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 respectable man, though his name was Richard, and he had never
been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two good livings,
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 lived on--lived 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 Brontë 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 interesting as any of yours." This
is implacable self-discipline. Jane Austen was not bred among the rigors
and self-macerations of Haworth. Abnegation 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 novelists, is called in to
renovate her physique. The concession is large, but Catherine is not wholly
untrue to the tradition of her noisy, dirty, and athletic childhood. 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,
magnanimously overlooking his possession of a large income and an enviable
position. There is, however, in Catherine's nature another coil for the
analyst to unwind. She is unromantic, but she is romanticistic. At Bath
she forms a passion for Mrs. Radcliffe which so far colors her view of
life as to impart vividness to her expectations of Northanger Abbey. Miss
Austen, in a word, has commissioned the same young person to serve as antithesis
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
idealisms which subjection to the God of 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 Julia Mills in David Copperfield--Julia who
sang "Affection's Dirge," and married an old Scotch Croesus with great
flaps of ears. We remember 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 Northanger 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 delightfully rewritten
from the point of view of their contrast with the habits and prescriptions
of romance. Second, Catherine Morland 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 presented with two or three romantic misconceptions which are dispelled
without the faintest damage to herself or the slightest 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 believes she has discovered an ancient manuscript
in a cavity of a black and gold Japan cabinet in her bed-chamber; the morning
light reveals nothing worse than a laundry bill. The childishness of this
adventure 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 little graver, but even more ridiculous. 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 inclined to say that the attribution of the mistake to any
person in his senses is as crazy as the mistake itself. A little introspection
shows us that chimeras as frantic as this do knock at minds whose sanity
we are indisposed to question, and that they are received with a hospitality
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 reality is such that they are remanded to silence
except where their aptness their influence is extraordinary, or where emphasis
is concentrated on the hinterlands of the imagination. In Miss Austen's
cool, clearheaded, good-humored narrative vagary of this sort seems as
misplaced as a secret panel in a railway station.
The main plot may be condensed into two or three sentences. Catherine
Morland, in a first sojourn at Bath, falls in love with a vivacious young
clergyman, Henry Tilney, whose response to her affection is not the less
sincere for being gentle and leisurely. Catherine spends several weeks
at Northanger Abbey by invitation of Henry's father, General Tilney, by
whose order she is later on ejected from the house with a cruel abruptness
unsoftened by explanations. The General had invited her on the baseless
report that she was rich, and now drives her out on the better grounded,
but not quite accurate, report that she is penniless. The young son follows
Catherine to her home, and marriage instantly follows on the ungracious
consent of the muddle-headed father. The plot, though scant, is spacious
enough to include two gross improbabilities, that the general should be
prepared to risk his son's happiness with a girl whose fortune was atteated
only by rumor, and that he should brave the tongues of the county by an
act of violence which stamped him as dupe no less than ruffian.
I have omitted certain minor trains of incident; my ability to omit
them in a summary of the main plot is proof enough of their logical detachment.
Isabella Thorpe, Catherine's friend in Bath, engages herself to a young
clergyman, whom she jilts for the sake of a young captain, by whom she
is ruthlessly and promptly flung aside. These circumstances are related
to Catherine's story only by the purely mechanical links that the clergyman
is Catherine's brother and the captain is Henry Tilney's. There is also
a bragging and brawling young bully, John Thorpe, who makes slapdash love
to Catherine between oaths and whip-crackings. An attempt has been made
to give this fact a bearing on Catherine's relations with the Tilneys,
but the device betrays as much awkwardness as conscience. General Tilney's
informant as to Catherine's wealth and as to her poverty is John Thorpe.
Now John Thorpe's bluster hardly imposes on the artless Catherine, whose
ignorance at eighteen is abysmal; General Tilney is a man of the world:
yet in a matter vital to his interest General Tilney reposes implicit confidence
in the word of a stranger whose blackguardism is vociferous.
It has been correctly observed that the second part of Northanger Abbey
is less interesting than the first. There is a curious break and falling-off
in the middle of the tale which I can only explain on the theory that it
underwent some mysterious internal lesion. It was prosperous and joyous
in its own course; it swerved from that course without adequate reason;
and it ceased to prosper and rejoice. The Bath part has a charm peculiar
to itself in Miss Austen's work, a charm almost anticipative of the lighter
and readier touch of the later decades of the nineteenth century. There
is a brisk patter of incident, a light, sprightly cursiveness, a gayety
of movement that sweeps along even the disappointments and heartaches in
the alacrity of its buoyant course. In a word it is the sort of story that
thrives in a pump-room and mopes in an abbey. Why, then, send it to an
abbey? I do not mind an Il Penseroso after my L'Allegro, if I can have
a Milton to write it for me; but Miss Austen's Il Penseroso would tempt
nobody to forsake "the gay motes that people the sunbeam" in Bath or any
other cheerful watering-place. Miss Austen has not even the excuse of having
wound up her affairs in Bath. Her affairs in Bath are most distinctly not
wound up; the affairs of Isabella plead for further elucidation on the
spot, and John Thorpe's pursuit of Catherine actually clamors for a settlement
of its claims in the place of its origin. But Miss Austen packs us off,
bag and baggage, with a peremptoriness which she might have learned from
the hare-brained General Tilney himself. Of course there is the satire
on romance to supply a motive; but if the satire on romance is to furnish
us with no better amusement than we find at Northanger Abbey, I think the
ghost of Mrs. Radcliffe is avenged.
