Chapter V: Emma
by O. W. Firkins.
The claim of Emma to the second place among Miss Austen's novels seems
to me as incontestable as its failure to compete with Pride and Prejudice
for the honor of the first. Emma, the novel, has a quality of its own,
a good-natured, placid, slightly, dispersed and unoccupied quality, which
is pleasantly reflected in the character of its heroine. The atmosphere
is sunny; the people are in the main healthy, prosperous, and cheerful;
nobody, with the doubtful exception of the two Knightleys, has much to
do; and the story resigns itself with the other inhabitanta of Highbury
to that poverty of incident and defect of bustle which is the price paid
by small villagers for security and comfort.
The main bid for heart-throbs lies in a secret engagement, and though
Miss Austen does her best to uphold its solemnity by speaking of it in
the tone appropriate to a defalcation or a burglary, the reader declines
to excite himself. Indeed, the opportunity to excite himself is not offered
until three-fourths of the narrative is complete, for this is the point
at which he is apprised of the occurrence. Meanwhile, he has contented
himself with such amusement as he could pick up by the way. Of what does
this Illnusement consist? There is a semblance of a love-affair between
Frank Churchill and Emma Woodhouse, but as the affair is pure imagination
on the woman's part and pure simulation on the man's, and as both parties
are warmly agreed on the expediency of its prompt consignment to the dustheap,
its contribution to the life of the story is not great.
What more does the narrative offer? There is a young girl who is induced
by a benevolent but shortsighted patroness to transfer her affections from
a young farmer, who is her social equal and mental superior, to a young
clergyman who airs his want of sense in a politer circle. The young clergyman
proving ungrateful, nourishing indeed a most unseasonable passion for the
patroness, the heart of the young girl is transferred, this time by its
own volition, to a county landowner. The landowner remaining obdurately
unconscious, the heart, which has been passed around like a photograph
in a drawing-room, is returned with the strictest probity to its original
possessor, the young farmer. This kind of chain-work will obviously awaken
no great suspense, especially when we allow for the fact that the young
girl is subsidiary and insignificant. The young clergyman, having been
refused by the patroness, proceeds with vindictive celerity to court and
marry another woman. This second woman's contribution to the plot is minute;
it consists in securing a place as governess for Jane Fairfax (the woman
who is secretly engaged), which the said Jane, accepting one evening in
an access of despair, cancels a few days later in a reflux of happiness.
The clergyman's wife, irrelevant to the plot, is nevertheless invaluable
to Jane Austen. The moment of her entrance is critical for the story. The
first interest, that of the young clergyman's love affairs, is definitively
ended; the secret engagement which is to vivify the close is undiscerned
as yet by any except the Dupins among the readers; something is clearly
needed to keep the public from dozing. Now this clergyman's wife is a woman
with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes (I speak partly in metaphor),
and with the jingle of these trinkets she is deputed to amuse the reader
in the slumber or susspension of the other interests. The expedient is
not artful; but in the act of drowning one clutches at Mrs. Eltons as at
other straws.
Meanwhile, a love-affair of a calm, slow, and uneventful type, disguising
itself as a friendship when it is not masquerading as a feud, has established
itself between the heroine and the landowner, and mutual avowals close
the book. The novel as a whole is a curious medley in which there is a
great deal of what passes for heart interest, handled with scant suspense
and broken continuity. The reader is often constrained to wonder where
the story is. He thinks of a picnic in which desultory groups of persons
dispose themselves at random, or pursue nominal objects with devious strolls
and pointless arrangements. The simile is instructive and yet unfair, because
in work so clean-cut as Miss Austen's, observation becomes an end in itself,
and the addition of fact to fact is significant irrespective of its bearing
on an issue. The story does not loaf even when it lingers; leafing implies
languor of movement as well sis uncertainty of route, and Miss Austen's
gait is never shufffing; even her route is rather various and devious than
unsure.
