Part 5
With regard to that other criticism which may be made of defective taste and sentiment in some of the work which is otherwise so excellent, as in “Pride and Prejudice,” in the free discussion not only by a vulgar matchmaker like Mrs. Bennet, and by her silly, giddy younger daughters, but by modest and charming girls like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, of the probability of Mr. Bingley’s falling in love with one of the girls among whom he has come, and marrying her--thus at the same time securing her happiness and providing her with an unexceptionable establishment--I believe it is an example at once of blunter candour than exists at present, and of the sole light in which a girl’s position was then regarded. It goes without saying that Jane and Elizabeth were incapable either of instituting unbecoming and unwomanly attempts to attract the hero of the hour, or of consenting to marry any other hero, whom they could neither respect nor love, simply as the means to secure an establishment in life. As it happened, Cassandra and Jane Austen, in whom some of their contemporaries saw the originals of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, proved equally incapable of the last piece of unworthy time-serving. But Miss Austen was what all true artists and teachers must be,--in advance of the prevailing morality of her day. She argued and acted on the side of what was upright and unworldly; still she was so far affected by the tone of thought around her as to cause her best women in “Pride and Prejudice” to wait and watch for Bingley’s throwing the handkerchief, while they coolly debate Jane Bennet’s chances of attracting and fixing his regard. A hundred or eighty years ago there was but one career for a woman not possessed of an independent fortune--that of marriage. Jane Austen never concealed--on the contrary, she publicly proclaimed in “Emma,” that she looked upon the necessity of a gentlewoman’s working for her livelihood as a very hard and well-nigh degrading obligation, an ordeal which would expose her to much that was at once painful and injurious. We may hope that we have to some extent happily changed all that. Besides the prejudices, no doubt not ill-founded, on all the evidence which was then in the possession of even the wisest and most liberal-minded of our predecessors, we must not forget that Miss Austen has placed her five Miss Bennets in a specially trying and precarious position. Their father’s estate was entailed on male heirs, and on his death passed to a cousin, who was a stranger to the family. The interest of the mother’s small fortune of four thousand pounds was inadequate to maintain her daughters, save in a poor way, altogether beneath what they had been accustomed to. The circumstances were not enough to tempt the fine-spirited, true-hearted elder girls into any betrayal of their real dignity and independence in the matter of marriage. But Jane Austen did not mean--it would be ridiculous in taking the generation and its rooted restrictions into consideration, to suppose she could--that the precariousness of the Bennets’ prospects did not influence them, and their friends for them, in desiring that they should be speedily and well married.
There is an undeniable occasional hardness and sharpness of satire, most perceptible in the earlier of the novels, and softening as the author’s nature mellowed. As an instance of change in a familiar custom, there is hardly ever an abbreviation of a christian name in the family life of Miss Austen’s novels, any more than in the family life of her class in that day. With the exception of Lizzy Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” and Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park,” the abbreviations end with the period of childhood. No perpetual Charlies and Neds, Kates or Kittys, and Babs, meet us at every step. There may be less formality in the modern practice, but there is also a suspicion of less manliness and womanliness, with their earnestness and responsibility. What serious sense of duty can be expected from a Hal, or a Loo, not to say from a Dolly representing an Adolphus, or a Dot standing as a pet name for a stately Margaret or a grandly simple Mary?
Jane Austen had a high opinion of the merit of her work. When her characters were compared to living people, she maintained stoutly that she was too proud of her gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B., although she qualified the assertion by allowing--for the credit of human nature, and for her own credit--to avoid the accusation of painting angels instead of men, that with regard to her favourites, Edmund Bertram and Mr. Knightley, they were very far from being what she knew English gentlemen often were.
In the long list--growing always longer with the years--of the distinguished admirers of Miss Austen’s books, Mr. Austen Leigh quotes formidable names--formidable to those who hold an opposite view of her claims as an author. Among widely different names of men are those of Southey, Coleridge, Sir James Mackintosh, Guizot, Lord Holland, Whewell, Sydney Smith, Archbishop Whately, Sir Walter Scott,[12] the American statesman Quincey, and Lord Macaulay. Only one woman’s name is given--that of Miss Mitford. We must hope, for the honour of intellectual and literary women, that many more names might have been added of women who have gladly and gratefully acknowledged Jane Austen as a queen of novelists. To the examples cited, large additions might be made from the names of modern thinkers and students of human nature, since among them the novelist’s fame is still increasing.
