c JANE AUSTEN BY O. W. FIRKINS NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1920 COPTBIOHT, 1920 BT HBNRT HOLT AND COMPANY An attempt is made in the appendix to furnish a reference to every important quotation and allusion in the text. The courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly in authorizing the reprint of the verses, To Jane Atisten, is gratefully acknowledged. 0. W. F. 48433m iu CONTENTS PART I THE NOVELIST Chapter Page I. Sense and Sensibility 3 II. Pride and Prejudice 24 III. Northanger Abbey 49 IV. Mansfield Park 65 V. Emma 96 VI. Persuasion 116 VII. The Group of Novels 130 PART II THE REALIST VIII. The Realist 147 PART III THE WOMAN IX. Life and Ways of Life 177 X. Liabilities and Assets 206 XI. Conclusion 229 Appendix 241 Index 249 V TO JANE AUSTEN THOU who to romance's sleights Didst come as dawn to elves and sprites, Replacing spectre-haunted nights With dayhght's genial reign; Shrewd exorcist — who couldst so well Romance's goblin bands expel, Yet keep thine own unrivalled spell, Incomparable Jane! How doth thy bodkin's slender steel Men's frailties and faults reveal! To thee Achilles is all heel, Thou lash of Folly's train! Thou scourgest tomboy, cynic, grig. The man whose diction is all wig, The snob, the autocrat, the prig, Inimitable Jane! Thou seekest truth, and when 'tis found Thou dost its sportive whims confound; The shafts, the stables, and the pound Shall now its pranks restrain; It dreads thy logic's bristling fence, Thy files of serried evidence, Thy panopUed, embattled sense, Irrefragable Jane! I know thy passion's cautious throes. Its timed and tactful overflows, Its firmly regulated glows, Its exemplary pain; viii TO JANE AUSTEN Oh, if a tense could court a mood, Or axioms propositions wooed, Their raptures were not more subdued, Inestimable Jane! O little world so trim and flat. Where Fate must straighten his cravat, And Death himself must use the mat, Ere they could entrance gain! Thine earth a box of mignonette, A bird-cage in a window set, A shelved and shapely cabinet, Inviolable Jane! eye of eagle and of mole, Thou shrewd and penetrating soul, Yet off thy Uttle English knoll So impotent and vain; Satiric— yet beneath thy glee An orgy of propriety, Thou riotest in decency. Invulnerable Jane I Was e'er a keen, satiric bent So quaintly, comically blent With smug and purring self-content, And homiletic strain? A Puck in cassock or a nun In motley — art thou both or one? frolic lore, surpliced fun, Inexplicable Jane! What pen could draw thee, line by line, With art ironic and benign, And truth unflawcd ; what pen but thine woman sage and sane? TO JANE AUSTEN ix I would this gladdened world might see Another Jane to laugh at thee, Rare target for rare archery, Irrevocable Jane! Lightly through time thy figure trips, Skirt lifted where the highway dips. Thy brow now crinkled, now thy Ups, As mirth rules or disdain: The barred and bolted centuries Thou frontest with unerring keys, The Park, the Abbey, Emma — these Shall swift admission gain: And if the porter claim a fee, Fling Pride op Sensibility: The flattered door shall ope for thee, Imperishable Jane! PART I THE NOVELIST JANE AUSTEN CHAPTER I SENSE AND SENSIBILITY /Sense and Sensibility* belongs to a very old type of story — the story of brotherly (or sisterly) contrast. In Hebrew narrative it is as ancient as Cain and Abel, and receives the countenance of Jesus himself in the parable of the Prodigal Son and his brother. In * The dating of Miss Austen's novels is not altogether precise, but it seems generally agreed that Sense and Sensibility represents an earlier formation, if not an earlier date, than Pride and Prejudice. A review of this novel is therefore the natural intro- duction to a survey of her work. At the outset, however, I shall gratefully avail myself of the succinct and useful summary in which Mr. R. Brimley Johnson has snooded up, if I may risk the word, the dishevelment of priorities in which the composition and publication of Miss Austen's fictions is involved. "Pride and Prejudice, written between October, 1796, and August, 1797, first published in 1813, and a second edition the same year, third edition, 1817; Sense and Sensibility, written in its present form between November, 1797 and 1798, though a portion was extracted from an earlier manuscript, in the form of letters, en- titled Elinor and Marianne, first published in 1811, second edition, 1813; Northanger Abbey, written during 1798, and first published in 1818; Mansfield Park, written between 1811 and 1814, and first published in 1814; second edition in 1816; Emma, written between 1811 and 1816, and first pubhshed in 1816; Persuasion, written between 1811 and 1816, and first published in 1818." 8 4 J ANY- AUSTEN classical and modem drama it lengthens chainwise and spreads fanwise in a long descent from Men- ander to Terence, from Terence to MoUdre, from Moli^re to Sheridan (with his griding Surfaces) down to a success not two years old in the commer- cialized drama of our American metropolis. On the sisterly side the theme reaches at least as far back as Martha and Mary in the New Testament, and comes down to yesterday in the Marta y Maria of Vald^s and the Constance and Sophia of Arnold Bennett in the Old-Wives' Tale. The Austen mark is pleas- antly conspicuous in the fact that the two sisters contrasted in this novel are both virtuous and af- fectionate women; they differ only in the degree in which they permit judgment to control feeling. The conduct of the novel is careful and successful, though far from blameless. Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, expecting offers of marriage from two young men, are forsaken by their lovers without declaration or explanation in the first half of the book. The retirement of the two cavahers in- duces a languor or slackness in the middle of the narrative comparable to the effect of the departure of the masculine element on a social assembly. For this shrinkage of interest the redress offered by the conclusion is imperfect. But the stories claim a more complete analysis. Elinor Dashwood learns that Edward Ferrars, who has made tacit love to her, is bound by an early and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 5 secret engagement to a young woman of inferior breeding called Lucy Steele. The secret is divulged; the young man is promptly disinherited by his vin- dictive and grasping mother; and he prepares by marrying the girl to try how far the fulfilment of duty can console its victim for a blighted love and a vanished income. Extrication comes from a novel quarter; the brother who has stripped him of his in- heritance unexpectedly relieves him of his bride. The supplanter is decoyed into a secret marriage, and the release of Edward Ferrars is followed by his be- trothal to Elinor and the reluctant forgiveness of the thwarted mother. The average novelist would call this material interesting, and the author of Vanity Fair would have lingered and luxuriated in the story of the arts by which the young girl sub- stituted the rich brother for the poor one. Not so Miss Austen. She dislikes, or merely tolerates, this >/ material. She is as slow in getting up to it and as quick in getting away from it as the decencies of the situation will permit. Two-thirds of the book is over before the divulging of the engagement which would start the interest for the average reader is ac- compUshed, and the decisive events are narrated at second-hand in the briefest summary in the impatient conclusion of a somewhat leisurely and ambling tale. The haste was probably due in part to Miss Austen's discontent with the makeshift expedient by which she cleared the path of Elinor and Edward to their de- 6 JANE AUSTEN ferred and improbable happiness. She was also not indisposed to evade the direct treatment of crises, as her management of the Lydia-Wickham afifair in Pride and Prejudice clearly shows. The conduct of the other story is subject to equal, if different, strictures. John Willoughby leaves Marianne Dashwood without making the offer to which his whole behavior has served as prelude and promise. Marianne follows him to London. Her disillusion is then effected by a series of incidents which are not uninteresting, but are at once so obvious and so meagre as to retard the speed and contract the volume of the narrative. Another suitor has been provided for Mariamie in the person of an amiable and melancholy Colonel, twice her age and the object, at his first introduction, of her untiring and unsparing raillery. The renovation of Colonel j Brandon in the esteem of Marianne might have seemed a seductive theme to a novelist who in Pride and Prejudice was to lavish time and pains on the rehabilitation of the rejected and discredited Darcy. But in Sense and Sensibility Miss Austen has stayed her hand. The embellislmient of the Colonel is in- cidental and perfunctory; it consists chiefly in his bestowal of a rectory upon Edward Ferrars — a point of only indirect concern to Marianne — and his fetch- ing of Mrs. Dashwood to her daughter's sick-bed. ^ The courtship is unhesitatingly shirked ; Miss Austen, for all her implacable worldly sense, may have been SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 7 woman enough to shrink from detailing a process by which a young girl was induced to marry a middle- aged gentleman who is the domicile — I had almost said the sepulchre — of all the virtues. Sickness is a classic expedient for reviving our interest in heroines who are slipping into insignifi- cance, and Miss Austen likes sickness