A month ago, I wrote here…. http://tinyurl.com/hvppyhv ….about Jane Austen’s winking allusions to Sophia Lee’s historical
novel The Recess (1783) and Sir
Walter Scott’s historical novel Waverley
(1814) in her novel about novels and history, Northanger Abbey (posthumous). In particular, I explored the subtle
distinction between a male vs. a female perspective on the writing of histories
in the late 18th & early 19th centuries, and also the
blurry line between novels and histories. Today I’m back with an unexpected
gloss on that earlier post, regarding the unrecognized literary dialog which I now
believe, more than ever, was covertly conducted between Austen and Scott during
the last five years of JA’s life.
I say “unexpected”, because this morning,
during my routine periodic trawling of scholarly databases for the latest literary
scholarly articles, I happened by pure serendipity upon an article from last
winter with a title which ought to raise the intrigued curiosity of Janeites: “Walter
Scott’s ‘everlasting said he’s and said she’s’: Dialogue,
Painting, & the Status of the Novel” by Christopher J. Scalia in ELH 82/4,
Winter 2015 p. 1159 et seq.
What raised my curiosity was only not the name
of the article’s author (who, if you were wondering, is indeed the son of the
late SCOTUS Justice Scalia, as well as an expert Scott scholar), but the
quotation in the title of Scalia’s article: “everlasting said he’s and said
she’s”. This quote reminded me of the following famous, oft-quoted paragraph in
Jane Austen’s Jan. 29, 1813 letter to her sister about the critical reception
of Pride & Prejudice by its first,
Austen-family readers: ‘There
are a few Typical errors – & a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes
make the Dialogue more immediately clear – but “I do not write for such dull
Elves” “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” ‘
I’ve often written about the mock modesty of
JA’s supposed acknowledgment of errors in not providing enough pronoun
references for the dialog in P&P—as if she would ever have made such a
rookie error! ---and, in addition thereto, three years ago I wrote the
following about the Scott aspects of the above-quoted passage:
“JA alludes to Scott’s famous
poem Marmion, but she materially changes and expands his
original line, which went: "I do not rhyme to that dull
elf, Who cannot image to himself". It’s clear why she changes “rhyme” to
“write”, but why does she change Scott’s “image” to the similar-sounding, but
different-meaning “ingenuity”? What does she mean by this? Judging by scholarly
reaction to that sentence, a number of possible meanings could be plausibly
applied to “ingenuity”—and so we must ask, why would JA be so vague, presenting
a mangled line of famous poetry in an ambiguous way, instead of writing clearly
and exactly what she means? I smell a rat…… ;) My reading of “ingenuity”, by
the way, is that JA is herself imagining a sharp-eyed reader who is ingenious
enough to figure things out not only who “he” and “she” are in various
passages, but, equally important on a metafictional level, to figure out why these
attributions have been left ambiguous in the first place—and to then realize
that one effect of such ambiguities is that it permits the text to be plausibly read
in alternative ways, i.e., where “he” might be, e.g., Darcy in one
interpretation, but Bingley in another, with two completely different
meanings….this last comment will take on extra meaning by the end of this post.
And JA then goes on to cryptically
hint at her own intentionality in these “errors” by highlighting that her final
revision involved a massive cutting of text from the last previous draft…plus,
JA points out that she is fully cognizant that as a result of her cutting,
there is now a much greater proportion of narrative to dialogue in the second
volume than there was previously. So it’s not just quantity she has
dramatically altered, it’s the fundamental nature of the words themselves,
since narration is a whole different beast than dialogue….” END QUOTE FROM MY 2013 POST
So far, so good, but what neither I nor
any other literary scholar has taken note of prior to this post of mine today,
was that JA’s decision---in a private letter to her sister written in January
1813, a letter that remained unpublished until seven decades later----to link a bon
mot about “he said’s and she said’s” in P&P to an 1809 poem by Sir
Walter Scott, must somehow, by some
form of off-channel communication, have become known to Walter Scott prior to 1821
when he published The Bride of Lammermoor,
the novel containing the passage which Scalia quoted from in his article title!
I.e., despite the “truth universally acknowledged” by Austen scholars that
Scott and Austen were never in private contact, it is now 100% clear to me that
this is not a truth at all, since Scott must’ve seen what JA wrote about Marmion in her private letter written
more than eight years earlier.
For other reasons entirely, which I
haven’t blogged about publicly [regarding extraordinary novelistic parallels
which I’ve detected as Scott and Austen in effect played a remarkable game of “Dueling
Novels” between 1814 and 1816], I’ve long speculated that Scott and Austen were
in direct, personal communication with each other during the last five years of
her life, even though no correspondence between them is known to exist, or to
have ever existed. So you can just imagine my pleasure when I happened upon
Scalia’s article title, which, as I’ll explain below, provides strong
written—even if circumstantial- evidence of exactly that sort of private
communication between these two most influential of early 19th
century English novelists.