Let it never be said, for women’s own sakes, that it is among women--among bright, quick-witted girls such as she herself was when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey,” far outstripping mature competitors--that Jane Austen begins to be no longer read and reverenced.
In her own day, Jane Austen kept a collection of such criticisms of her books as she could come across, including in the collection various contemptuous opinions as that “one lady could say nothing better of ‘Mansfield Park’ than that it was a ‘mere novel.’”
Another owned that “she thought ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ downright nonsense, but expected to like ‘Mansfield Park’ better, and, having finished the first volume, hoped that she had got through the worst.”
Another “did not like ‘Mansfield Park.’ Nothing interesting in the characters, language poor.”
“One gentleman read the first and last chapters of ‘Emma,’ but did not look at the rest, because he had been told that it was not interesting.”
“The opinions of another gentleman about ‘Emma’ were so bad that they could not be repeated to the author.”
Among the most remarkable of the criticisms worthy of the name of Jane Austen, are those of Sir Walter Scott and Macaulay. The generous entry in Sir Walter’s diary is as follows:--“Read again, for the third time at least, ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements of 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!”
Macaulay has this entry in his journal:--“I have now read once again all Miss Austen’s novels--charming they are. There are in the world no compositions which approach nearer to perfection.”
In Macaulay’s well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay, there is, in the course of an admirable comparison between the two writers, the following high praise of Jane Austen:--
“Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is, like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we could call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly rule that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet’s ruling passion? Or Othello’s? Or Harry the Fifth’s? Or Wolsey’s? Or Lear’s? Or Shylock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or Macbeth’s? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for ever. Take a single example--Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honour of his nation and the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life. A superficial critic may say that hatred is Shylock’s ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spat on the Jewish gabardine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way, for it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.
“Shakespeare has neither equal nor second; but among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all in a certain sense commonplace, all such as we meet every day; yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom--Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class; they have all been liberally educated; they all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession; they are all young; they are all in love; not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne; not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all of his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.”
Macaulay’s sister, Lady Trevelyan, told Mr. Austen Leigh that her brother had intended to write a memoir of Jane Austen, with criticisms on her works, to prefix it to a new edition of her novels, and from the proceeds of the sale to erect a monument to her memory in Winchester Cathedral. It is said that the references to the novels in Lord Macaulay’s “Journal” served to carry out his purpose so far, attracting a public which--to its shame, shall I say?--knew not the author, and selling off a whole edition of Jane Austen’s tales. That the erection of the monument in Winchester Cathedral followed is of less consequence. She needs no monument save what her brain and hands wrought out. Let her own works follow her.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Jane Austen’s nephew, on visiting Abbotsford, was suffered to take into his hand one of the volumes of Sir Walter’s well-worn set of her novels.
JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS, AND JANE AUSTEN.
“PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.”[13]
I.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Such is the lively sentence with which “Pride and Prejudice” begins. Then the author proceeds to illustrate the statement in her own admirable way.
Mr. Bingley, a young bachelor, well-born, wealthy, good-looking, agreeable, kindly-disposed--even sensible, while not too clever for his company, suddenly sets the whole country gentry of a quiet neighbourhood into a pleasant ferment, by taking a lease of Netherfield Park, and coming to occupy the house. My readers must remember that it is nearly a century ago since this happened, for it actually happened. The charm of Jane Austen’s situations is that they must have happened thousands of times. Her people all lived, are living still, since human nature never dies. We may correctly think and talk of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, and their father and mother; of Bingley and his sisters; of Darcy and his sister; as if they were real men and women. They were and are the very men and women whom our grandfathers knew, whom we know and visit, like and dislike, marry and refuse to marry.