It may be thought that Emma's blunders should supply a unifying principle
for the book. But Emma's blunders are an odd lot; they are of all sorts
and all sixes; they are sometimes rather undefined, and the degree of their
harmfulness is sometimes difficult to measure. They have nothing like the
symmetry and ordered neatness (nor, let us hasten to add, anything like
the arrant artifice) of the blunders of Lélie in Molière's
Etourdi or of Sir Martin Marall in Dryden's imitation of that comedy. Emma's
capital error is her first--the fostering of Harriet's passion for Mr.
Elton. By that step, if I may paraphrase the language of Macaulay on Marlborough's
treachery, she put herself under the disadvantage which attends every great
artist from the moment he has achieved a masterpiece; and, unlike Marlborough,
Emma fails to cope successfully with this disadvantage. Her second blunder
in the same kind is far less flagrant, and the recuperative powers of Harriet's
heart do not strengthen our sense of the wickedness of Emma. With one exception,
her other follies amount to little. Her flirtation with Frank Churchill
is hardly more than an excusable imprudence, and her levities at Box Hill
are a relatively innocent part of a complex general situation of which
a rupture of the engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax is
the momentary outcome. On the other hand, her really unpardonable conduct
in the Dixon matter is productive of no evil beyohd a passing embarrassment.
It is quite true that Emma's experience is no more unequal or unsorted
than the normal course of life, but life is not a novel and the entertainment
of spectators is not the object of its march.
It is regrettable that the mistake of Elinor Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings
as to the identity of the person of whom they talk is repeated with equal
extravagance and rather less excuse in the conversation of Harriet and
Emma in the fortieth chapter.
Emma Woodhouse is a finely drawn character. She is not lovable, she
is not winning; but she is vastly likable. She is one of those persons
whose vicinity is wholesome; her presence is more exciting than her conversation,
which seems merely episodic to her presence. She does nothing but blunder,
and the effect of this succession of blunders is the instilment of an unshakable
trust. The truth is that Emma's consciousness at this stage of her life
is the antipodes of her temperament; what she thinks and feels belies what
she is. Her thinking and feeling is for the most part frivolous and silly;
but the essential things in her are bottom and poise. She has that firm-based
British nature, that rounded--I am almost moved to say that mounded--temperament
which shows itself in such diverse forms and to such varied purpose in
Scott's Jeanie Deans, in Hardy's Tess Durbeyfield, and in George Eliot's
Mary Garth.
She is handsome, clever, and rich, and she suffers from the malaise
of having nothing to do. She has too many servants to permit her to work,
and too few dependents to exercise her charity. The care of an invalid
father to whom she is devoted furnishes her with just that degree of occupation
which makes the absence of voluntary tasks forgivable. She has no religion
to speak of, no zeal in the pursuit of study, no serious intellectual interest.
The social activity in the populous village of Highbury is meagre and casual.
She has indefinite leisure and an untilled mind. A mind capable of seriousness,
but not capable of finding its own occasions for seriousness, has drifted
into levity through defect of schooling and excess of freedom. Only a fraction
of her nature is in play; she is the owner of a chateau who lives in a
marquee.
Emma's love for Mr. Knightley is the natural and salutary demand of
her tentative nature for certainty and authority. She has no explicit principles;
it has never occurred to her that a person of such admirable dispositions
as herself could stand in need of principles. One doesn't muzzle a lamb.
Unfortunately, the most admirable of dispositions, if unsecured by principles,
are in themselves no security against acts the most contrary to their own
tendencies. The good-natured and generous Emma confides to Frank Churchill
her meddlesome and illbred conjectures on the relations of Jane Fairfax
to Mr. Dixon. Conduct of this kind is a trial--not to say an ordeal--for
the sympathetic reader, but our kindness for Emma has something of the
stability and amplitude of Emma herself. I use amplitude here in a moral
sense, though there is a quality including both mind and person, which
tempts me to use, and yet will not quite permit me to use, the adjective
buxom.
Mr. Woodhouse is drawn with hardly less ability though with less subtlety,
than his daughter. The solicitudes of Mr. Woodhouse are undoubtedly caricatured--Miss
Austen loves truth, but not truth at a vast expense of pungency--yet that
is not tantamount to saying that Mr. Woodhouse himself is a caricature.
