man at least as unworthy of her as, in his worst days, was Tom Jones of
Sophia, and he believed, with or without reason, that the knowledge of
Willoughby's character would be a bitter but efficacious medicine for
her heart-sickness. Elinor, the sensible, prudent, devoted sister,
seemed the only person to whom he could tell the story with any hope
that it would be discreetly used. "He had spent many hours in
convincing himself that he was right," and when Elinor said, "I
understand you, you have {143} something to tell me of Mr. Willoughby
that will open his character farther. Your telling it will be the
greatest act of friendship that can be shown to Marianne. My gratitude
will be ensured immediately by any information tending to that end, and
hers must be gained by it in time. Pray, pray let me hear it," there
is little reason for wonder that "upon this hint he spake," and told
the story of the moral ruin of the mother and the cruel desertion of
the daughter which the reader of _Sense and Sensibility_ will recall,
Elinor lost little time in retailing it to her sister, with the
immediate and apparently unexpected effect of increasing the girl's
unhappiness. "She felt the loss of Willoughby's character yet more
heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart," though we know that
she soon afterwards became as fond a wife of Colonel Brandon as she
ever could have been of Willoughby.
Far more remarkable, I think, than Brandon's telling Elinor the
miserable story of his sister-in-law and her daughter is the manner in
which Elinor herself receives Willoughby's attempt to excuse his
conduct. He admits his treatment of Miss Williams, but asks how Elinor
could think {144} Colonel Brandon an impartial reporter of the affair,
and proceeds to offer his own excuse in the words that follow--
"I do not mean to justify myself, but at the same time cannot leave you
to suppose that I have nothing to urge,--that because she was injured,
she was irreproachable,--and because I was a libertine, she must be a
saint. If the violence of her passion, the weakness of her
understanding--I do not mean, however, to defend myself. Her affection
for me deserved better treatment, and I often, with great
self-reproach, recall the tenderness which, for a very short time, had
the power of creating any return. I wish--I heartily wish it had never
been. But I have injured more than herself; and I have injured one
whose affection for me (may I say it?) was scarcely less warm than
hers, and whose mind--oh! how infinitely superior."
In other words, the inexperienced child was of weak understanding, and
loved him passionately, and therefore he was not so much to blame as if
she had been less warm in her affection and stronger in her
intelligence. Surely the reasoning should have been reversed. Yet
after this fine oration Elinor "pities" him, and, when he goes on to
disparage his wife, whom he has married for {145} her fortune, and to
express his continued love for Marianne, all that Elinor says is, "You
are very wrong, Mr. Willoughby, very blamable, you ought not to speak
in this way, either of Mrs. Willoughby or my sister," and in saying
this "her voice, in spite of herself, betrayed her compassionate
emotion." When he left her, Elinor assured him that she thought better
of him than she had done, "that she forgave, pitied him, wished him
well--was even interested in his happiness--and added some gentle
counsel as to the behaviour most likely to promote it;" counsel which
he showed little disposition to take.
This tolerance by Elinor for a man who, on his own admission, had
"taken advantage" of a simple young girl, ignorant in the world's ways,
this readiness to allow extenuating circumstances to a mercenary
breaker of reputations and hearts, is a far more serious fact than the
mere introduction of a story which does fit quite easily into the plan
of the novel. Elinor's reflections when Willoughby had ended his
apologies sufficiently show that the point of view suggested in the
duologue between the sinner and the sister was deliberately set up by
the author--
{146}
"She made no answer. Her thoughts were silently fixed on the
irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent
habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the
character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person
and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a
feeling, affectionate temper. The world had made him extravagant and
vain; extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish.
Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another,
had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least
its offspring necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty
propensity, in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment.
The attachment from which, against honour, against feeling, against
every better interest he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no
longer allowable, governed every thought; and the connection, for the
sake of which he had, with little scruple, left her sister to misery,
was likely to prove a source of unhappiness to himself of a far more
incurable nature."
