Jane is probably commemorative--the liquidation of some debt of affection
and homage. She is the angelic person who delights the middle-class reader,
and she is naturally rather tedious to that kind of upper-class reader
who regulates his aversions by the raptures of the middle class. In Jane
there is a contrast between the softness of the material and the firmness
of the handling which is interesting to the thoughtful student of Miss
Austen. In calling the material soft I do not contest Jane's possession
of judgment and a kind of fortitude. We are impressed with the strength
of her defenses, even while we are a little impatient of the weakness which
requires the evocation of so much hardihood for its subdual. We like Jane,
but perhaps we are tried by her emotion when we ought to be touched by
it. We feel pain for her, but we do not feel that pleasure in our pain
which draws and wins us in the case of Ellen Douglas or of Lily Dale. We
are behind a closed door, and the exclusion magnifies our sense of the
suffering, while it denies us the solace of participation.
Elizabeth's Bennet's value as a character is large, though not transcendent,
and her interest as a study is extreme. If it is hard to find room for
Jane's judgment in the rifts of her sensibility, it is hard to find room
for Elizabeth's sensibility in the crevices of her judgment. We might think
her made by formula; her very speech seems diagramed. These impressions
are delusive. Elizabeth has all the human, all the womanly, traits, but
she holds them by the oddest of tenures. Her figure possesses the indispensable
feminine curves, but these curves are so gradual and so elongated that
in viewing any small arc of her character we might readily mistake them
for straight lines. Her delightful humor should temper the precision of
her intellect, but the humor itself has a sharpness of definition so unusual
that it all but reinforces the precision it should qualify. Elizabeth has
a woman's variations, but her shifts are so'massive and so deliberate that
to a remote or careless glance they have much the air of constancy. She
has impulses, as a woman should have, but the reader must know her pretty
well, before he can tell these impulses from plans. In short, there is
a woman, even a girl, inside Elizabeth, but you must rummage to find either.
Compare her with Beatrice in Shakespeare, with Diana Vernon in Scott's,
Rob Roy, with Patience Oriel in Trollope's Doctor Thorne. What is the difference?
In the last three cases the temperament wields the intelligence, and is
dignified by the brilliancy of its utensil. In Elizabeth the intelligence
wields--or seems to wield--the temperament. In the firm edges and broad
surfaces of her character there is both satisfaction and unrest. There
is not a fold in her personality, or if research lights upon a fold it
is so straight and so severe that it leaves an effect of added candor,
not of coyness. So much formality would have frozen a less spirited woman;
so much spirit would have ignited less formality. Elizabeth's position
is curiously intermediate.
In Mary Bennet Miss Austen courted disaster. Miss Austen's own serious
conversation is exaggerated almost to the point of burlesque in respect
of the conversation of real people. One shudders to think what will happen
when Miss Austen sets forth her own notion of exaggeration and burlesque.
Mary justifies the shudder.
If Kitty is the least interesting, she is likewise the least exceptionable,
of the portraits in the Bennet family. In the lifelike limpness and tameness
of this subsidiary character the evoctttive force of a very few touches,
when the few touches are Miss Austen's, is happily evinced.
Lydia Bennet herself is hardly more reckless thaa Miss Austen is reckless
in the lengths to which she permits the boisterousness and shamelessness
of Lydia to go. The drawing is unbridled. Here is a girl who disgraces
herself, tries and sentences herself in every speech--a, thing hardly compatible
with human nature. Her want of conscience, her want of decorum, are perhaps
barely conceivable. But I can it be imagined that a girl whose pleasures
and ambitions are purely social should be absolutely indifferent to the
preservation of her claims to the respect or even the tolerance of society?
She is a gentleman's daughter; she has two sisters who are models of refinement;
and she has not one ladylike instinct, not one vestige of decorum. Scott
is thought to be impromptu and swashing in comparison with Miss Austen,
but compare the shading in the character of the compromised and fugitive
Effie Deans with Miss Austen's big bow-wow portrayal of Lydia Bennet.
Nevertheless gross as the characterization is, it is vigorous in its
crude way. If the strokes are few, their vividness is unequalled; and,
if they have no support in human nature, they reënforce each other.
Even individuality is secured, though how individuality can be imparted
to a character that has neither variety nor moderation is a paradox before
its acomplishment and a secret afterward. Lydia's individuality rests mainly
on a self-reliance which gives a massiveness to her very levity and is
intrin- sically a respectable trait. I think that Miss Austen felt this,
though I doubt if she was awake to her own feeling.