for its own sake; she deUghts in its respectability. Accordingly^ Marianne, who seems likely to fall into abeyance in the last third of the story, is saved from this calamity by taking to her bed. It is only fair to this illness to note that it disappears with the most obhging celerity as soon as it has accomphshed the rather trifling errand for which its presence was invoked. That Marianne should be sick in a house not her own whence the whole family, with the exception of a grandmother who is half a guest, have fled at the mere pronunciation of the name ''typhus," appears forced in an author so studious of the normal as Miss Austen. The change of domicile is intended chiefly to provide an excuse for a penitential visit on the part of the mercurial and dashing Willoughby. He makes an explanation to the placable Elinor which he has the impudence, and Miss Austen the courage, to present as a defense of his behavior. The two stories, as the outline shows, are essen- tially distinct; they are bound together after a fashion, however, by the intimacy of the two sisters who scarcely leave each other's sides, and there are one 8 JANE AUSTEN or two secondary ligatures. Colonel Brandon, for instance, who is Marianne's suitor, is destined for Elinor by the prevalent opinion of the circle in which they move. As we have seen, it is Colonel Brandon who provides the rectory for Edward Ferrars. The interval between the two plots is lessened, or at least blurred, by the likeness of the two situations and the identical moral which is deduced from the contrasted behavior of the two sisters. I may re- mark here that the difference between Elinor and Marianne, whether in conduct or fortune, is probably not so wide as Miss Austen in the zeal of tutorship intended that it should be. Marianne's palpable indiscretions, the private excursions and the letters to Willoughby, are productive of no palpable mis- fortune. Her real error consists in the surrender of her heart without guarantees, and the guarded and provident Elinor has made the same mistake. A few months of anguish is the sum total of Mari- anne's penalty, and the endurance of a very httle less is all the reward that Elinor reaps for the per- severing exercise of the whole troop of circum- spect and heedful virtues. It may be said in Miss Austen's defense that the support her narrative gives to the virtues is no more uncertain or unequal than the support they commonly receive from that lukewarm and hesitating moralist that we call life. To return to the handling of the story. The volume of the two plots is small, and the reader who recalls 1/ SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 9 the plethora of minor incident, the incessant meet- ings and partings, the fuss and bustle, which mark the London section of the novel will be puzzled to relate this superflux of exertion to this shortage of accomphshment. The truth is that Miss Austen's main end is the exhibition of life and character for their own sake, and her specialty is not the great scene — hardly even the deciding or impelling scene — but the normal social occasion. The multiplying of these occasions without too rigid a scrutiny of their actual contribution to the outcome has resulted in a feebler story and a better novel. It is notable that side by side with this slackness in the pursuit of relevance there is an extreme, almost an ex- travagant, interest in the development of minor trains of consequence. Here is a httle catena. First, John Dash wood meets his sister Elinor in a jeweler's shop. Second, he calls on her the next day. Third, he asks Elinor to take him to the Middletons. Fourth, he recommends his wife to call on the Mid- dletons. Fifth, his wife complies. Sixth, friendli- ness results. Seventh, the Dashwoods invite Lady Middleton to their home, where Mrs. Ferrars is staying. Eighth, the Misses Steele, who have been invited to stay with Lady Middleton, hasten then- acceptance. Ninth, they are included in the Dash- wood invitation. Tenth, Lucy Steele meets Mrs. Ferrars. Miss Austen revels in this sort of general- ship; her own temper has points of contact with L 10 JANE AUSTEN that of the satirized Mrs. Jeimmgs. On the other hand, Colonel Brandon's supposed courtship of Elinor has almost no bearing on the outcome of the story. Willoughby's seduction of Colonel Bran- don's ward is material only in the clearer revelation it afifords of the infamies of that young wastrel's character. The utility of the Palmers appears to be confined to the provision of a house in which Marianne can be sick, the Colonel assiduous, and Willoughby histrionic. If Miss Austen had been a man, she would have enjoyed the vocation of a courier. To see people from place to place, to pro- vide for their entrances and exits, and to get as much out of them as an adroit use of these opportunities permits would have given point and vivacity to life. Miss Austen is unable or unwilling to dispense with the friendly offices of coincidence. Coincidence had not in her day fallen into that sere and yellow leaf to which the frost of latter-day criticism has reduced the green of its abundant foliage. In this novel Mr. Robert Ferrars is seen by chance in a jeweler's shop. Mr. John Dash wood is seen, equally by chance, in the same place. Edward and Lucy call on EUnor by chance at the same time. The en- counter of the man-servant with Lucy Ferrars at Exeter is one of those alms of destiny to which the poverty of novelists is perennially grateful. I may add that the servant's mistake as to the identity of the bridegroom is one of those borrowings from SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 11 farce which a novelist of Miss Austen's calibre in our own time would find incompatible with self- respect. Far worse is the misunderstanding between Mrs. Jennings and Elinor in Chapter XL, where Elinor is talking abou^ the gift of a rectory and Mrs. Jennings about an offer of marriage. Here the stale devices which realists contemptuously allow to farce prolong through a conference of appreciable length a misconception to which the bluntness of actuaUty would have put an end in sixty seconds. I pass to an estimate of the. characters. Elinor Dashwood is the personification of good sense and right feeling, and the instructress, by precept and example of her impetuous and incautious mother and sister. The hardships of such a position are manifest, and nothing less than Miss Austen's wit and vitahty could have extricated Ehnor from the straits into which she is thrown by Miss Austen's irrepressible didacticism. "He really is not disgusting," said Gwendolen Harleth of Grandcourt, and insisted that the praise was generous for a man. The critic is half disposed to say of Elinor Dashwood : "She really <■ is not disagreeable," and to say that for a paragon of discretion the praise is munificent. Our liking passes through crises at every turn, and its final safety is a form of miracle. The reader is aided by the fact that under Miss Austen's convoy he takes up his abode in the mind of Elinor, and a well-bred person feels a difficulty in quarreling with his hostess. 12 JANE AUSTEN Elinor, moreover, has strong affections and even keen sensibilities, though, Uke captive princesses, the most they can do is to flutter a signal or drop a rose through the gratings of the tower in which her judg- ment has confined them. Possibly another help is her practical helplessness in many cases. Her temper is less rigid than her ideal, or what we may venture to call her own version of her temper. She seems, at first sight, a bureau, an official headquarters, to which all questions are automatically referred for instant and final adjudication. But, however rigid her judgment, her conduct abounds in compliances. Elinor accompanies Marianne to London against her judgment. She is diplomatic in her treatment of her brother, of Fanny Dashwood, of the gadfly Lucy and of the buzz-fly Miss Steele. She does not openly protest against Marianne's letters to Willoughby. She accepts the hospitality of the Palmers in opposi- tion to her initial prejudice. She hears Willoughby after her indignant refusal to hear him, and, by one of the subtlest touches in the book, allows herself to be swayed in his favor by the romantic charm of his person and manners. Miss Austen is after all so much wiser than her superflux of wisdom would suggest. The truth is that the novelist is as in- tensely social as she is conscientious, and if the essence of conscience is inflexibility, the essence of society is compromise. The rational woman is provisionally rational and ultimately woman. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 13 Elinor is much better than her ungrateful role; Marianne is not quite so good as her vocation. She is imagined strongly, but thinly and brokenly as it were. She suffers from that glaze of formality which in Miss Austen's work overlays the really formal and the really informal characters alike. The twen- tieth century hardly knows what to do with a yoimg woman to whom apostrophes of this type are feasi- ble: And you, ye well-known trees — but you will continue the same. — No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer. In lines like these the satirized Mrs. Radcliffe is vindicated — or avenged. Even where the heart is stirred, the creaking of the eighteenth-century stays in which its throbbings are confined is distinctly audible. " Nor I," answered Marianne with energy; " our situations then are alike. We have neither of us anything to tell; you, because you communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing." The pitiless Taine remarked of Pope's Eloisa to Abelard that Abelard would have cried out ''Bravo" at certain passages, and on reaching the end would have reversed the letter to see if "For press" were not added to the superscription. If Marianne wrote as she talks, one could almost for- give a similar levity in Willoughby. 