There is much in him besides the self-coddler. He is grateful and affectionate
and hospitable and courteous, and his anxieties are so widened by his altruism
as to include the whole body of his deplorably reckless acquaintance. Mr.
Woodhouse is the mildest of men, yet being a member of the Austen world,
he is precise in his mildness. If in his softness and tremors he is jelly,
he is jelly in a mold. The association of ceremony with flutter was an
original thought, whether the originality was nature's or Jane Austen's.
Nothing in Jane's work is more endearing than the deference that is paid
on all hands to a type that is normally unlucky both in its companions
and its painters. Mr. Woodhouse is an egotist and fool, an exacting and
trying fool, yet he is the object of unrelaxing tenderness and esteem from
people who, like the Knightleys, are possessed of every excuse for impatience
which health of unfeeling robustness and the curtest of tempers can bestow.
The Westons will hardly detain us. Mr. Weston, while personally a little
tedious, is highly interesting as a bit of craftsmanship. He is the best
of men, with all the favorable indications and all the dubious implications
of that amiably insidious phrase. To be specific, he is just, kind, cheerful,
friendly, talkative, a little lavish in his talk, a little indiscriminate
in his cheer and comity. A comic dramatist would have left the virtues
unclouded, or would have given the foibles a free hand. But Miss Austen
makes a mere abatement, a qualification, both a source of difference and
guarantee of reality. The picture is instinct with that rare equity which
in Miss Austen was the incongrous associate of so reckless and dashing
a onesidedness. Her temper in the portayal is as perfect as her art; it
is almost as hard to despise men a little with hliss Austen as to despise
them tenderly with Anatole France.
Mrs. Weston, in whom all the virtues are neatly packed and plainly
labelled, has only one drawback; she has always the air of a person who
comes to us superlatively recommended. We feel that she is earning our
indorsement; at the end of her stay we shall be powerless to refuse her
a "character". We respect her for bearing a child; that is an act of refreshing
solidity in a world in which the people are mostly idle observers of each
other's idleness. Mr. Knightley, Emma's dictatorial lover, is the kind
of material which anybody who can draw chaacter at all can draw admirably.
Incisiveness requires less art, or will make the same allowance of art
go farther, than almost any other trait. Being the least expensive of material,
it is also the most lucrative; the returns on the investment are very large
in the Hotspur of Shakespeare, the Anthony Absolute of Sheridan, the Jaggers
of Dickens, and the Lady Rockminster of Thackeray. Mr. Knightley is a middle-aged
English landowner of redoubtable probity, great executive force, adamantine
opinions, and a candor by which others profit and suffer. His speech has
the velocity, regularity, and energy of a force-pump, yet manages to keep
its human property for all that. He is almost cruel in his rebuke of cruelty;
one feels that he is the sort of master who would damn a servant for a
lapse into profanity. I cannot but feel that this world must be far better
and far better-natured than it now is before a mere flick of satire at
another person's obvious and obtrusive folly can deserve the avalanche
of reprobation which Emma receives for her treatment of Miss Bates. Nothing
is more curious, nothing is more revelatory of Miss Austen's self-inclosed
and consequential world, than the subjects which occupy the mind of this
thoughtful, powerful, and unimaginative man of affairs. They include snubs
to old spinsters by thoughtless young women, but they mainly deal with
love. His interest in the marriage of a young farmer with a village girl
engrosses him to the point of quarrelling with the woman he loves in its
behalf. It is the oddest of worlds in which a novelist, assuming the part
of Omphale, can find no apter instrument for Hercules than the distaff.