A few customs have changed: greater breathing-space has come into every-day intercourse with better education, increased facilities of helping ourselves, moving about and knowing our neighbours--not only in the next parsonage and country house, or at most in a popular watering-place, but in the busy, endless streets of London, or up in the romantic glens of the Scotch highlands, or still farther away, in nooks of the Apennines, or recesses of the Black Forest. Such revolutions on revolutions have occurred in dress, that we have come back from the antipodes of one fashion to the same fashion again, looking new and fresh once more on the lithe figures and about the blooming faces of our nineteenth-century girls. Still we do not see a young lady, her hair in turret curls, wearing a low-necked gown long before even her early dinner-hour, and holding above her head, as a much-needed protection, one of the first specimens of the original large, green, tent-shaped parasols such as I remember in a representation of Elizabeth Bennet, when she accompanied Lady Catherine de Bourgh to their memorable interview in the wilderness on one side of the lawn at Longbourn. Wildernesses, in their turn, have disappeared; certain phrases have grown obsolete; but the men and women who led that kind of life, dressed in a style which, when we do not chance to be familiar with it, we insist on regarding as _outré_, and spoke in a manner half racy, half precise, are among us still, and will always be among us, with merely slight superficial differences.
But I wish to recall, at this moment, the distant date of “Pride and Prejudice,” in order to say that the arrival of a young man like Charles Bingley, or “Bingley,” as he is called in the old use of surnames in conversation, was a much greater event to a country circle then, than it could be now.
It would still be a good deal--witness the use of the same situation in the clever modern novel, “Mr. Smith.” But the class of women who are powerfully affected by Mr. Smith’s appearance on the scene, and who make him the centre of all their hopes and plans, are altogether inferior, socially and intellectually, to the women with whom Jane Austen dealt.
About a hundred years ago “to paint tables, cover screens, and net purses,” formed the general standard of girls’ accomplishments--a standard which did not furnish many topics of conversation. It is the girls’ own fault if they have not wider interests to-day. Therefore, those among them who are in a fever of curiosity when a new comer crosses their path, are decidedly lower in the scale, in every respect, than the gossips were in the time of Jane Austen.
We are first introduced to the Bennets of Longbourn in their animated discussion of the welcome event in their quiet lives. Soon we know the family intimately. We find vulgar, shallow Mrs. Bennet assailing her husband with unvarnished arguments that he ought to be one of the first to call on their new neighbour “for the sake of his daughters.”
We listen with much amusement to eccentric, witty, Mr. Bennet, who has married his wife for her beauty, and seeks compensation for her silliness in laughing at it on all occasions, in those mocking, terse little speeches, in which he responds to her profuse “my dears” with an answering flow of “my dears,” while he takes her off, to her broad, over-blown face, unsuspected by her, at every word.
The two elder daughters are the cream of the family. Jane is lovely and loveable. Her good understanding is so well balanced by her gentle, tolerant temper that she is able to bear patiently and tenderly with her mother’s foibles, including her vain-glory in Jane’s beauty. Jane is so fair, sweet, and reasonable in the most unassuming fashion, that she cannot help winning--without any effort at popularity--good opinions on all sides, even from the most unlikely quarters.
Elizabeth, with her fine eyes, brown skin, light, graceful figure, nimble feet in dancing, nimble tongue in talking, is a warm-hearted, softened, womanly edition of the father whose favourite she is. In answer to the covert reproach once addressed to her, that the wisest and best of men--nay, the wisest and best of their actions--may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke, she defends herself frankly yet earnestly, and we feel it is Jane Austen speaking for herself by the lips of Elizabeth Bennet. “Certainly there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” Withal, this laughter-loving girl, in spite of her naturally hasty conclusions and rash judgments, struggles so faithfully to be fair, is so candid in confessing her mistakes and submitting to pay the penalty when they are brought home to her--she is at once so frank and fearless, yet so dutiful and reverent in the middle of her innocent daring, so unselfish and devoted in her sisterly attachment, so true a woman, so thorough a lady, that while we willingly respect and like the more faultless Jane, we do more, we love the more tempted and tried Elizabeth.