14 JANE AUSTEN Deep passion is not Miss Austen's strong point, and Marianne's suffering has the vague though real impressiveness of a house of mourning which the spectator views from the remoteness of the pave- ment. As her business is largely to suffer, the re- sulting exclusion is considerable. The need of keep- ing her imprudences within strictly respectable limits has shortened the span of the character, and, as I have already intimated, her speedy recovery does not conduce to the energy of the thesis. The first effect of Willoughby, as he comes dashing into the story with spurs jingling and bridle-bells tinkling, like a youthful chevalier, is distinct and promising. But with this first sharpness of impres- sion Miss Austen's proficiency ceases. Her knowl- edge of a bad man was decorously limited. George Eliot in Tito or Grandcourt would spell you out a bad man, word for word and letter for letter; Miss Austen keeps warily aloof from the Up of the crater. She knows Willoughby's manners and that part of his temperament to which manners are the clew. She is not withheld by any visible squeamishness. Her account of Willoughby's worst offense is handled with a frankness and a discretion and an absence of any consciousness of either frankness or discretion which, in relation to her sex and epoch, is notable and laudable. The awe, the mystery, which encircle sex are entirely absent; her disapproval is emphatic, but her coolness is immovable. Willoughby is a / y SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 15 trumpery character. The curvettings and bridlings with which he dashes upon the stage in the outset of the story arouse a distrust which is rather confirmed than lessened by the final caracole of his repentance. Miss Austen leaves us at last with the impression ' that his desertion of Marianne and his betrayal of Eliza are criminal at best, and that, in an unpohshed or imhandsome man, they would have been totally ^ unforgivable. Edward Ferrars is placed in direct contrast to Willoughby. Willoughby is gloss without sub- stance; Edward is substance without gloss. The difficulty with Edward is that the absence of plumage is so much more demonstrable than the presence of marrow. Edward has the ill luck to be compelled always to carry a shyness which needs no nursing into situations which supply it with the most liberal encouragement. He is inactive and largely invisible; and when he is dragged upon the stage by the in- exorable Miss Austen, his chief aim is to conceal his mind from the friends to whom he has been obliged to expose his person. His adhesion to the pestiferous Lucy seems a dismal if not a truckling type of virtue, and the American reader is not propitiated by his naive view of the ministry as a steppingstone to a ^ living in the double sense of a rectory and a hvelihood. It is quite true that in this view of the church as a refectory he has the cordial support of his patroness, Miss Austen. m 16 JANE AUSTEN Colonel Brandon is the last of the three men in the story to whom the office of lover and suitor is com- mitted. He is hampered in this function by an accumulation of years which exposes him to the contempt of romantic young women of eighteen. Colonel Brandon is thirty-five, and the touch of rheumatism from which he suffers is confessed by the novelist with a candor which may be classed with the heroisms — not to say the heroics — of conscien- tious realistic treatment. That touch of rheuma- tism is felt in Colonel Brandon's gait throughout the story. He is a very good, indeed a verj' efficient, man, if the only sound test, the test of deeds, be applied to his character, but we feel always that he is bandaged. He is the most recurrent, yet the most unobtrusive, of characters, and the reader starts at the perception of his arrival as he might at the discovery of the nearness of some quiet person who had entered the room on tiptoe. Even at the Ivery end of the tale he can hardly be said to have laid aside his muffler; wejknow the facts, but we do not know the man. It is natural that he should be drawn to Marianne rather than to Elinor, between whom and himself is the obvious bond and the impalpable barrier of a precise conformity of tastes and principles. It is not so easy to understand his final conquest of Marianne even with the aid of a proviso that Marianne accepts him in the first in- stance on the unromantic basis of gi-ateful friendship y SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 17 and esteem. Discretion that is to be made amiable to indiscretion might sm-ely assmne a livelier and com-tlier shape than it wears in the sedate — almost the lugubrious — Colonel. Miss Austen's tolerance of inconsistency is evident in the changes undergone by two characters, Mrs. Jennings and Mr. Palmer, in the shifting exigencies of a varied novel. Mrs. Jennings as we first see her, is a vulgar gossip, wholly foolish and wholly con- temptible. In the course of the story she becomes a convenience to Miss Austen, and Miss Austen is too robustly English to view any convenience with im- qualified contempt. Mrs. Jennings is revamped. Her cheap good-nature is changed to an endearing benevolence; the folly which had pervaded and con- stituted her character is reduced to a tincture that makes her virtues pardonable by making them diverting. The change in Mr. Palmer, while much less conspicuous, is even more violent. When we are first introduced to this extraordinary person, the only characteristic he exhibits is a brutal and super- cilious rudeness, and that characteristic is pushed to an extreme from which anybody but a demure and discreet clergyman's daughter engaged in the writing of reaUstic novels would have shrunk. Later on, when Mr. Palmer has a chance to be useful, half his brutaUty is obliterated at a stroke. These alterations are instructive. In Miss Austen's comic delineations the character is spitted on a trait, and the trait is 18 JANE AUSTEN abnormally sharpened for the due performance of this trenchant office. This may pass, if the handling is brief and includes no diversity of functions. A person may stand on his peculiarities, as he may stand on the tips of his toes, for a httle while, if he is content to do practically nothing else. But there is nothing like prolonged contact for the taming of superlatives, and nothing like variety of function for abatement of the rankness of caricature. Miss Austen's changes are tacit acknowledgments that the unrevised Mrs. Jennings and Mr. Palmer were libelous. This confession really involves the whole prolific and interesting group of characters in Miss Austen for which the formula is the raising of a single trait to the highest power and the iteration of that trait with tireless insistence. People are not like that, whatever Smollett and Dickens and Miss Austen may think. The arbitrary modification of full- blown or full-grown characters is one of the artistic sins that spot the record of Dickens. I will take an illustration from that novel of Dickens which repe- rusal has lately freshened in my memory, the Tale of Edwin Drood. The lawyer, Mr. Grewgious, in that book is pure fool and butt in the extravagant and irrational scene in which he is first introduced to the amused but protesting reader. Later on, Mr. Grew- gious's help is wanted by Dickens in some rather deUcate transactions in the conduct of which a char- SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 19 acter and brain are indispensable. The equipment of Mr. Grewgious with these desiderata is carried out without hesitation or delay. Unsightly tricks of this sort excite the Uveliest indignation in admirers of the authoress of &ense and Sensibility. Mrs. Jennings has two daughters, Lady Middle- ton and Mrs. Palmer. They are like each other only in their brainlessness, Lady Middleton's folly taking the form of an inane silence, Mrs. Palmer's that of inane speech. Mrs. Palmer is the smarter perform- ance. Lady Middleton the truer success. Mrs. Palmer's drivel is incessant and her good-nature is swashing, but beside her husband — and she is tactful enough never to leave his side — her very insipidities are lustrous. Lady Middleton has not the air of the woman of fashion she is presumed to be, at least not of the woman of high fashion; the middle tone in her, if I may venture the pun, is very noticeable. But the suggestion of well-bred and tranquil in- eptitude by a very few strokes is expert; and as her specialty is silence she is not subject to that con- tinuity in self-betrayal which is the retribution of loquacity in Miss Austen. Her husband. Sir John Middleton, is described by Goldwin Smith as ''half- way between Squire Western and the country gentleman of the present day." This is gracious, ahnost obsequious, to Squire Western. Possibly as a social datum it might be approved by a conamittee of historians, but I find nothing in my own impres- 20 JANE AUSTEN sion of Sir John to indorse it. I cannot think, with Goldwin Smith, that the character is hinged on its vulgarity. The hinge is brainless good-nature, and in the deft though sparse drawing I seem to feel that this good-nature is reciprocated by Miss Austen, who is less violent than usual in her chastisement of the brainlessness. Fanny