Mr. John Knightley is the brother of the elder Knightley and the husband
of Emma's sister. I spoke just now of Miss Austen's delicate fairness to
the demonstrative and genial Mr. Weston. Mr. John Knightley is a fairly
good illustration of the opposite habit--the habit of making a single trait
the sum and substance of the portrayal to the exclusion or unfair subordination
of more vital elements in the character. Mr. John Knightley is in most
ways a very good man, but Miss Austen has no time to waste on such kickshaws
as virtues. Mr. John Knightley is the possessor of an invaluable little
temper of which a thrifty novelist must make the most. The point in visiting
a geyser is always to arrive at or near the moment of eruption. That is
exactly the point in the portrayal of Mr. John Knightley. His ill-temper
is crisp enough, though in view of the smallness of its occasions and the
entire innocence in many cases of the human receptacle into which its acerbities
are poured, it might pass for mere peevishness, but for its assumption
of logical form and its origin in a masculine chest. It is not merely in
literature that the recourse to the big bow-wow strain is of service to
the arrogant male. Mr. Frank Churchill is Mr. Weston's handsome and aristocratic
son. He enters the story at a advanced point--to be precise sit the one
and fifty-first page in an edition of three and ninety-five pages; but
in the interest which preludes and the sensation which accompanies this
belated entrance he is comparable only to Chad in Mr. James's Ambassadors.
Like Chad again, he is a little disappointing and not perfectly elucidated.
To adopt the language of Elizabethan stage directions, after the opening
flourish there are scattered alarms and excursions, which are clearly mere
episodes and offshoots of some larger conflict off-stage, the purport and
progress of which are inscrutable from our post of observation.
Mr. Churchill is a spasmodic young person, prolific in arrivals and
departures, and with feelings almost as agile as his person. There are,
roughly speaking, three stages in the portrayal: the splendor of his advent,
the disillusion, and the partial rehabilitation. Miss Austen has hardly
time enough for thoroughness in the report of all three processes, and
the second in particular is hurried and muleted. Frank Churchill is variable;
he is light; he can be momentarily unfeeling. So much we know, and we are
by no means completely reassured by the condescensions and sumptuosities
of his almost too bountiful repentance. We are not clear as to the extent
to which we should commiserate or congratulate Jane Fairfax. In one point
it seems to me that Miss Austen has committed an artistic error. After
setting Frank Churchill on his feet, she is seised with a qualm of candor
or a jet of spite, and gives us a last glimpse of the young man (in the
final conversation with Emma at Mrs. Weston's) for no apparent purpose
but that of convincing us that he is a mawkish fribble. This comes too
late. I have enough of the New England housewife in me to be horrified
at the spectacle of muddy foot-tracks on a floor that has been newly mopped.
I confess that I quite agree with Emma in her dislike of Jane Fairfax.
I grant that her character is exemplary, but example may be quite as irksome
as precept. The irreproachableness of Jane Fairfax is a reproach to all
the onlookers. There are two main points about Jane, her reserve and her
pathos. The one should command respect, and the other should engage sympathy.
Neither fulfils its office. There is no disguise like the appearance of
openness, and nothing invites curiosity like the appearance of reserve.
Jane Fairfax's bearing has the indiscretion and the impropriety of a whisper
in company. As for her sufferings, there are people who have a talent for
endurance which is little short of an entreaty to destiny to unload its
carload of misfortunes at their door. These comments are of course rather
trivial but a reader's disposition to trifle is a matter of weight for
the novelist and critic. I doubt if Jane Austen liked Jane Fairfax; at
the close of the book Emma and Emma's creator seem to be doing penance
together.
Miss Bates, like Mr. Woodhouse, is a humor in the old-fashioned sense.
But, like Mr. Woodhouse she is much more than a caricature, though the
picture is extreme, if not burlesque, in one of its phases. The elephant's
nose is greatly elongated, but the general size of the animal is a justification
of the magnitude of his proboscis. Miss Bates has character enough to bear
up her peculiarity. There is something snug and buxom in this spinster,
the like of which is not easily to be found in the novels of Miss Austen.
We feel that she would get on with us. Mrs. Nubbles and Mrs. Lupin and
Polly Richards and other worthies of a circle with which most of Jane's
characters would be at a loss to fraternize. Her hand, if touched, would
be warm--pudgy, if you insist, but warm; and there is hardly another specimen
of the handiwork of her creator of whom the same thing could be securely
said. She has an artless faith in the good-will of her fellow-creatures
which illumines and adorns the world. Everybody is glad to survey that
embellishment of himself which faces him in the trustful geniality of that
simple mind, and the reader on whom she has never looked is indirectly
flattered by the admiration she bestows on his inferiors.
