A Jane Austen Education(29)
She might have been talking about Catherine Morland, and the same vitality, and joy in vitality, shines through her responses to both young women. Finally, there was the letter she sent one January to her brother Charles’s daughter Cassy, also nine at the time, in which every word was spelled backwards, a missive that began, “Ym raed Yssac, I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey,” and ended, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” No wonder Tnua Enaj was the favorite of her many nieces and nephews.
Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older, she was telling me, but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house. Now I was getting a new idea about what life can have in store.
Once I moved in next to my professor, I found myself running into him from time to time outside our buildings. He had a long-term project to repaint the railings in front of his house (he and his wife would go away for the summers, so the progress was slow), and we would stand there now and then—I’d have a backpack, he’d be holding a brush—and talk about whatever happened to be on my mind. One day it was Northanger Abbey, and he called my attention to a scene I hadn’t thought about before.
“It’s the one where Catherine tells Henry, ‘I have just learnt to love a hyacinth’,” he said. “Now that’s exceedingly interesting, don’t you think?”
“Uh, I guess so,” I said—not an unusual response on my part.
“Well,” he went on, “Austen is saying that we need to learn to love things, that it doesn’t just happen by itself. That’s not an obvious idea.”
“No, I guess not,” I said. “Love is supposed to be completely spontaneous and natural, like love at first sight.”
“Right,” he said, “but the most remarkable thing is, we can learn. And think about what Henry says in response.” He could apparently recite the scene from memory, but I needed a little help.
“‘Who can tell,’” he quoted, “‘the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose? . . . The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.’”
The habit of learning: if Catherine could learn to love a hyacinth when she was seventeen, my professor was telling me—or rather, Austen was telling me, through my professor—I could keep learning to love new things my whole life. Of course, it was my professor himself who had helped me learn to love Jane Austen in the first place, against expectations at least as stubborn as the ones that Catherine brought to Northanger Abbey. But I was starting to get it now: the wonderful thing about life, if you live it right, is that it keeps taking you by surprise. Just when you think that nothing can be more uninteresting than a hyacinth (or a scene about a hyacinth, or an author who writes scenes about hyacinths), you find it becoming a new source of delight.
Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilities, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.
But Austen’s ideas about staying young contained a further paradox. When I went back and looked up that scene for myself, I remembered how Catherine had learned to love a hyacinth. “Your sister taught me,” she said to Henry. “I cannot tell how. Mrs. Allen used to take pains, year after year, to make me like them; but I never could, till I saw them the other day in Milsom Street.” Young people, Austen was saying, need to learn to be young, must be woken up to the world’s physical beauty (the loveliness of hyacinths) as well as to their own moral beauty (their capacity to love them). They need to be taught, somehow, by older people, people who have learned it already—people like the Tilneys, or my professor, or Jane Austen. Taught by example (“I cannot tell how”), not the pedantic taking of pains we can too well imagine Mrs. Allen having employed.
The need for teachers: there is something in the modern spirit that bridles at the notion. It seems inegalitarian, undemocratic. It injures our self-esteem, the idea of having to confess our incompleteness and submerge our ego beneath another person. It outrages our Romantic temper, which feels that the self is autonomous and the self is supreme. And if the teacher is a man and the student a woman, as they are in Northanger Abbey—and, even worse, an older man and a younger woman—it offends our feminist sensibilities, as well.
But Austen accepted it, even celebrated it. Nearly all of her heroines have teachers of one kind or another, and in her own life, we know, her mentors were many and crucial. There was James, her oldest brother, ten years older, who had, according to his son James-Edward, Austen’s first biographer, “a large share in directing her reading and forming her taste.” There was Eliza Capot de Feuillide, her glamorous cousin, fourteen years her senior, who became Jane’s friend and idol when she descended upon the Austens from France. There was Anne Lefroy, the wife of a neighboring parson when Austen was a girl—beautiful, spirited, clever, a great reader and wit—her “best loved and admired mentor,” according to Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, a kind of “ideal parent” to whom she could turn for advice and encouragement. And finally, there was Cassandra herself, Austen’s deeply beloved older sister, about whom she would speak “even in the maturity of her powers,” as James-Edward put it, “as of one wiser and better than herself.”