Dash wood is inhumanly simplified, and the same process that robs her of nature endows her with liveliness, if not with life. Her business is to clutch at property and to maltreat her husband's rel- atives, and in the pursuit of this vocation she is not al- lowed even those passing furloughs which Thackeray permits to Blanche Amory or Becky Sharp. John Dashwood, her husband, is a curious study. In him the crudities and delicacies of Miss Austen's handiwork are seen in operation side by side. He is a fool who talks; that is tantamount to saying that he is his own target, and his marksmanship is so expert that he is left at the end of the exhibition com- pletely riddled by his own bullets. The crudity lies in that uniformity of method which never per- mits him to open his mouth without, so to speak, swallowing his own character. The delicacy lies in the art with which his own view of his character is suggested at the same time that the utter falsity of that view is laid bare to the least wakeful reader. The ground, the texture, of his character is selfish- ness and worldly greed, but there is a lining of de- SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 21 cency, humanity, and self-respect, and the lining is very thick and very soft. That is the deUcate and worthy task — to portray inside of the fool and knave the man who is like ourselves in every pomt but the excess of his knavery and folly. The combina- tion of abihties and ineptitudes in John Dashwood is mysterious. Here is a man of excellent business judgment, of perfect social tranquillity, of faultless ease in the handling of unexceptionable Enghsh; yet he is the dupe of the flimsiest pretenses and blind even to those inconsistencies which his own circle must have trained itself to perceive. He complains of poverty in the same breath in which he offers proofs of riches. He thinks a woman who invites two girls to spend a few weeks at her house in London is under a moral obHgation to remember them in her will. I have no first-hand knowledge of England; in America folly is more symmetrical. To Mrs. Dashwood, the mother, who is an un- regenerate, or, if the reader pleases, an undegenerate, Marianne, Miss Austen is, for tactical reasons, rather inattentive; but the brand of truth which she exhibits seems to me more delicate than that which I find in the fuller portraitures of the younger women. The two daughters are encumbered by the necessity of serving at the same time as the poles of an antithesis and the stays of a thesis; Mrs. Dashwood has the leisure and freedom to be herself. I am not sure but the best-drawn character in the 22 JANE AUSTEN book is Lucy Steele. She finds the spot of vindictive- ness in the gentlest reader, for her business through- out the book is to provide distress for Edward Fer- rars and Elinor Dashwood, to the first of whom she serves as barnacle, to the second as gadfly. An early and heedless engagement has bound the scrupulous and submissive Edward to this incubus, and placed his honor between him and his later and lasting love for Elinor Dashwood. Lucy Steele is single-minded, courageous, and resolute. She is without manners, without affection, and without conscience. She is capable of meanness, hypocrisy, and treachery. At the same time it is impossible to detect in Lucy the smallest trace of harlotry, of Bohemianism, or of disorder. She is privateer, but not buccaneer. Her means and her ends ahke find harborage within the securities and the decorums — those securities and decorums which so often serve as shelter to worse deeds than the deeds to which they serve as barrier. A Frenchman could not have so neatly separated the manoeuverer from the adventuress. We see Lucy only in her relations with Elinor Dashwood — relations in which her confidences are unmeasured, her attitude dissembling, and her Jesuitry extraordinary. In the skill with which she is drawn there are occasional lacunae. Lucy is sup- posed to talk bad English, but the stuff or tissue of which her English is composed is not bad at all. On the contrary, it is very good English upon which SENSE AND SENSIBILITY 23 patches of vile English have been purposely and in- expertly sewed. A second mistake, already men- tioned, is the final stroke by which Lucy, having jilted Edward to marry Robert, allows Elinor to imagine that the marriage has gone forward without change of bridegrooms. This seems an overdraft on the badness of a character which has met all its obligations to the evil principle with the most com- mendable punctuahty and exactness. The stroke, even if natural, seems artistically wrong. A touch of mahgnity is as injurious to the artistic perfection of the pure self-seeking embodied in Lucy Steele as a touch of benignity would have been. Lucy has a sister, Anne Steele, a scatterbrain, frankly vulgar, who may be said to reek with good- nature. Her conversation is an unceasing current in which she not merely swims but splashes. She is drawn with a precision which by no means excludes gusto. Robert Ferrars, on whom Lucy is finally bestowed, has every claim to that privilege which im- beciUty and vanity can confer. He is hacked out with the broad-axe, but the vigor of the axeman's stroke is immistakable. CHAPTER II PRIDE AND PREJUDICE I INCLINE to rank Pride and Prejudice among the best-plotted novels in English Uterature. This is far from holding it to be impeccable. It is mif ortunately true that a novel need not be faultless— need not be free from grave faults, to be classed with the best- woven fabrics of the clumsy English looms. Enghsh noveUsts commonly write on the grand scale which makes the correlation of particulars difficult and u*k- some, and in general they are eager or preoccupied. Like the man who had been so busy in making money that he had wanted time to think about finance, they have been so lost in narrative that they have ahnost forgotten plot; and their forethought, when it has existed, has been moral and intellectual rather than artistic. Even the jesthetic re-quickening in the last years of the nineteenth century came almost too late for the amelioration of their plots. They found themselves ready to appropriate the patterns of their continental masters at the very time when those masters were preparing to teach them that art is truth and that truth is patternless. Accordingly, a strong, definite, and shapely plot, like that of Pride and Prejudice, has never lacked the pedestal of isola- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 25 tion. For the most part the Enghsh have muddled through in novel-writing as in war. Lovers of liter- ature will find solace in the thought that in the mili- tary field the habit has not acted as preventive to Blenheims and Trafalgars. The plot of Pride and Prejudice belongs to that admirable class in which two processes, a flux and reflux, of approximately equal length and strength, are parted in the middle by a crest or equinox in which the first process finds an end and the second a beginning. This is the type which proved so captivating to the imagination of Gustave Freytag that he was decoyed into the error of making it an imperative formula for tragic drama. In Miss Aus- ten's novel, Elizabeth Bennet accumulates dislike of Darcy throughout a volume; throughout a second volume she accumulates love; the arch finds its beautifully poised keystone in the rejection scene in which her aversion touches its acme. The manner of these changes is highly characteristic. The word " process" which I have applied to the movements is inexact, they are no more processes than a flight of steps or a series of ledges is an incline. The gradu- ated is achievable by Miss Austen, but not the grad- ual. Elizabeth, in the first volume, collects evidence of Darcj^'s wickedness; in the second she collects evidence of his worth: and this evidence comes not in grains but in blocks. As soon as the rebuttal is complete, so strict a logician cannot delay the be- 26 JANE AUSTEN stowal of the hand which is the irrefutable Q. E. D. Yet it is by no means unpleasing or unexciting to watch the deUberate movements of the crane by which block after block is swimg into its due place in the massive lines of Miss Austen's geometric masonry. The mingled correspondence and opposition m the two movements is worth noting. The inexcusable rudeness of Darcy to EUzabeth in volume first leaves a bruise to which a series of dehcate courtesies in volrnne second apphes the counteractive and appeas- ing salve. A scandalous count in the indictment against him in the first half of the book is his in- justice and malignity toward an angehc personage called Wickham. In the second half we are informed that the object of these persecutions is a worthless Lngrate on whom generosities have been vainly lavishe'H^ But the crowning offense in Darcy is his interference with the thriving mutual attachment of his friend Bingley and EUzabeth's sister Jane. This act is not onl}'' revoked in the second volume, but is more than counterpoised by an act of magnanimity toward another sister by which a prostrate reputation is placed not on its feet indeed, but on crutches, and repairs are effected in the highly reparable honor of the unexacting Bennet clan. The equation is not precise; precision would outrun nature. Even the general plan of the two movements is a departure from the truth, and owes all its brilliant virtuosity to the imposition on life of a synometrical elegance PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 27 to which life itself is uncompromisingly hostile. Of itself, it would