The chapter describing this interview between Willoughby and Elinor is
the only one in all the novels of Jane Austen wherein a "problem,"
after the kind dear to the dramatist of to-day and the novelists of
yesterday, is fully presented and {147} considered, the heroines, with
this exception, answering to Mr. Andrew Lang's description, being
"ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings
and interesting doubts." Elinor only, as we find her on this occasion,
is a pioneer of that school of sociology which whitewashes the
individual at the expense of his early environment and education. Her
defence of this wretched man is, in principle, that which an Old Bailey
advocate offers when he cites the theories of Lombroso in favour of a
beetle-browed criminal who has stuck his knife into the breast of some
confiding woman. It was "the world" that had made him what he was, he
was to be pitied, not condemned.
Though we have not to consider here whether Elinor and the advocate are
right or wrong, it is hard to avoid the thought that, when she wrote
this remarkable chapter, Jane Austen was influenced in a degree quite
unusual in that age with people of her class by the sense of futility
which, not long before her day, had been the motive of _Candide_.
Voltaire's irony is bitter, in spite of the optimism which his book
preaches, and of the essential kindness of his nature, while Jane
Austen's is as sweet {148} as irony can ever be. That she was
intentionally ironical in this case of Elinor's tolerance is scarcely
possible. Only a cynic would treat a pure-minded maiden's apology for
a heartless seducer as a subject for covert satire, and Jane was not a
cynic.
Writing of Maria Edgeworth in his _Notes for a Diary_, Sir M. E. Grant
Duff says: "In her, as in Miss Austen, there is something wanting. Is
it what has been called the _nostalgie de l'Infini_?" That
intellectual ailment is more common now-a-days than it was in the
eighteenth century, and there was little of it in the grey matter of
any country brains when Jane was born. Certainly it cannot be
diagnosed from her work generally. Only in the particular case of
Elinor and Willoughby does that idea of the helplessness of man in the
maelstrom of Infinity which has paralyzed the wills of so many unhappy
victims, and induced the devastating literature of determinism, seem to
have entered into her plan of work--for only thus can I account for the
moral whitewashing of Willoughby, not by a "man-of-the-world," with his
"after all," and his "human nature" arguments, but by a country
ingénue. The more I {149} read Jane Austen's writings the stronger
grows my conviction that she was one of those fortunate beings whose
optimism is differentiated from pessimism by the good offices of an
excellent digestion and an even pulse.
We need not suppose that she had thought much about the philosophical
sanction of conduct as opposed to the purely religious, or that she had
studied the French _Encyclopædia_. She was born and brought up in an
atmosphere wherein convention, in regard to the things that matter, was
almost omnipotent, and she was not of the type whereof iconoclasts are
made. She attacked no system, social or religious; but she had no
fondness for "isms," and thus it is that dogmatism is quite as hard to
discover in her writings as scepticism.
It has been said already that Jane Austen was not a cynic. Yet it
would be easy, by making _Lady Susan_ one's text, and ignoring the rest
of her writings, to show that she was as cynical as a Swift or an
Anatole France. Of course I do not mean that her apparent cynicism in
this case was exercised on the kind of subjects which is ridiculed in
_The Tale of a Tub_ or in _L'Ile des {150} Pingouins_. But I know
nothing, in its way, more cold-blooded in the presentation of "love"
than the conclusion of that novel of Jane's springtime, which she
herself, her own wise critic, withheld from publication. The rivalry
of mother and daughter for the affections of the same man must always
be an unpleasant subject, and the story of the conflict between Lady
Susan Vernon and her daughter for the matrimonial prize represented by
Reginald de Courcy, as told in letters among the characters concerned,
is on a low plane. The morals of the "heroine" may not be suspect, but
her tone is below suspicion.
What is the _dénouement_ of _Lady Susan_? The mother's schemes to
marry the man of the daughter's choice have ended in her own marriage
to the wealthy noodle whom she had tried to force upon the daughter.
