I am not the first Austen
scholar to note the striking parallelism between the very famous and
influential maxims of La Rochefoucauld, on the one hand, and the “epigrammatism”
of Jane Austen’s “general style”, on the other. However, I will in this post be
the first scholar to land that plane, so to speak, and definitively claim, and
then prove by overwhelming circumstantial textual evidence, that this was not
an accidental or unconscious parallelism on JA’s part. Instead, I will show
that Jane Austen’s own epigrammatism—and not just in her most epigrammatic
novel, P&P--was very consciously based upon that of the grandmaster French
epigrammatist.
JA of course referred to
her own “epigrammatism” in those playful above-quoted words, in her very famous
“too light, bright, and sparkling” 1813 letter to sister Cassandra, in which
she wrote what any alert reader will recognized as “solemn specious nonsense”
about her recently published “darling child”, Pride & Prejudice, supposedly being “too light, bright, and
sparkling”.
PRIOR SCHOLARLY
CONNECTIONS OF JA TO LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
The earliest scholarly recognition
I can find of synchronicity between JA and La Rochefoucauld (who was also a
favorite of many other famous writers in many different languages who came
after him, including England’s Lord Chesterfield, who was himself a source for
Jane Austen’s writing) is in “Style and Judgment in JA’s Novels” by Frank
Bradbrook, Cambridge Journal Vol. 4, #9 (1951) ppg 515-37, at p. 517:
“Directness and brevity
find their appropriate consummation in the epigram, and here JA reminds us of
La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, and their English imitators, Lord Halifax, Swift,
and Lord Chesterfield, as much as of Dr. Johnson. Comments such as ‘A large income is the best
receipt for happiness, I ever heard of.’ ‘We all love to instruct, though we
can teach only what is not worth knowing’, “Selfishness must always be forgiven
you know, because there is no hope of a cure’ abound. A character such as Mr.
Bennet is a personification of this trait: the apparent cynicism of his
reflections, and the characteristic irony with which they are expressed,
correspond to a permanent attitude in Jane Austen…”
Bradbrook did not appear
to recognize that JA was very consciously and specifically alluding to La
Rochefoucauld. However, when Bradbrook quoted, as an example of JA’s
epigrammatism, Elizabeth Bennet’s cynical, almost Zen Buddhist, comment spoken to
sister Jane in P&P Ch. 54, “We all love to instruct, though we can teach
only what is not worth knowing”, I’m pretty sure Bradbrook subconsciously had in mind La Rochefoucauld’s famous Maxim
377: “We may bestow advice, but we cannot inspire
the conduct.”
From Bradbrook, we move
ahead over 40 years to Jane Austen's Novels:
The Art of Clarity by Roger Gard (1994), in which
Gard quotes Willoughby…
“I
do not mean to justify myself, but at the same time cannot leave you to suppose
that I have nothing to urge—that because she was injured she was
irreproachable, and because I was a libertine, SHE must be a saint. If the
violence of her passions, the weakness of her understanding”
…and then comments:
“This has a whiff of La Rochefoucauld, a whiff
of the writer of Lady Susan; it at
once lifts us out of identification with Elinor’s point of view, and at the
same time enhances our respect for her ability to cope with such truths.”
Again, the scholarly
timidity, the failure to walk through the door that is already wide open.
And then a few years after
Gard, there was still no clear acknowledgment of JA’s intentionality of
allusion to La Rochefoucauld in Rachel Brownstein’s 1997 chapter in The Cambridge Companion to JA, in which Brownstein
begins by quoting Mr. Bennet’s most famous epigram “For what do we live, but to make sport for
our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" and then observes:
“It is tempting to read
Mr. Bennet’s remark as a self-conscious gesture by the novelist….One of her
acquaintances [Charlotte Maria Middleton] recalled of Austen that ‘her keen
sense of humour …oozed out very much in Mr. Bennett’s style”, and his accents,
or the most cynical tones of La Rochefoucauld, are audible in a gossipy letter
she wrote to CEA in 1799: “Whenever I
fall into misfortune, how many jokes it ought to furnish to my acquaintance in
general, or I shall die dreadfully in their debt for entertainment. “
Brownstein, like Bradbrook
and Gard, clearly had in mind, at least subconsciously, La Rochefoucauld, in
this case the famous Maxim 31: “If we had no faults, we should not take so much
pleasure in noting those of others.”