The first remark on Catherine Morland's character has been anticipated
in my comments on the plot. She has a taste for romantic novels, but the
texture of her mind is wholly unromantic. Romanticism has not struck in;
it merely dusts the surface of the character. Her charm lies very largely
in an incipient good sense which is held down for the moment by her ignorance
of reality and her delight in fiction. The body has barely flowered, and
the mind is still unblown, and the result is a grace which is rather seasonal
than personal. Her mind is not only simple; it is plain; she will pass
from girlhood to matronhood without any interval of young-ladyship. Strangely
enough, I find her the most winning of Miss Austen's heroines in the absence
of nearly every quality which makes the heroines of other novelists pleasant
in my eyes. I am rather shocked to find myself preferring her to Elizabeth,
that "darling child," on whom her parent lavished a fondness that reminds
one a very little of Sir Waiter Elliot and the Elizabeth whom he blindly
favored.
I think I am drawn to Catherine by the fact that she is the only one
of the heroines who acts like a young girl. Anne Elliot's youthfulness
is past; she already wears the willow, and her attitude imitates its droop.
Emma, Elizabeth, and Elinor (they run to E's like the early Saxon kings)
are not really young.
I reject the futility of baptismal register young. and the vain umpireship
of the family Bible. They all impress us as having sat on boards; we are
lucky if we do not feel that they are sitting on them in our very presence.
Marianne's conversation is ten years older than her behavior. I shall be
told that Fanny Price is a young girl. Miss Becky Sharp was obliged by
circumstances to be her own mamma; to my mind, Fanny Price is obliged by
nature to be her own maiden aunt. But Catherine Morland is young in the
fashion of young girls whom I actually know, simple, warm-hearted, pleasure-loving,
diffident between her impulses and eager behind her shyness, a few strong
interests and vivid likings checkering the unresponsiveness of girlhood
to the proffers and urgencies of life. Miss Austen has stinted her of attributes
and yet kept her distinct. The note of her small but clear personality
is never hushed in that Bath turmoil in which Isabella shrills and John
Thorpe bellows. Isabella and John may silence Catherine, but her very silences
are audible. There is little to Catherine perhaps, but what there is is
firm. You may call her a particle if you like, but the particle is a granule.
Henry Tilney is a dancing shape, an image gay; in other words, his
humor is the best and biggest part of him. His virtues are unmistakable,
but they efface themselves in the company of his spirits like obliging
aunts and grandmammas in the presence of madcap juniors. Goldwin Smith
finds him so like his clerical brother. Edmund Bertram, as to threaten
the stability of Macauby's famous observation on the unlikeness of Miss
Austen's young divines. To my thought he resembles Edmund Bertram about
as much as tomato salad resembles peach marmalade. His gayeties and railleries
are not definitively clerical, and in this point he reminds one of Mr.
Breckon, Mr. Howells's young Unitarian pastor in the Kenions. Mr. Breckon
paid his calling the deference of an occasional doubt as to whether a person
so jovial and quizzical as himself was qualified to lead his fellow-men
in worship. No such doubt visits the mind of Mr. Tilney. The clerical profession
in Miss Austen's day appears never to have pestered its votaries with any
scruple as to their qualifications; in fact it gave little trouble of any
sort. Its unobtrusiveness was quite endearing.
I confess that I am drawn to a young man who can make much of a young
girl in the very act of making fun of her; the combination is sound. Henry's
treatment of Catherine, if free in appearance, is really delicate. Perhaps
amusement and condescension pass a little too speedily into love; if the
growth of his affection is too slow to keep pace with Catherine's, it is
quite swift enough to outrun nature. One of the capital points in which
Miss Austen flouts the romantic tradition is conveyed in the following
words: "I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better
than gratitude; or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality
for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought." On this
point Miss Austen's courage is delightful, and there is no doubt that in
principle she is entirely correct. The only adverse comment on the specific
case is that gratitude is among the most fragile of human traits, and it
is difficult to conceive that plank so slender should adequately bridge
a chasm so broad as that which divides the minds at least Catherine Morland
and Henry Tilney. Miss Austen crows over the insulted romanticist in making
Henry Tilney love Catherine Morland because she loves him. But does not
romanticism turn the tables Miss Austen when she arranges a match between
so ill-matched a young couple with an appended guarantee of lasting happiness?
Catherine's strong points are South and artlessness, and both these qualities
have a reckoning to make with Gratitude is a shortlived passion. Can we
trust the longevity of a love which is its offspring?