The peculiarity which makes her the dread and wonder of her neighbors
is her speech. Miss Bates is the rambling monologist, but she differs from
her tribe in several interesting particulars. The Austen trade-mark is
visible in the precision of her trim--her ahmost formal--volubility, The
speech of her class tends to coagulate, to become a paste--a trait clearly
observable in the much less cohesive, but much more glutinous, monologues
of Mrs. Nickleby. Miss Bates always keeps her thread even when she lets
it dangle, and the difference between her and the scatter-brained monologist
is the difference between excursion and wandering. In the nineteenth chapter
hliss Austen has some important circumstances to impart to the reader.
She does not hesitate to intrust the conveyance of these facts to the progressive
if dilatory conversation of Miss Bates. In the ballroom scene the speeches
are sharply punctuated, cut into blocks with an evident concern for style
underlying all the superficial inadvertence. In this respect they resemble
the more obviously fabricated monologues of Blanche Evers--later Blanche
Wright-in Mr. James's barely remembered Confidence.
Mrs. Elton's character has been warmly praised. In those interesting
Opinions of Emma cited in the Life and Letters of Jane Austen, four persons
are particular in their admiration of Mrs. Elton. A Miss Sharp, who has
sense enough to dislike Jane Faifax, thinks Mrs. Elton beyond praise, and
there is a Henry Sanford who thinks "Mrs. Elton the best-drawn character
in the book." Here, again, I think of Scott's apt judgment, applied with
such doubtful aptness to Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates--that the unpleasantness
of a reality may overcharge the portrait. Mrs. Elton is clear, but disagreeable,
and we, not having been inured to the regimen of Dotheboys Hall, grow tired
of that particular mixture of brimstone and treacle, in other words of
malice and smirking, which is served up to us without stint in her lavish
conversation. The case would be less irksome if she had any real business
in the story. But, as I have already observed, her offce is merely that
of a screen or stop-gap, and her impertinence is emphasized by her inutility.
Again, Mrs. Elton is more foolish than comic, or, at all events, she
does not amuse in the degree in wbich she repels. She has not quite the
amount or kind of folly which contents a reader by the establishment of
his own superiority. To insure that result, Mrs. Elton should be humbled.
Nothing of the sort occurs; Mrs. Elton is secretly abominated, but, openly,
she is tolerated and deferred to by everybody on the premises. Mr. Knightley
is taciturn; Emma is acquiescent; Jane Fairfax is submissive; Miss Bates
is idolatrous. The form of portrayal does not show Miss Austen at her very
best. In Mrs. Elton's conversation, self-betrayal is abnormally, even incredibly,
continuous; indeed, it goes on long after there is nothing left to betray.
It is only fair to repeat after this train of objections that the character
is drawn with much skill. Mrs. Elton is real to us, at least while she
is in our company. In the memory I find that she undergoes a sort of disembodiment
or dissolution to which Mr. Woodhouse, Emma, Mr. Knightley, and Miss Bates
are by no means subject.
I find Mr. Elton a more satisfying figure--I would not say a cleverer
piece of drawing--than his wife. In Mrs. Elton, the coloring is garish;
in the husband the artist's own design has obliged her to stay her hand.
Mr. Elton is Emma's choice for Harriet, and Emma is Harriet's sincere,
if very condescending, friend. A bound must be set to his meanness. His
profession clearly sets no bound to it in the eyes of the creator of the
Reverend Mr. Collins. Mr. Elton's calling, like Mr. Collins's, appears
to be removable like his surplice and with his surplice. He is not merely
not religious; he is not even clerical. He is a handsome young fellow in
whom the sentimental and the mercenary blend as amicably as politeness
and rapacity in the behavior of a keeper. He is full of arch and winning
ways, trappings and furbelows of manner, the forms of an effusiveness that
is partly nature, partly convention, and partly strategy. In several of
the early chapters through which Mr. Elton waltzes so briskly, his character
no less than his attitude toward Harriet is left in a state of cunning
ambiguity. "There are cats" said Violet Effingham to Phineas Firm, "who
play with their mice and do not eat them, cats who eat their mice and do
not play with them, and cats who play with their mice and eat them." Miss
Austen may be trusted to eat her mouse in the Elton case, but she is feline
in her willingness to postpone her meal to her sport. Mr. Elton, disappointed
in Emma, retaliates by marrying fashion and folly in the person of Augusta
Hawkins, and spends the rest of his time more quietly in the wake of his
wife's train and the lee of her vocabulary. The insult to Harriet in the
ball-room scene has the effect of a sudden descent of Miss Austen's fist
at a moment when we expected nothing more than the play of the finger-tips.