It is good for young readers of the present day to look at Elizabeth Bennet, and learn to discriminate between the sparkling intelligence and gay, sweet temper of the good, kind, young girl in her lawful attractiveness, and the miserable travesty of her in many modern heroines, in whom profanity and levity do duty for wit, audacious ignorance for originality, and coarse licence for nobility of nature.
The bond of sisterhood, more than any other relation, seems to have influenced Jane Austen in her art. With her own closest life-long friend in her sister Cassandra, the author who so rarely repeats herself in the circumscribed sphere in which she chose to work, again and again draws a pair of sisters, for the most part sharing every joy and sorrow.[14] In two or three cases--those of the Bennets, the Dashwoods, Mrs. John Knightley and Emma Woodhouse, we have the contrast between the milder and more serene elder, and the livelier, more impulsive younger sister, which caused their contemporaries to say that Jane and Elizabeth Bennet stood for Cassandra and Jane Austen. But the author’s nephew pronounced against this conjecture. It is said, indeed, that in gentleness of disposition and tenderness of heart Jane Austen bore more resemblance to Jane than to Elizabeth Bennet.
Mary Bennet, the third daughter in the household at Longbourn, and the plainest member of a handsome family, tries to supplement her deficient personal attractions by such mental acquirements and accomplishments as are within her reach. These are laboriously learnt for the purpose of display. In contrast to her sister Elizabeth, she has no natural shrewdness. She is a pedantic, sententious young goose, with her elaborate exhibition of worthless knowledge and formal speeches out of commonplace books. Mary Bennet contrives to render herself as ridiculous as her younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, who are precocious, noisy girls of seventeen and fifteen. They are too unformed and callow to be treated separately at first, but we have one significant distinction between them. Lydia, big and bouncing for her age, already arrogating rights from being the tallest of the family, spoilt by her mother, invariably takes the lead. Kitty simply runs after her more headstrong junior. The most individual trait Kitty shows is the peevish impatience of contradiction which belongs to a weak character.
We may remark, by the way, that Jane Austen, while she cuttingly condemns pedantry and conceit, never dreams of offering a premium to sheer juvenility, empty-headedness, and frivolity, after the example of some of the strange preferences which are presented for the consideration and edification of nineteenth-century readers.
Miss Lydia and Miss Kitty Bennet spend the chief part of each day in walking to Meryton, a market town, where a militia regiment is stationed, which, unhappily for the growth in wisdom of the young ladies, is situated only a mile from the village of Longbourn, and Longbourn House, their home.
In Meryton dwells Mrs. Philips, Mrs. Bennett’s sister, the wife of a country attorney in a lower social grade than the Bennets. Good-natured, commonplace Mrs. Philips is gratified by her nieces’ company, and willing to indulge them with any amount of dawdling and gossiping in her house. When no better goal presents itself, the shop windows, with the latest bonnets and muslins, are always to be had. Above all, there is the chance of encountering some of the militia officers in their regimentals--those dazzling red coats, which filled the imaginations of girls like Lydia and Kitty Bennet, and which were not without their picturesque merits even in the more reflective eyes of the elder sisters. Well for girls that they have no regimentals, worn off parade, to turn their heads to-day. If they are still caught by the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, and enthralled by its blatant trumpeting, at least, the “red rags,” which are now for the most part kept sedulously out of sight, are no longer to blame.
Mr. Bennet calls on Mr. Bingley, as he has always meant to do, in spite of all his protests to the contrary, but the sisters first meet the hero at a Meryton assembly.
That was the era of assemblies--subscription balls, in rooms provided for card-playing and supping as well as dancing, under highly respectable auspices, given at regular intervals in all the country towns, and duly patronised by gentle and simple, clergy and laity.
If people stayed all the year round and year after year in their own quiet country neighbourhood, some recreation must be provided for them. The assemblies were at once simple and social. The stereotyped recreations of the last century were dancing and card-playing. If both were liable to grave abuse, we may still hope that many worthy people used them temperately and not unconscientiously.