and intimate. Why, for instance, when even I wish to go over to the majority and write a short story, why do not I overhaul my bedside copy of Jane and make note of that one most golden precept, to remain within the limits of my own observation? Suffice that I do not. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. I rise from a diet of Italian vermicelli and cold Slav, or from long observation of those patient jewelers whom Thackeray unconsciously immortalized as Messrs. Howell and James of Bond Street, and I go out in search of a situation. Or rather, I combine shop-worn bits in that literary bargain-counter, my mind. And I picture to myself a man, a man of some forty years, pacing his bachelor chambers, looking out ever and anon into a dull, wintry, London street, and returning toward his bookcases by a desk littered with the pads, the proofsheets, the marked volumes of the professional writer. He sits down and draws to him paper and the letter he has to answer, which, with the privilege of my class, I read over his shoulder. From a woman, of course, and a woman of dignity, though loving. ’Do not,’ she writes, ’make the unavoidable harder for us both. We have both seen it clearly, planned for it. Father’s need does not grow less, and we must still put away the thought of futures.’

And now, nothing being further from me than the male mind, or the male mind working under such circumstances, I have decided that a short story can be constructed out of his answer. For would not the manufacture of that answer enable me to display Method, Subtlety, Technique? could not I, by taking much thought, create for posterity the picture of a very mean mind of literary ability trying to wound a woman’s heart? Could not I, by showing the various stages of that letter, the evolutions of the brain contriving it, succeed in ingeniously building up, by implication, two human characters and their mutual past? By implication only, — no vulgar direct narrative.

Opportunity is here abundant for the management of that much-prized thing, to be spoken of only with respectful capitals, —Suggestive Detail. My hero, my subject rather, reaches a point in his composition where the chill fear strikes him that a dexterous turn of phrase, colored rich with reminiscence of some older artist, and yet his own, which flows from his pen, has been used by him recently. Accursed human trick of repetition! He searches his memory for evidence to convict or clear himself. Unfortunately the rough draft of that other letter was not kept as usual, and a temporary illness had prevented its harvesting into the note-book. But the matter is serious, since the two women are friends. Women, one knows, are not of stern stuff; the stricter masculine code of honor does not prevail among them. Letters have been shown, letters may yet be shown.— Thus would I suggest, subtly, as one perceives, and stiffening the too-fluid movement of my narrative by allusion and echo from older literature. And my final phrase, that was long ago decided upon. The letter dispatched, the door closing upon the silent servant, who goes out into the storm with the perfected work in his hand, the writer should fling himself with a sigh of satisfaction upon the fireside couch, and take down a volume of Meredith with a sense of intellectual kinship.

What would Jane say? I think I hear an echo, — ’outside the limits of my own observation.’ And yet, indignant, I demand, What would Jane write about in my place? Would Jane go out into the kitchen and gather the romantic material which flourishes there hot and hot while I do rechauffès in the study? The cook is thirty-five, short-tempered but sunshiny; she has been divorced, and her one child lies buried far away in a prairie state; her husband, after drunken threats and wearisome prayers for forgiveness, has at length gone his solitary road; the absurdly opportune ’lover of my childhood,’ with no money saved in the past, no prospect of work in the future, and a very large black cigar in his mouth in the present, has appeared. And my cook, regardless of these many tenses, is trustfully featherstitching her middle-aged trousseau without heed to the angry contempt of all the old ladies in the neighborhood. It is a Mary Wilkins idyl of New England fidelity, an Esther Waters of Chicago.

And yet again, — What would Jane say? Are these my observations? Because my cook lives in my kitchen, is she therefore my raw material? Do not I see, alas! that in thinking of her I put her in her literary class, that I have an obsession of literature and no experiences? Who shall cleanse me from these masses of vicarious and superincumbent knowledge and give me to find myself?

Well may I guess that no word of reply would be Jane’s. In whatever nook she sits sewing, she only smiles.