block Miss Austen's claim to the title of an inexorable realist. The differences in merit between Sense and Sensi- bility and Pride and Prejudice are emphasized in one point by the similarity of their materials. There are two sisters with two parallel love-affairs in both novels. But in Sense and Sensibility the union of the stories has Uttle other basis than the union of the heroines, as if two lapdogs became companions rather than partners through the fact that their mis- tresses were inseparable. In Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, the two stories are vktually one; they not only interlace; they interlock. Darcy, in destroying the happiness of Jane by the removal of Bingley (who, it may be incidentally remarked, is almost as removable as a joint-stool), has ruined his own prospects with the justly resentful Elizabeth, and his sanction of the renewal of Bingley's addresses to Jane is the prelude to the estabhshment of his own happiness. There is another point in which the two stories are superficially alike, but artistically differ- ent. In the middle of Sense and Sensibility the two cavaliers ride away; the interest slackens, ahnost languishes; and there is a "moated grange " effect in the forsaken cottage to which the name "Marianne" seems charmingly apposite.. In Pride and Prejudice, likewise, the two heroes betake themselves to Lon- don, but the threat of languor for the story implicit 28 JANE AUSTEN in this step is dispelled by the promptitude with which Darcy is recalled to the proscenium. It may be noted as a symptom of the times that the modest and discreet Jane pursues the fleeing suitor to London almost as promptly as the headlong and reckless Mariarme. The maxim that "To the victor belong the spoils" appears to have regulated the conduct of the most exemplary young women of the period. In Pride and Prejudice the fabric is minute. Ob- serve the dense packing and close coherence of the Uttle incidents which precede and provoke Darcy's final declaration to Elizabeth. Bingley becomes en- gaged to Jane. This brings Darcy and EUzabeth into contact. To gossiping countrysides one marriage suggests another. The report passes from the Lu- cases who belong to that countryside to their rel- atives, the Collmses, and from the CoUmses to Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherme visits EUzabeth to bully her into a refusal. Elizabeth betrays a willingness to accept. Lady Catheririe, visiting Darcy, unwittingly allows hmi to divme this willingness. Darcy renews his proposal, and is ac- cepted. This is more than care; it is elaboration. It in- dicates not merely a love of good plots but a love of plotting. Meredith's plots have a shnilar careful minuteness, but the enjoyment they might afford to the reader is nullified by the onus of unravelling their complications. Miss Austen's admirable clear- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 29 headedness makes even her minuteness lucid. The Gardiners are entirely subordinate, but they are en- Hsted in the plot three times; they serve as hosts to Jane, as escorts to Ehzabeth, as helpers to Lydia. An ordinary noveHst would have treated such auxiUaries as porters or hackmen to be changed at eyery station. When Mr. Collins marries !Miss Lucas, that might serve as his conge from the novel at the hands of the easygoing, shiftless storyteller. Not so with Miss Austen. Further service is to be extracted from Mr. Collins. EHzabeth's visit to liis wife becomes the occasion for Darcy's first proposal, and his value as a medium for the transmission of Longboum gossip to Lady Catherine has been noted in a former para- graph. But if Miss Austen's care in the provision of se- quences is unresting, I cannot affirm that her choice of hgatures is always sound. The means by which Jane and even Ehzabeth are made to spend a night or more under Bingley's roof may be called un- scrupulous, but they are modesty itseK in com- parison with the effrontery of the methods by which Ehzabeth of all persons is conveyed into the grounds at Pemberley, yes, even into the unmitigated pres- ence of Mr. Darcy himseK. Still, even where Miss Austen is brazen, she is careful according to her Hghts. To rationalize the visit to Derbyshire, Mrs. Gardiner was long before appointed to be bom and bred in that county, and an effect of innocence is 30 JANE AUSTEN given to the choice of that district as a destination by making it a reluctant second choice. The ball at Netherfield Park illustrates both the skill and the heedlessness of the writer. To make Darcy's con- duct in deporting Bingley excusable, two things are requisite: he must be convinced of Jane's indiffer- ence and of the hopeless vulgarity of the vulgar members of the Bennet family. The second of these objects is obtained with admirable foresight, but the first, which is even more important, is ignored. In- deed, two points in Jane's behavior make for a con- clusion precisely opposite to that which it is needful to implant in Darcy's mind, and the elasticity of the term ''gentleman" in Miss Austen's day is proved by his pm"suit of his imchivalrous object without forfeiture of that title. In a review of the characters in Pride and Preju- dice the Bennet family merits the first place. A family, as Americans understand that term, they are not; they are a congeries. They are bedded and boarded in the same enclosure, but a family Ufe is unimaginable in their case. Even under the double disadvantage of the father's neglect and the mother's attention it is difficult to conceive that Kitty and Lydia should have sprung from the same stem of which Jane and Elizabeth were the primary off- shoots. Sisters may be as far apart morally as Goneril and Cordelia, as far apart intellectually as Dorothea and Celia Brooke; but, if reared in one PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 31 household, they can hardly differ in manners as Rosalind differs from Audrey in As You Like It or as Romola differs from Tessa in George Eliot's Florentine story. Breeding, being more superficial, is more teachable and less variable than either in- tellect or character. The two eldest and the two youngest sisters in the Bennet household are divided by an incongruity of this type. Mr. Bennet is well drawn, though sometimes he seems little more than a salver for his own pleasan- tries. The appearance is unjust. He has a character apart from his witticisms, but he and his witticisms are practically inseparable, and in their seductive and distracting company his character, though visible, is hardly seen. No one ever joked better, but his lazy tolerance is more characteristic than his wit, which is almost too consummate to be individ- ual. One imagines his wit, when not springing, to be always couchant for a spring, or rather perhaps one imagines his condition between jokes to be syncope. He is described interestingly enough as an odd mix- ture of "quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice," and one can imagine that in a richer soil and sunnier climate he might have matched feUcities with the Bromfield Corey of Mr. Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham. But Mr. Bennet's lot was less for- tunately cast, amid earthier and grosser conditions, on a social order in which the farm-horse took the girls to fashionable parties. He is overridden with 32 JANE AUSTEN ; women — woman-rid as the schoolmaster whom Charles Lamb avoided and pitied was boy-rid. A little henpecked by his wife, he finds in irony both (solace and revenge; in his encomiters with her he is perfectly secure of an absolutely ineffectual victory, . since his shafts, though unerringly aimed, are stopped '■ by the cuirass of her insensibility. I think we should be more comfortable with Mr. Bennet if he had less to do or did more; he reaps the guilt, without the grace, of nonchalance. His indignation at his daughter's elopement is vehement but short-lived, and the baseness of his new son-in-law supplies his returning levity with a fresh target. Idleness, the least active of passions, is perhaps finally master of the swiftest and fieriest of its competitors. I think there are possibiUties of delicacy, of pathos, in Mr. Bennet which his creator lacked the power to exploit; a century later, a more intuitive Miss Austen would have drawn a more intimate Mr. Bemiet. The character of Mrs. Bennet illustrates the firmness and sureness of Miss Austen's hand. It illustrates no less clearly the utter want of temper- ance, of shading, almost of decency, in her satirical delineations. It is brilHant and it is garish. Many women have had foUies akin to Mrs. Bennet's, but no live woman ever devoted herself to the quite superfluous task of proving that she was a fool with the perseverance and assiduity of Mrs. Bennet. The wariest of fools are off their guard sometimes; PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 33 they stray into remarks which would be conceivable on the lips of intelligence. There is a neutral ground between wit and folly in which perhaps both wit and folly spend the greater part of their time. Miss Austen scores every minute with Mrs. Bennet, and at the end of the book her recompense is a splendid score rather than a human being. With her usual ruthlessness Miss Austen will allow Mrs. Bennet nothing; motherly feeUng is conceded only in the form of a weakness. The woman has undoubtedly strength of a kind — the strength of an undivided nature. Counsel, experience, suffering, leave no dent on the fixity of her prepossessions. She is a consunmiate exhibit, but she is hardly a char- acter. Jane