"Frederica," says the author,--dropping the "correspondence" plan in
order to wind up the book more readily--"was therefore fixed in the
family of her uncle and aunt till such time as Reginald de Courcy could
be talked, flattered and finessed into an affection for her which,
allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her mother, for
his abjuring all future {151} attachments, and detesting the sex, might
be reasonably looked for in the course of a twelve-month. Three months
might have done it in general, but Reginald's feelings were no less
lasting than lively. Whether Lady Susan was or was not happy in her
second choice, I do not see how it can ever be ascertained...."
It is certain that to some considerable extent _Lady Susan_ was a
satire on several lady novelists of the period. All Jane Austen's
novels are more or less satirical, from _Northanger Abbey_, which is
full of burlesque passages, to _Persuasion_, in which they are so rare
that it needs a hunt to discover any. Whether or not _Lady Susan_ was
intended to be taken more seriously than in jest, it is a dull
performance. The whole plan and treatment of the book are artificial.
It was not Jane's natural instinct or her finer art which was at work
in its making. So foreign is it to herself that if the MS. had been
found in some cupboard of a manor-house no occupants of which had been
of known relationship to the Austens, I doubt if it would have been
attributed to her by any one who had not made a meticulous comparison
of its phraseology with her acknowledged works.
{152}
There is, I think, no surer evidence of Jane's fine taste, alike in
character and in literature, than that, having brought this novel to
completion, she deliberately suppressed it. Had she sold it to a
publisher, and allowed it to run its chance of popularity like the rest
of her finished novels, we should have had to revise our views on her
nature and judgment to a considerable extent. As it is, the fact that
having written a poor novel of disagreeable tendency she recognized the
unsatisfactory thing that she had done in time to cancel it is much in
her favour, and justifies the opinion that whatever defects of subject
or of treatment we may find in _Lady Susan_ were condemned by its
author. It is for this reason that we need not regret the decision of
her nephew and niece to publish, many years after their aunt's death,
the book which she herself had withheld. Only, let us never forget as
we read it that it was cancelled by the author.
_The Watsons_ was produced, as far as can be ascertained, in that
middle period of Jane's life when, after her father's resignation of
the Steventon living he was spending his few remaining years at Bath
with his wife and daughters. Having {153} written three of her six
novels in the nineties of the eighteenth century--the six novels by
which she chose to be judged--at Steventon, she produced nothing more
of her best until at Chawton, in the early years of the nineteenth
century, she completed her life's work.
All her books that live by their own merits were written in the heart
of the country. The book that comes nearest to the commonest fiction
of her period was chiefly written in a town which, however staid and
irreproachable in its tone at the present date, was in her time a
centre of worldliness and frivolity.
_The Rivals_ was first acted in the year of Jane Austen's birth, but
the picture it offers of Bath society is almost as true of 1802 as of
1775. Dress had changed much in the intervening years, but in all else
there seems to have been little change between the Bath of Sheridan the
lover of Elizabeth Linley, and the Bath of Sheridan the friend of the
Prince Regent. It was among Lydia Languishes and Captain Absolutes
that Jane Austen walked in Milsom Street and danced at the
Assembly-rooms in 1802-5, and it was in an atmosphere of social
affectation and busy idleness that she found {154} her powers unequal
to any nobler performance than the account of the husband-hunting and
silly young women who angle for Lord Osborne and his friends. The
futilities of _The Watsons_ form a remarkable interlude between _Pride
and Prejudice_ and _Mansfield Park_.