Of Henry Tilney's relatives little need be said. The general is an
ogre quite unfit to be the father of the young prince in a modern fairy
tale, and conducts himself with a blind folly from which even the possession
of a single eye should have protected him. He qualifies himself equally
for the straitjacket and the halter. Elinor Tilney is little more than
a suave excuse for the approximation of Henry and Catherine.
The Bath party cannot be quite so brusquely dismissed. Mrs. Allen,
whom Miss Austen despatches in a few cavalier strokes of brilliant exaggeration,
is perhaps as good a portrayal of pure inanity as the history of literature
can supply. The creation of Mrs. Allen points to a momentary suspension
in Nature's proverbial abhorrence of a vacuum. She undertakes the duties
of a chaperon with that cheerfulness which is the outgrowth of a complete
indifference to their fulfilment. She is the most amiable and the most
selfish of human beings, and human nature is of course both shamefully
maligned and tinglingly enlivened in the mere tip or extremity of itself
which it sees reproduced in the unequalled Mrs. Allen. The odd thing--the
all but impossible thing outside of Miss Austen--is that inanity should
be clean-cut. Even emptiness for Miss Austen is not vague. If she drew
a zero, she would give it angles.
Miss Austen's treatment of the redoubtable Isabella Thorpe may be said
to have found a model in the dash and smartness of Isabella herself. On
the surface this young lady is all modesty, sensibility, devotion. Inwardly,
she is heartless, impudent, perfidious. Hypocrisy is inevitable, and it
is the fashion of this hypocrisy that imparts to Miss Austen's treatment
its rare vivacity and its real unsoundness. Isabella Thorpe is fool as
well as hypocrite, and, at the very moment when her hypocrisy is covering
her meanness, her folly is drawing away the screen from her meanness and
her hypocrisy alike. Her rule is to say one thing and within the space
of five minutes to do or say something that; is in open and violent contradiction
to the initial speech. The rawness of this method is incontestable. Even
a fool would avoid the constant recurrance of these obvious clashes, and
Isabella's excuses show an agility which ought to have fitted her to evade
the continual necessity of evasion. It is Miss Austen's way to bestow great
alertness on persons to whom she peremptorily refuses an atom of sense.
In view of the widespread belief in the delicacy of Miss Austen's craftsmanship--a
belief which is as beautifully justified by a part of her work as it is
refuted and mocked by another--I shall clarify my point a little further
by contrasting Isabella with Hialmar Ekdal in Ibsen's Wild Duck. Hialmar,
like Isabella, is a sentimental hypocrite, masking selfishness and heartlessness
under professions of tenderness and magnanimity. Ibsen's portrayal, though
very forcible, is not remarkably delicate; it scores too constantly against
Hialmar to maintain an agreement with reality. But in comparison with Miss
Austen's Isabella, Ibsen's not over-scrupulous portrait is delicacy itself.
Hialmar, like Isabella, falls into open self-contradiction. The beer which
his plaintiveness has refused is accepted in the next second by his magnanimity,
and his semi-abstraction consumes the bread-and-butter which his self-respect
had imperiously declined. But in a very long and minute portrayal this
unsoftened self-reversal occurs only a very few times. Other means are
freely used for bringing out the weakness of the character; there are even
times, though never long times, in which the exposure of its littleness
is suspended. Miss Austen's method is as monotonous as the character she
draws is unshaded. It is only fair to the Englishwoman to repeat that she
has not failed to attain the vivacity to which temperance and truth have
been so ruthlessly sacrificed. Those who smarten up reality have their
reward, and the reward in Miss Austen's Isabella is considerable.
The last character that demands attention is John Thorpe. What will
Jane Austen do with such a character? That a keen woman should succeed
with a young springal and prodigal like Tom Bertram, that she should succeed
with unbending and powerful masculinity in Mr. Knightley, need not surprise
us overmuch. But what will the sheltered and circumspect spinster, the
young girl born and bred in an English vicarage, make of a sheer blackguard
mildly qualified with dunce and booby? The answer is that the success is
extraordinary. John Thorpe is drawn with absolute clearness, with great
apparent accuracy, and with a hidden zest from which a cynic might infer
that the horror women feel for insolence and rudeness is often only an
inverted sympathy. If Sheridan had dramatized Northanger Abbey for Drury
Lane, I doubt if he would have found it necessary to add one coarsening
or one enlivening touch to the demure novelist's portrayal of this loud-mouthed
and bullying young Englishman. In saying this I concede that the picture
is highly charged, but the excess, if I may be indulged in the paradox,
is not excessive. What is excess from the point view of the painstaking
and conscientious historian may be moderation from the point of view of
the painstaking and conscientious artist. The cases of John and Isabella
are essentially different. Isabella is disclosed by an obvious artifice,
by assigning permanence to what in the real world is merely occasional.
But loudness and impudence are capable of indefinite prolongation even
in life itself, and Austen has done nothing more than magnify the truth
without altering its quality.
Part of Jane Austen E-texts, etc, compiled and maintained by Cathy Dean**
July 12, 1998 | Comments? E-mail
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http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/austen