is probably commemorative — the Hquidation of some debt of affection and homage. She is the angeUc person who dehghts the middle-class reader, and she is naturally rather tedious to that kind of upper-class reader who regulates his aversions by the raptures of the middle class. In Jane there is a contrast between the softness of the material and the firmness of the handling which is interesting to the thoughtful student of Miss Austen. In calUng the material soft I do not contest Jane's possession of judgment and a kind of fortitude. We are impressed with the strength of her defenses, even while we are a Httle impatient of the weakness which requires the evocation of so much hardihood for its subdual. We 34 JANE AUSTEN like Jane, but perhaps we are tried by her emotion when we ought to be touched by it. We feel pain for her, but we do not feel that pleasure in our pain which draws and wins us in the case of Ellen Douglas or of Lily Dale, We are behind a closed door, and the exclusion magnifies our sense of the suffering, while it denies us the solace of participation. Ehzabeth's Bennet's value as a character is large, though not transcendent, and her interest as a study is extreme. If it is hard to find room for Jane's judgment in the rifts of her sensibiUty, it is hard to find room for EUzabeth's sensibility in the crevices of her judgment. We might think her made by formula; her very speech seems diagramed. These impressions are delusive. Elizabeth has all the human, all the womanly, traits, but she holds them by the oddest of tenures. Her figure possesses the indispensable feminine curves, but these curves are so gradual and so elongated that in viewing any small arc of her character we might readily mistake them for straight hues. Her dehghtful humor should temper the precision of her intellect, but the humor itself has a sharpness of definition so unusual that it all but reenforces the precision it should quaUfy. Ehzabeth has a woman's variations, but her shifts are so massive and so dehberate that to a remote or careless glance they have much the air of constancy. She has impulses, as a woman should have, but the reader must know her pretty well, before he can tell PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 35 these impulses from plans. In short, there is a woman, even a girl, inside EUzabeth, but you must rununage to find either. Compare her with Beatrice in Shakespeare, with Diana Vernon in Scott's, Roh Roy, with Patience Oriel in Trollope's Doctor Thorne. What is the difference? In the last three cases the temperament wields the intelligence, and is dignified by the brilHancy of its utensil. In EHza- beth the intelligence wields — or seems to wield — the temperament. In the firm edges and broad sur- faces of her character there is both satisfaction and unrest. There is not a fold in her personaUty, or if research fights upon a fold it is so straight and so severe that it leaves an effect of added candor, not of coyness. So much formafity would have frozen a less spirited woman; so much spirit would have ignited less formafity. Elizabeth's position is curiously intermediate. In Mary Bennet Miss Austen courted disaster. Miss Austen's own serious conversation is exag- gerated ahnost to the point of burlesque in respect of the conversation of real people. One shudders to think what will happen when Miss Austen sets forth her own notion of exaggeration and burlesque. Mary justifies the shudder. If Kitty is the least interesting, she is likewise the least exceptionable, of the portraits in the Bennet family. In the fifelike limpness and tameness of this subsidiary character the evocative force of a very 36 JANE AUSTEN few touches, when the few touches are Miss Austen's, is happily evinced. Lydia Bennet herself is hardly more reckless than Miss Austen is reckless in the lengths to which she permits the boisterousness and shamelessness of Lydia to go. The drawing is unbridled. Here is a girl who disgraces herseh, tries and sentences herself in every speech — a thing hardly compatible with human nature. Her want of conscience, her want of decorum, are perhaps barely conceivable. But can it be imagined that a girl whose pleasures and ambitions are purely social should be absolutely in- different to the preservation of her claims to the respect or even the tolerance of society? She is a •gentleman's daughter; she has two sisters who are models of refinement; and she has not one ladylike instinct, not one vestige of decorum. Scott is thought to be impromptu and swashing in com- parison with Miss Austen, but compare the shading in the character of the compromised and fugitive EjEhe Deans with Miss Austen's big bow-wow por- trayal of Lydia Bennet. Nevertheless gross as the characterization is, it is vigorous in its crude way. If the strokes are few, their vividness is unequalled; and, if they have no support in human nature, they reenforce each other. Even individuality is secured, though how individu- ality can be imparted to a character that has neither variety nor moderation is a paradox before its ac- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 37 complishment and a secret afterward. Lydia's in- dividuality rests mainly on a self-reliance which gives a massiveness to her very levity and is intrin- sically a respectable trait. I think that Miss Austen felt this, though I doubt if she was awake to her own feehng. Darcy, the problem of the book, is also its failure. He is neither firmly drawn nor clearly understood. A really estimable character is to appear intolerable throughout the first half of a book, and to reveal a climax of virtue in the last half. The condition of success in this adventure is that no offense shall be specified in the premises which cannot be forgiven as venial or explained as illusory in the conclusion. Miss Austen is too fond of violent coloring to observe this rule. Darcy is merely the shell of a character, and the two Hps of the shell will not meet. When he first appears, he speaks insultingly of a young girl within her hearing. After that, all is over, and to search the character for virtues is to delve among ruins for salvage. Goldwin Smith's comments on this behavior leave nothing whatever to be said either in supplement or in retort. "No- body but a puppy would reply when he was asked to let himself be introduced to a young lady, 'She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give conse- quence to young ladies who are sUghted by other jnen.'" Strange things no doubt passed as ladies 38 JANE AUSTEN and gentlemen in Miss Austen's day, but it is difficult to imagine that puppyhood and magnanimity shared a character between them in any age. Darcy has not exhausted his littleness in this remark. The thrift of Miss Austen has provided him with a reserve of enormities. He insults Elizabeth in the act of sohcit- ing her hand. Later on, he writes her a letter in which he vilifies her family, and excuses this in- decency on the characteristic ground that "my character required that it be written and read." In a word, the recovery of her esteem is to be pur- chased by her mortification in the perusal of insults to her nearest relatives. This is the conduct of a man whose character, in the sequel, is to be pictured as the abode and meeting-place not only of all the virtues but of all the deficacies. One does not envy the virtues and the deUcacies their lodgings. Miss Austen's explanation of all this is that he was spoiled in his youth, that his pride was not innate or ingrained, but a cloak or even a shawl, which dropped off at once and forever the moment a young woman with a mind of her own gave it a vigorous twitch by rejecting its wearer. Darcy, however, is long past the juveniUties of fife, and his strong character — we are assured that it is strong — is fully ripened. His pride is not a gentleman's pride, but a sullen and forbidding arrogance, a pride that flaunts its own withdrawals and isolations, that battens on the morti- fications it inflicts. He is like Dombey, except that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 39 he is not absolute fool, and the change he exhibits is only a httle less incredible than the change by which Dombey, in the language of the uncompromising Taine, " spoiled a fine novel." His churHshness in society would have a certain excuse, if, like the im- perious Rochester in Jane Eyre, he had a tempera- ment to which society was an episode or a bagatelle. But Darcy is as much a social animal as Bingley or Wickham; he is that unpleasing and unlucky combi- nation in which the social ideal consorts with the un- social temper. An owl I fancied scared by night, A fish that had the water-fright — though in Darcy it is disUke rather than scare that is visible. There is a stiffness in almost all the man's move- ments; it abates a little in the spring warmth of his first hesitating attraction toward Elizabeth, but soon reasserts itself, especially in the love-making, which has an effect of being done by clockwork. Even his anger is heavy; it makes him vehement, but it cannot make him supple. There is one happy stroke in which Miss Austen, who is wiser than she sometimes chooses to let her patrons suspect, indi- cates the survival of the old man in the spick-and- span paragon whom she has obUgingly revamped for the delectation of the uncritical reader. When he revokes the inhibition he has laid upon Bingley, 40 JANE AUSTEN Elizabeth cannot "help smiling at his easy manner of directing his friend. . . . EUzabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend — so easily