The unlikelihood that Scott’s and
Austen’s “said he’s and said she’s” is merely an extraordinary coincidence, is
compounded when we take a closer look at the entire passage in Scott’s Bride in which this usage occurs. But first,
Scalia’s article expertly summarizes and sets the stage for me:
In
both The Bride of Lammermoor and Ivanhoe, Scott seeks to explain the craft of
novelistic dialogue by comparing fiction to drama and painting.
For Scott, novelistic dialogue is best considered in reference to these art
forms because the former relies almost entirely on dialogue and the latter is
inherently silent. His use of painting as a touchstone for fictional speech is
particularly thought-provoking because he seems to contradict himself in these
two passages. The introductory chapter of TBOL features a character named Dick Tinto, who argues that excessive
dialogue makes novels too much like drama and that novelists should instead
borrow more painterly approaches to composition. Although the chapter is
generally interpreted as a straight-forward send-up of Tinto’s attempt to
conflate painterly and fictional techniques, I interpret it as a deeply nuanced passage that, while certainly
satirizing Tinto, clears original space for novelistic dialogue by both
repeating theories that Scott had expressed elsewhere and also relying heavily
on contemporary theories of painting. On the other hand, the introductory
letter of Ivanhoe aligns theories of
painting, and in particular Sir Joshua Reynolds’s arguments about balancing
general and specific detail, with Scott’s approaches to dialogue. The barrier separating painting from
fiction, constructed in TBOL, is razed in Ivanhoe. But rather than creating
a problematic contradiction, this inconsistency comprises a multi-front
vindication of the novel in which dialogue represents both the traditional and
innovative possibilities of the form, its distance from and proximity to more
ancient and critically appreciated arts.”
END QUOTE FROM SCALIA ARTICLE
Scalia goes on in his article to explain the
deep nuance he sees in Scott’s treatment of the issue of dialog vs. narration in
novels, and so I recommend you read it from start to finish. But for my
purposes today, I merely piggyback on Scalia’s observations, which dovetail
perfectly with my above-stated claim that Scott must have, sometime between 1813
and 1821, read JA’s paragraph channeling his poem Marmion. I believe Scott produced an excellent literary injoke, by
writing a passage in Bride which in
effect returns the favor to JA’s letter which alludes to his famous poem, a
favor she of course did not live long enough to enjoy.
Here, then, is that Bride passage, in the context set up by Scalia, above. It is in Chapter
1 of Scott’s novel, and is a first person narrative by the character Pattieson,
a novelist, describing the debate of the aesthetics of dialog vs. narration in
novels with his painter friend Tinto, whose artistic services Pattieson has
commissioned to illustrate his novel:
“...while [Tinto] thus proposed to
unite his own powers with mine for the illustration of these narratives, he
mixed many a dose of salutary criticism with the panegyrics which my
composition was at times so fortunate as to call forth.
“Your characters,” he said, “my dear
Pattieson, make too much use of the gob box; they patter too much (an elegant
phraseology which Dick had learned while painting the scenes of an itinerant
company of players); there is nothing in whole pages but mere chat and
dialogue.”
“The ancient philosopher,” said I in
reply, “was wont to say, ‘Speak, that I may know thee’; and how is it possible
for an author to introduce his personae dramatis to his readers in a more
interesting and effectual manner than by the dialogue in which each is
represented as supporting his own appropriate character?”
“It is a false conclusion,” said
Tinto; “I hate it, Peter, as I hate an unfilled can. I grant you, indeed, that
speech is a faculty of some value in the intercourse of human affairs, and I
will not even insist on the doctrine of that Pythagorean toper, who was of
opinion that over a bottle speaking spoiled conversation. But I will not allow
that a professor of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his scene
in language, in order to impress upon the reader its reality and its effect. On
the contrary, I will be judged by most of your readers, Peter, should these
tales ever become public, whether you have not given us a page of talk for every
single idea which two words might have communicated, while the posture, and
manner, and incident, accurately drawn, and brought out by appropriate
colouring, would have preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and saved THESE EVERLASTING ‘SAID HE’S’ AND
‘SAID SHE’S,’ with which it has been your pleasure to encumber your pages.”
I replied, “That he confounded the
operations of the pencil and the pen; that the serene and silent art, as
painting has been called by one of our first living poets, necessarily appealed
to the eye, because it had not the organs for addressing the ear; whereas
poetry, or that species of composition which approached to it, lay under the
necessity of doing absolutely the reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for
the purpose of exciting that interest which it could not attain through the
medium of the eye.”