The rural society into which Jane Austen takes us in all her novels
marks a rapid development from the manners of the preceding age. If we
regard the Squire Western of Fielding as representative of a
considerable class of the country gentlemen of his time, we may wonder
how it is that no such rude disturber of the peace bursts in among the
Woodhouses and the Dashwoods. His nearest relation in Jane's novels is
Sir John Middleton, and he, with all his noise and ignorance, is a
quiet, well-bred person in comparison with the rude father of the
delicious Sophia. Even the less rubicund and animal squire of the
Hardcastle species is here unknown, and Squire Allworthy himself would
have been strange in the drawing-rooms of Mansfield Park and Pemberley,
or the parlours of Longbourn and Hartfield. There is less change to be
seen in the "manners and tone" of the women, especially the younger
{155} women, than of the men. Sophia and Amelia would have used a few
expressions, perhaps, that might have made Emma stare and cry "Good
God!" or the fine colour deepen on Elizabeth's cheeks, and Marianne
Dashwood would have confided to Elinor her astonishment that such
otherwise attractive girls should be so ignorant of the poets, and of
the proper arrangement of natural scenery. Had the girls become
confidential on further acquaintance, Sophia might have wondered why
Elizabeth said so little about the appearance of her lover, and so much
about his intelligence. But Tom Jones and Booth would never have got
on intimate terms with Knightley, or Darcy, or Edward Ferrars, until
these Austen young men had drunk more port than anybody in Jane's
novels--with the exception of John Thorpe as described by
himself--could carry without disaster.
There are no "heroes" among these honest gentlemen of a hundred years
ago. Wentworth has indeed won credit and fortune at sea. Bertram and
Knightley do nothing to entitle them to the name, beyond marrying the
heroine. Edward Ferrars merely behaves properly in keeping faith {156}
with Lucy as long as she wants him. Darcy is heroic in taking Mrs.
Bennet for a mother-in-law; Henry Tilney makes fun of his chosen mate
in a way that would have cost him her heart in a more conventional
novel. "Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien," says Rochefoucauld,
but of the evil-doing kind there are none here, unless, indeed, the
effrontery with which, after jilting Marianne for a rich wife,
Willoughby comes to her sister Elinor and asks for her sympathy for his
sad fate, or the coolness of Wickham in the presence of the people he
has wronged may be regarded as evidence of heroism.
It is to the wonderfully true presentation of the hearts and minds of
girls that these novels chiefly owe their immense power of attraction
even for readers who miss the greater part of the humour. Fanny Price
and Elinor Dashwood are themselves but poorly endowed with humour, and
Catherine Morland only possesses it in the rudimentary way of a lively
school-girl. With how much of understanding, how clearly and fully are
the hopes and fears, the innocent little plans of Fanny and Catherine,
the more mature and reasoned ways of Elinor shown to us, without the
least apparent effort.
{157}
The trustful reader nurtured on the successful fiction of our own time,
especially that of the last ten years, during which English novelists
have been able to indulge themselves and their public by the
introduction of incidents and types of character which up to about the
commencement of that decade would have secured the ban of the
circulating libraries, has been led to believe that sensual impulse
plays as large a part in woman's life as in man's. That such women as
Lady Bellaston in _Tom Jones_, Arabelle in _Le Lys dans la Vallée_, or
the Bellona of _Richard Feverel_ exist, and in great numbers, is
certain, but they are not representative of woman. Balzac, who was
not: much restrained by any fear of the libraries, knew that many
faithless wives (so very common in French fiction and drama, whatever
they might be in life) gave themselves to men their love for whom
contained much less of sensuality than of other instincts. Esther, the
unhappy Jewess of _Splendeurs et Misèes de Courtisanes_, loves Lucien
with an affection far more chaste than that which many a correct
heroine is made to display for the man with whom she goes to the altar
in the last chapter. The mistresses of famous men, as known to us from
memoirs and histories, have not {158} generally been of a sensual
nature. Aspasia, most distinguished of them all, was of the
intellectual, not the sensual, type. Strangely indelicate as was
Madame du Châtelet, her relations with Voltaire were based on affinity
of literary taste and critical appreciation much more than on physical
attraction. Even among the unintellectual women who have figured among
the _grandes amoureuses_ of history, the passion of the woman does not
in most instances appear to have been of the coarser kind. Louise de
la Vallière is at least more typical of womanhood than Barbara Villiers.