In Harriet Smith, Miss Austen faces a difficulty. She draws character
as it were in straight lines, and if there is anything willowy or sinuous
in the contours of her subject, the need of adjustment is obvious. The
need is especially insistent in a young girl like Harriet Smith. The problem
is by no means hopeless. Trollope, with a similar though slighter propensity
to the rectilinear, succeeded in drawing young girls of an ideal charm
and an adequate suppleness. Miss Austen asks less of Harriet, but her success
in getting what she asks is considerable. Miss Smith is a light-haired
and blue-eyed young thing whom an accident of birth has placed in the neutral
region between two social classes, without assured footing or firm poise
in either. An American girl in Harriet's place would have more spring and
lissomeness. Her mind might be stored to as little purpose as that of Harriet,
but at worst it would be more littered; it would not have that effect of
bare walls and whitewash which belongs to those unfurnished lodgings otherwise
known as the mind of Harriet Smith. One might almost complete the figure
by imagining a sign "To Let" suspended in the curtainless window of Harriet's
mind or heart.
A character like Harriet's needs the embellishment of simplicity, and
in the formal Austen world simplicity is hard to come by. Harriet uses
the buskined diction of her associates; she affects judgement and discretion
in conformity to the manners of a time when the semblance of judgment and
discretion was mandatory even upon flighty little girls. But in spite of
this dowager's harness which fashion has obliged her to put on, she remains
a young girl, and Miss Austen, who has drawn her in a magnanimous mood,
is scrupulously and studiously just to her good qualities. She bears her
disappointmetns with unresentful patience, and omniscience in the person
of Mr. Knightley is compelled in the course of time to retract a large
part of its overbearing strictures. Harriet Smith is not vulgar; she is
not flimsy; she is not missish. She is girlish, girlish--that is the worst
that can be said. Miss Austen's power to combine attack and defense in
the same portrayal is worthy of all praise. Nothing can be better than
the manner in which Harriet's fluttered deference and bashful vanity are
conveyed. She has less firmness perhaps than any other of Miss Austen's
characters, who, take them as a class, are a tenacious and resolute set.
But if the woman lacks individuality, the same cannot be said of the portrait.
An artist of Miss Austen's power can impart individuality to the drawing
by the which deny it to the sitter.
The value of the characterisation in Emma is great, and the novel is
more individual, more in a class by itself, than any of the other books
but Pride and Prejudice. In Pride and Prejudice, however, the individuality
is that of the author; in Emma it is that of the village. The communal
effect, while not explicitly sought, is strongly imparted. This explains,
almost justifies, the negation of plot; we feel that plots, like circuses,
would skip Highbury. We feel that the stories of such a region would copy
the deliberation of its brooks, and that tbe intervals between events might
be patterned on the spaces between houses. We are in a world with broad
margins, a world in which everybody's dole of space and time is larger
than in the compact and bustling metropolis. There is a reserved and leisurely
but persevering social life, loose but secure ties, malice enough to temper
the dulness, and good-will enough to temper the malice, a placidity which
is patient of the usual, happily blent with a curiosity to which the mildest
forms of the unusual are exciting. Is a society of this kind vacuous? Its
neighborship to the earth and the processes by which earth is tilled and
man is fed prevent it from becoming that. Bovine in a sense the life of
"Emma" is, but "bovine" is a word Of various suggestiveness, and included
creatures in the early Greek mythology who were thought worthy of Apollo's
mastership and of the forays of the youthful Hermes. We are not surprised
that a book to which such an epithet should be even loosely applicable
should be the healthiest and sunniest of Miss Austen's works.
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