Dick was not a whit staggered by my
argument, which he contended was founded on misrepresentation. “Description,”
he said, “was to the author of a romance exactly what drawing and tinting were
to a painter: words were his colours, and, if properly employed, they could not
fail to place the scene which he wished to conjure up as effectually before the
mind’s eye as the tablet or canvas presents it to the bodily organ. The same
rules,” he contended, “applied to both, and an exuberance of dialogue, in the
former case, was a verbose and laborious mode of composition which went to
confound the proper art of fictitious narrative with that of the drama, a
widely different species of composition, of which dialogue was the very
essence, because all, excepting the language to be made use of, was presented
to the eye by the dresses, and persons, and actions of the performers upon the
stage. But as nothing,” said Dick, “can be more dull than a long narrative
written upon the plan of a drama, so where you have approached most near to
that species of composition, by indulging in prolonged scenes of mere
conversation, the course of your story has become chill and constrained, and
you have lost the power of arresting the attention and exciting the
imagination, in which upon other occasions you may be considered as having
succeeded tolerably well.”
I made my bow in requital of the
compliment, which was probably thrown in by way of placebo, and expressed
myself willing at least to make one trial of a more straightforward style of
composition, in which my actors should do more, and say less, than in my former
attempts of this kind. Dick gave me a patronising and approving nod…” END QUOTE FROM SCOTT’S BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR
I believe you can already discern from the
above passage why I claim that it makes it even less likely to be coincidental that
Scott’s novel contains unusual verbiage identical to that of JA’s private letter.
This is because of the other, related,
remarkable parallel which permeates the above passage, i.e., that both JA’s
letter and Scott’s novel refer to “he said’s and she said’s” in the context of discussion of novelistic
artistry. More specifically, JA’s acknowledgment of “usual errors” is a mock,
ironic critique on her manner of depicting dialog in P&P; and Dick Tinto’s
fictional critique of his friend Pattieson’s writing is also a commentary on novelistic
dialog—one which is moreover also ironic (as Scalia acutely noted), when we
consider that the above quoted passage is….filled with dialog! This shows that
Tinto the character who hates dialog in novels did not speak for his creator Scott
the novelist, who gives Tinto a great deal of dialog in Scott’s novel….criticizing
dialog in novels! Wheels within ironic
wheels!
And there are three other parallels between
Scott and Austen which also emerge upon closer consideration:
First, as I just reread Dick Tinto’s critique
while writing this post, I heard in his aesthetic judgment “But
as nothing can be more dull than a long narrative written upon the plan of a
drama…” what seems like a further wink at another private Austen document – JA’s
famous satirical and ironic “Plan of a Novel”, her mock description of a
surefire plotline for a successful novel, along the lines suggested to her in total
seriousness by the clueless James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s court
librarian.
Second, I also reconsidered my prior
observation about how JA’s famous “lopping and cropping” of P&P while
revising same in 1812, must’ve involved cutting out a lot of narration from the
first half of the novel, leaving it the most extended narrative-scarce extended
section in all of JA’s novels. Did Scott realize this? I think so!
As for my third and last point, I once
more rely on Scalia’s article to introduce it:
“As if to underscore that theories of painting
can apply to fiction—and recalling Scott’s appropriation of painterly theory in
Bride-both Ivanhoe and the Quarterly Review piece adapt controversial ideas
expressed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his influential Discourses on Art, delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and
1790. In these lectures, Reynolds frequently instructs historical painters to
avoid including minute details and to focus instead on the commonalities
between ages, to prefer the general or ideal over the particular. For example,
in his fourth discourse, delivered in 1771, Reynolds argues that minute detail
distracts the audience from the more important elements of a painting…” END
QUOTE
I wrote two years ago… http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/03/scotts-1816-review-emma-reynoldss-cupid.html
… about Sir Walter Scott’s famous 1816 review of Emma in which Scott picked up on Austen’s covert allusion in Emma to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s highly
sexualized painting of “Cupid as Link Boy”, as well as via the character “Mrs.
REYNOLDS” in P&P. I also wrote a few months ago about the extensive, barely
veiled allusion to Gilpin’s picturesque theories in P&P. So, the theme of
visual art that saturates so much of P&P is exactly the sort of thematic
engagement that is debated by Dick Tinto and his writing friend in Scott’s Bride.
In conclusion, then: the aggregate
of all of the above, densely clustered parallels between Austen’s 1813 letter
and Scott’s 1821 novel, reinforces my prior confidence that Scott and Austen
were in direct communication about their respective literary productions. It frees
me to imagine a series of private meetings between these two immortals of
English literature, perhaps during JA’s extended stays in the anonymous privacy
of London, which they mutually agreed to keep secret from the world, which would
have made their game of literary cat and mouse more delicious to them both.
But then, when JA passed away so
prematurely at 41 ½, Scott (who survived JA by 15 years, despite having been 4
years older) would’ve mourned the loss of his friendly literary sparring
partner very strongly. And that would suggest even more poignancy in Scott’s
famous journal entry in 1826:
“Also
read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written
novel of Pride and Prejudice. That
young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and
characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.
The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite
touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting,
from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a
pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
To which I only add, what a pity
that it took nearly two centuries to recognize the secret bond between these
two such gifted creatures!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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