guided that his worth was invalu- able; but she checked herself." Does Miss Austen often check herself, with the satiric truth balancing on her hps? As portraits I prefer either Bingley or Wickham to Darcy. The deUneation is sparing, ahnost frugal, in both cases; the margin round the text is blank and broad. Bingley, sHght as he is, possesses an in- dividuahty, the key to which may possibly be found in his union of impulsiveness with docility. He is one of those persons in whom an effect of general ade- quacy to the immediate occasion is combined with final insignificance. He is not a mere nobody; he is not a mere anybody: yet we feel that his proximity to both those characters might have made a more perceptive wife than Jane uncomfortable. That his winningness should somehow percolate through the scant portrayal to the indifferent mind of the half- attentive reader is proof of the dehcacy of Miss Austen's touch. Side by side with the attachable and detachable Bingley, we have in Wickham another happy illus- tration of the multum in parvo form of character- drawing. We know of Wickham's person only what we can extract from the brief generalities of a single uncommunicative sentence. "His appearance was PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 41 greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address." We do not hear his voice, or discriminate his tones, and his speeches, which are conscientiously reported, are suggestive of an ab- stract and colorless propriety. Yet somehow Wick- ham is got before us. His entrance is clandestine, but his presence is unmistakable. The word that embodies him, to my imagination at least, is velvety. He is the demure, pensive, and pathetic rascal; he had wished to be a clergyman, and he is not un- Hke the sort of man whom one can imagine the Rev- erend Laurence Sterne to have been — at any rate that traditional Sterne whom Thackeray amused himseK by impahng in the English Humourists. His aplomb is exemplary; it is very nearly as good as innocence. Miss Austen, who is the kind of person to accept a hon mot as expiation for a felony if the transaction could be kept inviolably secret, is rather more tolerant of Wickham than so responsible a woman has any right to be. I do not think that the prodigious and portentous Mr. Collins is fully entitled to the superlative praise he has ehcited in certain quarters. He is rather too unqualified himself to be admired without qualifica- tion. Miss Austen's stroke is bold and blunt, and she begrudges the character every dehcacy — I mean of course artistic, not moral, dehcacy — which could impair its rolHcking completeness. There is a con- 42 JANE AUSTEN ceptual felicity in the iinion of egregious self-im- portance with gross toadyism. The sycophant to rank who is boaster and bully to his mferiors is by no means a rare figure, but the imperturbable self- respect of the incorrigibly fawning Mr. ColHns is something for which memory is slow to furnish parallels. His flunkyism has a pecuHar hterary virtue; it is not in the least disinterested, but, in a gross way, it is sincere. He wants the wages, but he likes the job. What is poHcy in its origin becomes reUgion in the process; most religions have doubtless grown up in the same way. Thackeray, with his procUvity for moral discovery, showed us later, in his account of Tom Tusher, how caste-worship might turn inward. " 'Twas no hypocrisy in him to flatter, but the bent of his mind, which was always perfectly good-humom-ed, obUging, and servile." Mr. Colhns is amusing, undoubtedly, but he fatigues ahnost as much as he enUvens. The pun- gency of verbiage has been overrated. Even in the famous and excellent Micawber, it is doubtful if the rotundity of the periods is to be counted as yeast or dough in the ingredients of that eccentric bread- making. The lawyers in Browning's Ring and the Book are intolerable. The chief satisfaction of laugh- ing at a character is to feel that we are getting the better of him, and, even. while we laugh at Mr. Colhns, we feel that his mighty periods and redoubt- able diction are getting the better of us. The laugh- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 43 ter cannot pierce the bore, but the bore, as his name wittily indicates, can penetrate anything, including the laugher. What chiefly troubles me in Mr. Colhns is the reconciliation of his sophistications with his clown- ishness. There is not the sUghtest artistic reason why a man who writes an Enghsh far beyond the capacity of most professional men in America, and who makes a point of scrupulous adhesion to the ritual of politeness should not insult his kinsfolk and triumph in their misfortunes. But, while he may be as low-minded as a carter in the substance of his communication, I doubt if he could address a gentleman in these terms: ^The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though, at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity at so early an age. . . . They agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others; for who, as Lady Catherine herself condescendingly says, will con- nect themselves with such a family? And this consideration leads me moreover to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain event of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must have been involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. This passage appears to be enjoyed; at all events the letter is quoted in full by Goldwin Smith as one 44 JANE AUSTEN of the "charming" things in Pride and Prejudice. To me it seems neither enjoyable nor true. I do not quarrel with its vindictiveness or cruelty; I quarrel with its open vulgarity. This is not the brutahty of the parsonage, though parsonages may be brutal in their kind; it is the brutahty of the sponging-house, the barrack, and the counter, with a bedizenment of Johnsonese which those haunts could not parallel. I may add that to laugh at Mr. ColHns in this phase is almost a form of comphcity, and admission of kin- ship. A world in which the record of insults to sensi- tive women in calamity can amuse the refined is of one substance with the world in which their perpetra- tion can delight the vulgar. ''^Charlotte Lucas, who marries Mr. Collins for pru- dential reasons, is hardly drawn at all, yet her situa- tion is strangely disquieting. In the few plain words in which her sedate and steadfast fortitude is sug- gested to the wakeful reader there is the inthnation of a tragedy which awes us Uke the neighborhood of death. That the martyrdom is voluntary and that the martyr is pedestrian and calculating does not alter the decorous grimness of a situation iti the drawing of which the pencil of Alary Wilkins Free- man might have found an acrid pleasure. Charlotte says nothing, and ]\Iiss Austen very httle; the con- tinence of both is impressive, almost dismaying. One thinks with heartbreak of a social order in which a woman of family and education could find marriage PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 45 with Mr. Collins the preferable alternative. Litera- ture' has strange repercussions, and in this quiet Enghsh country-side, amid these inexorable de- corums, I catch a faint foreshadowing of the dilemma (or trilemma) from which a nimble and bustling French dramatist was to rend the veil with cruel abruptness in the Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont. Nothing makes me respect Miss Austen more than her portrayal of Charlotte CoUins. Miss Austen requites herself for the hush in which she has enshrined the homespun tragedy of Char- lotte by the shrillness of her portrayal of the arro- gant and domineering Lady Catherine de Bourgh. They say Miss Austen is quiet. The elderly friends of young Marlow in the Good-Natured Man said that he was quiet. They had not seen him with the bar- maids. The discoverers of quiet in Miss Austen have surely not seen her with the titled aristocracy. Thackeray was a high colorist, a reveller in extremes, but the difference between Lady Kew, for instance, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the difference between an extravagant human being and a per- former, a trick mule, whom his trainer exhibits to a deUghted audience. I grant the excellence of the training and the merit of the tricks; but the mule never steps off the platform. Miss Austen in a quiet novel which leisurely people are to read by a cosy fireside draws a character of the sort which MoHere or Congreve would have adapted to the glare of a 46 JANE AUSTEN theatre — that is to say, she excludes all points but the points of highest reUef. The series of volleys of which this woman's conversation is made is in- consistent — I will not say with the virtue or the decency — but with the laziness and fickleness — of ordinary human nature. Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, is put on the low ration of half-a-dozen sentences to an entire book, but those few and scattered words, chosen with infallible judgment, make her a sounder and more credible human being than her mother. Miss Bingley, like many of Miss Austen's un- pleasant characters, unites the diction of an aca- demician with the manners of a housemaid. She is clear enough — ^unendurably clear in many particulars, but I have a sense of fissures, of lacunse, in the de- Uneation. She is hke a book from which handfuls of pages have been casually torn; all is felt to be capable of unification, but the connective tissue has been snatched away, and incompleteness puts on the guise of incoherence. The other members of the Darcy-Bingley group may be passed over with the single exception of the inconspicuous but unforgettable Mr. Hurst, of whom Miss Austen supphes the following account: "As for Mr. Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who hved only to eat, drmk, and play at cards; who, when he found her prefer a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her." Another PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 47 hint or two of equal meagreness are furnished later on, and Miss Austen, whose concern for Mr. Hurst seems to be patterned on his own soUcitude for EUzabeth, has completed her portrait of this por- cine individual. In the normal writer — even in the normal strong writer — this handful of vulgarities would be nothing; yet somehow in the utterance of these meagre phrases Miss Austen has smuggled a soul, or whatever in his primitive make-up takes the place of a soul, into the sluggish and sensual Mr. Hurst. Of just this form of magic I am not sure that even Shakespeare has given proof. I have commented on sixteen distinct characters in Pride and Prejudice. I doubt if another novel of its size can show sixteen characters who invite or permit comment. To these might be added a list of persons who are by no means wholly indistinct, Georgiana Darcy, Mrs. Hurst, the two Gardiners, Mrs. PhiHps, Colonel FitzwilUam, Maria Lucas, Sir WiUiam Lucas. Here are twenty-four persons to whom individuality in various amounts is allotted in a novel which, by the scale of Dickens and Thackeray and George EHot, must be accounted short. Yet the novel has not that effect of being cumbered or ht- tered with characters which is more or less notice- able in Scott's Peveril of the Peak and Mr. Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes. The minor figures are not tufted or ranged in scattered groups, and the emi- nence of the primary actors is never threatened by the 48 JANE AUSTEN intrusion of the subordinates. I must not close the chapter without noting the rather frequent shifts of place in the narrative, and the ease and convenience with which the transfers are effected under the un- hurried but unpausing conductorship of Miss Austen. I CHAPTER III NORTHANGER ABBEY Northanger Abbey has a motive and a story, but the bearing of the story on the motive is very ob- scure, and, so far as the obscurity is penetrable, unsatisfactory. The author wishes to reprove the romanticism of a fiction-reading young girl . Sheridan had done the same thing not ineffectually in Lydia Languish, and an older form of the same dreamy and paralyzing romanticism had been rebuked by Lessing in the Schwaermerei of the heroine of Nathan the Wise. The obvious course in such a fable is to lead the heroine from daydreams into indiscretion and from indiscretion into misfortune or difficulty. Miss Austen, however, hardly pursues this course. Her heroine does indeed run heedlessly into two or three imprudent and improper acts in caUing alone upon the Tilneys, but these are blunders for which it is difficult to make Mrs. Radcliffe and the Mysteries of Udolpho even indirectly responsible. Her roman- tic theory of General Tilney's conduct to which I shall refer later is unproductive of any evil to her- self; and the semi-romantic misadventure which expels her from the General's house has its real 49 50 JANE AUSTEN origin in the dustiest of calculations in which Cath- erine has neither guilt nor share. Catherine Morland is not even a romantic char- acter; she seems intended as a rebuke and corrective to romance. No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy- would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman without being neglected or poor, and a very respecta- ble man, though his name was Richard, and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two good Uvings, and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and, instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as any body might expect, she still Uved on — Uved to have six children more — to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will always be called a fine family, where there are heads, and arms, and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features; so much for her person, and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. Miss Austen allows her heroine a plain girlhood, but her courage falters at the threshold of maturity. She is no Charlotte Bronte to say to her sisters (in relation to Jane Eyre): ''I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as inter- NORTHANGER ABBEY 51 esting as any of yours." This is implacable self- discipline. Jane Austen was not bred among the rigors and self-macerations of Haworth. Abnega- tion in Kent and Hampshire has its limits; and when Catherine is to visit Bath and see young men, nature, equally friendly to budding girls and rising novehsts, is called in to renovate her physique. The conces- sion is large, but Catherine is not wholly untrue to the tradition of her noisy, dirty, and athletic child- hood. Her first exploit, on venturing into the world, is to fall instantly and irreparably in love with a young man whose main attraction is his raillery, and the prime object of whose raillery is the absurdities of the producers and consumers of romance. At the end of the book she marries this young man, magnan- imously overlooking his possession of a large income and an enviable position. There is, however, in Catherine's nature another coil for the analyst to imwind. She is unromantic, but she is romanticistic. At Bath she forms a passion for Mrs. Radcliffe which so far colors her view of hfe as to impart vividness to her expectations of North- anger Abbey. Miss Austen, in a word, has com- missioned the same young person to serve as an- tithesis to the Radcliffe heroine and as illustration of the flightiness of the Radcliffe reader. I do not say that the combination is impossible; from reader to heroine is a far cry; and, in reading, a man may court those ideaUsms which subjection to the God of 52 JANE AUSTEN things as they are has remorselessly banished from his practice. But Miss Austen's art seems to me unwieldy and unthrifty in the appointment of the same person to both parts. It may be said that the difference between Catherine's real and imaginary self is the point of the book. If so, I cannot think that the point is effectively made. We remember the case of Juha Mills in David Copperfield — Juha who sang "Affection's Dirge," and married an old Scotch Croesus with great flaps of ears. We remem- ber the case of Blanche Amory, who sighed for a paladin, and, after a vain assault upon a brewer, married a cook. If Catherine had married dollars after yielding her heart or her fancy to witticisms, she might have been counted among these renegades to sentiment. But since her first, last, and only object is Henry Tilney, who is neither romantic enough nor unromantic enough to make his capture a pointed victory for either side, I cannot see that her daydreams really becloud her mind or that her conduct really unmasks her disposition. The truth is that the satire on romance has no real or logical relation to the slender plot of North- anger Abbey. Imagine the story to have taken shape by itself; then four additions or modifications will bring the novel to its present form. First, a few paragraphs will be dehghtfully rewritten from the point of view of their contrast with the habits and prescriptions of romance. Second, Catherine Mor- \ NORTHANGER ABBEY 53 land is lent a copy of the Mysteries of Udolpho. Third, the addition of a few Gothic windows and feudal trappings converts General Tilney's country house into an abbey. Fourth, Catherine is pre- sented with two or three romantic misconceptions which are dispelled without the faintest damage to herself or the sUghtest profit to the story. The satire can be lifted clean out of the frame of the narrative, and the narrative will not even show a dent. The delusions which are foisted upon Catherine are the least acceptable portions of the tale. She beheves she has discovered an ancient manuscript in a cavity of a black and gold Japan cabinet in her bed- chamber; the morning fight reveals nothing worse than a laundry bill. The childishness of this adven- ture would seem to be pretty evenly divided between Miss Austen and Catherine. This is the grade of burlesque which the Sunday newspaper might be glad to admit to its columns of syndicated fiction, or which the school-girl essayist might read aloud to the willing laughter of uncritical classmates. The second point is a fittle graver, but even more ridic- ulous. Catherine frames the notion that General Tilney has murdered his wife. This nightmare is detected and gently dispelled by the general's younger son. On first thought we are incfined to say that the attribution of the mistake to any person in his senses is as crazy as the mistake itseK. A Uttle introspection shows us that chimeras as frantic 54 JANE AUSTEN as this do knock at minds whose sanity we are indis- posed to question, and that they are received with a hospitahty which the hosts themselves would scoff at in another person. This is a fact, and yet our objection to the incident in Jane Austen proves impervious to our recognition of the fact. The truth is that delusions of this sort are on the same footing as dreams in their adaptation to record. Dreams are as much a part of experience as purchases or conflagrations, but their irrelevance to ordinary reahty is such that they are remanded to silence except where their aptness or their influence is extraordinary, or where emphasis is concert; a.te