Emma Woodhouse, deeply distressed at the supposed intention of
Knightley to marry Harriet Smith, feels that she cares not what may
happen, if he will but remain single all his life. "Could she be
secure of that, indeed, of his never marrying at all, she believed she
should be perfectly satisfied. Let him but continue the same Mr.
Knightley to her and her father, the same Mr. Knightley to all the
world; let Donwell and Hartfield lose none of their precious
intercourse of friendship and confidence, and her peace would be fully
secured. Marriage, in fact, would not do for her." Marriage, we know,
"did for her" very {159} well, and not at all, so far as we have her
story, in the idiomatic sense in which the words are commonly used.
But in this healthy maiden, who could regard with equanimity a future
wherein the man she liked best should never be more to her than a dear
friend who dropped in for tea or supper, we have an effective
illustration of the relative insignificance of passion in Jane Austen's
view of life.
Emma Woodhouse has near relations in Elinor Dashwood and Edward
Ferrars, who, after the marriage of Lucy Steele to Robert Ferrars had
cleared away the only barrier to their own avowals of affection, "were
neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and
fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life."
Kitty and Lydia Bennet could simultaneously adore all the officers of a
militia regiment, but there was nothing of the "all for love, and the
world well lost" nonsense about any of the agreeable women of Jane
Austen's creation. They were not to be captured by a man's attractions
of mind and person in the way that Millamant was by Mirabell's, nor
even by the art of others, as Beatrice was won for {160} Benedick--and
he for her. The names of Millamant and Beatrice were in the ancestral
tree of Elizabeth Bennet, but her pulses beat more regularly than
theirs.
In the effect of Mary Crawford's charms on Edmund Bertram we may see
some pale suggestion of such an awakening as that of Robert Orange (in
_The School for Saints_), who, on meeting with Brigit, "suddenly had
found presented to him a mind and a nature in such complete harmony
with his own that it had seemed as though he were the words and she the
music, of one song." But it was only a "seeming" in Edmund's case, and
while we read Jane Austen our thoughts are rarely allowed to flow into
a "Romeo and Juliet" channel for more than a few moments at a time.
The re-awakening of Wentworth's dormant love for Anne Elliot would have
afforded to most lady novelists an opportunity for some fine, romantic
writing. Jane Austen allows herself no romance in the matter. The sea
air at Lyme has heightened Anne's colour, and a passing visitor--her
cousin, as it happens--is attracted by her appearance. Wentworth
notices his glances of admiration and is _reminded_ that she is
charming!
{161}
"When they came to the steps leading upwards from the beach, a
gentleman, at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew
back and stopped to give them way. They ascended and passed him; and
as they passed, Anne's face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a
degree of earnest admiration which she could not be insensible of. She
was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features
having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which
had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which
it had also produced. It was evident that the gentleman (completely a
gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked
round at her instantly in a way which showed his noticing of it. He
gave her a momentary glance--a glance of brightness which seemed to
say, 'That man is struck with you'--and even I, at this moment, see
something like Anne Elliot again."
This scene may be deficient in the sentiment that delights Catherine
Morlands and Marianne Dashwoods, but it is a bit of true observation of
a familiar phase of human folly. Archbishop Whately remarks that:
"Authoresses ... can scarcely ever forget that they _are authoresses_.
They seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female
mind. _Elles se peignent en buste_, and {162} leave the mysteries of
womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like Richardson or
Marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is
forced to spin from his own conjectures the rest. Now from this fault
Miss Austin is free. Her heroines are what one knows women must be,
though one never can get them to acknowledge it." It is a striking
proof of the little that was known of Jane Austen by her contemporaries
that, even four years after her death, neither Whately himself, nor the
editor of the _Quarterly Review_ knew how to spell her name.