Bravo to Brownstein for
catching the connection between JA’s 1799 letter and Mr. Bennet, but still,
Brownstein is one more scholar who doesn’t trust their intuition, and does not
seem to realize that La Rochefoucauld is not just “in the air”, but is behind
both of them.
And now here is the fourth
and last scholarly connection of JA with La Rochefoucauld that I found-in Jon
Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999) at p. 121:
“[JA’s]
dialogues and authorial asides contain observations that could have come
straight from La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere. In Chapter 9 of P&P, for
instance, we find an exchange that mirrors La Rochefoucauld’s comment on how
absence affects love of varying degrees of strength.”
This
is the best of the four, and hats off to Elster for coming closest to
acknowledging JA’s intentionality in alluding to La Rochefoucauld. Elster first
quotes this passage of Elizabeth and Darcy’s repartee…
“"I have been used to
consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout,
healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is STRONG already. But if it be
only a slight, thin sort of INCLINATION, I am convinced that one good sonnet
will starve it entirely away."
Darcy only smiled…”
….and
Elster’s excellent summary makes it easy to locate La Rochefoucauld’s Maxim 269
as the source:
“Absence weakens the minor
passions and increases the great ones, as the wind blows out a candle and fans
a fire. “
This example is particularly
wonderful, because it is not a literal quotation, but is Elizabeth’s (and therefore
obviously JA’s) brilliant ad libbed paraphrase, translating La Rochefoucauld’s metaphor of
wind as feeding fire to a riff on Darcy’s metaphor of poetry as food feeding
love.
MY ADDITIONAL CATCHES
Based on the above, I didn’t
need any further prompting to begin skimming through La Rochefoucauld’s many
maxims myself, and the following are what I found (and I’d be willing to bet
that these are still not all there are hidden in JA’s varied, subtle palette of
“epigrammatism”:
Maxim 386. What makes the
vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.
&
Maxim 33: Pride
indemnifies itself and loses nothing even when it casts away vanity.
It’s obvious that Jane
Austen had both of these maxims in mind, in tandem, when she wrote the following
famous passage in Chapter 5 of P&P, in which first Elizabeth, and then
Mary, channel La Rochefoucauld:
"His pride,"
said Miss Lucas, "does not offend me so much as pride often does,
because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young
man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of
himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud."
"That is very
true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive his
pride, if he had not mortified mine."
"Pride,"
observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections,
"is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am
convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly
prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of
self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used
synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to
our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of
us."
Now you see what I meant by overwhelming
circumstantial proof.
And how about this one? Turns out that Mr. Darcy also read his La
Rochefoucauld:
“A refusal of praise is a
desire to be praised twice.”
This is clearly the source
for this repartee between Bingley and Darcy:
"My ideas flow so
rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my letters
sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr.
Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing is more
deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often
only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."
"And which of the two
do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The indirect boast;
for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them
as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which,
if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing
anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often
without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
And it’s not just Mr.
Bennet, Elizabeth, and Mary…..
NOT JUST PRIDE &
PREJUDICE
At the beginning of this
post, I claimed that JA did not only have La Rochefoucauld in mind while
writing P&P, she also alluded to him in other novels.
First, here is Reflection 139: “One of the reasons that we find so few
persons rational and agreeable in conversation is there is hardly a person who
does not think more of what he wants to say than of his answer to what is said.
The most clever and polite are content with only seeming attentive while we
perceive in their mind and eyes that at the very time they are wandering from
what is said and desire to return to what they want to say. Instead of
considering that the worst way to persuade or please others is to try thus
strongly to please ourselves, and that to listen well and to answer well are
some of the greatest charms we can have in conversation.”
Isn’t it obvious that Reflection
139 is the minds of both Anne Elliot and Cousin Elliot when they provide the
best company to each other?:
"My idea of good
company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a
great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."
"You are
mistaken," said he gently, "that is not good company; that is the
best.
And then we have Maxim
245: “The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.”
Isn’t it obvious that
Henry Tilney is showing off his literary erudition when he channels La
Rochefoucauld as follows?:
“Where people wish to
attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to
come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a
sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the
misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
The advantages of natural
folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a
sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice
to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility
in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion
of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more
in woman than ignorance. “
It’s no coincidence that
the narrator of NA then goes on to speak wittily and epigrammatically about
side-screens, perspectives, and other metaphors of visual art that translate
readily into their equivalents in words,
in this case, JA’s infinitely subtle art of allusion to La Rochefoucauld.
And that being a ready an
easy step to silence, I will bring this post to a close now.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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