Darcy, the problem of the book, is also its failure. He is neither
firmly drawn nor clearly understood. A really estimable character is to
appear intolerable throughout the first half of a book, and to reveal a
climax of virtue in the last half. The condition of success in this adventure
is that no offense shall be specified in the premises which cannot be forgiven
as venial or explained as illusory in the conclusion. Miss Austen is too
fond of violent coloring to observe this rule. Darcy is merely the shell
of a character, and the two lips of the shell will not meet.
When he first appears, he speaks insultingly of a young girl within
her hearing. After that, all is over, and to search the character for virtues
is to delve among ruins for salvage. Goldwin Smith's comments on this behavior
leave nothing whatever to be said either in supplement or in retort. "Nobody
but a puppy would reply when he was asked to let himself be introduced
to a young lady, 'She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me;
and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who
are slighted by other men.'" Strange things no doubt passed as ladies and
gentlemen in Miss Austen's day, but it is difficult to imagine that puppyhood
and magnanimity shared a character between them in any age. Darcy has not
exhausted his littleness in this remark. The thrift of Miss Austen has
provided him with a reserve of enormities. He insults Elizabeth in the
act of soliciting her hand. Later on, he writes her a letter in which he
vilifies her family, and excuses this indecency on the characteristic ground
that "my character required that it be written and read." In a word, the
recovery of her esteem is to be chased by her mortification in the perusal
of insults to her nearest relatives. This is the conduct of man whose character,
in the sequel, is to be pictured as the abode and meeting-place not only
of all virtues but of all the delicacies. One does not envy the virtues
and the delicacies their lodgings.
Miss Austen's explanation of all this is that he was spoiled in his
youth, that his pride was not innate or ingrained, but a cloak or even
a shawl, which dropped off at once and forever the moment a young woman
with a mind of her own gave it a vigorous twitch by rejecting its wearer.
Darcy, however, is long past the juvenilities of life, and his strong character--we
are assured that it is strong--is fully ripened. His pride is not a gentleman's
pride, but a sullen and forbidding arrogance, a pride that flaunts its
own withdrawals and isolations, that battens on the mortifications it inflicts.
He is like Dombey, except that he is not absolute fool, and the change
he exhibits is only a little less incredible than the change by which Dombey,
in the language of the uncompromising Taine, "I spoiled a fine novel."
His churlishness in society would have a certain excuse, if, like the imperious
Rochester in Jane Eyre, he had a temperament to which society was an episode
or a bagatelle. But Darcy is as much a social animal as Bingley or Wickham;
he is that unpleasing and unlucky combination in which the social ideal
consorts with the unsocial temper.
An owl I fancied scared by night,
A fish that had the water-fright--
though in Darcy it is dislike rather than scare that is visible. There
is a stiffness in almost all the man's movements; it abates a little in
the spring warmth of his first hesitating attraction toward Elizabeth,
but soon reasserts itself, especially in the love-making, which has an
effect of being done by clockwork. Even bis anger is heavy; it makes him
vehement, but it cannot make him supple. There is one happy stroke in which
Miss Austen, who is wiser than she sometimes chooses to let her patrons
suspect, indicates the survival of the old man in the spick-and-span paragon
whom she has obligingly revamped for the delectation of the uncritical
reader. When he revokes the inhibition he has laid upon Bingley, Elizabeth
cannot "help smiling at his easy manner of directing his friend. . . .
Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful
friend--so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked
herself." Does Miss Austen often check herself, with the satiric truth
balancing on her lips?
As portraits I prefer either Bingley or Wickham to Darcy. The delineation
is sparing, almost frugal in both cases; the margin round the text is blank
and broad. Bingley, slight as he is, possesses an individuality, the key
to which may possibly be found in his union of impulsiveness with docility.
He is one of those persons in whom an effect of general adequacy to the
immediate occasion is combined with final insignificance. He is not a mere
nobody; he is not a mere anybody: yet we feel that his proximity to both
those characters might have made a more perceptive wife than Jane uncomfortable.
That his winningness should somehow percolate through scant portrayal to
the indifferent mind of the half-attentive reader is proof of the delicacy
of Miss Austen's touch.
Side by side with the attachable and detachable Bingley, we have in
Wickham another happy illustration of the multum in parvo form of character
drawing. We know of Wickham's person only what we can extract from the
brief generalities of a single uncommunicative sentence. "His appearance
was greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance,
a good figure, and very pleasing address." We do not hear his voice, or
discriminate his tones, and his speeches, which are consciensiously reported,
are suggestive of an abstract and colorless propriety. Yet somehow Wickham
is got before us. His entrance is clandestine, but his presence is unmistakable.
The word that embodies him, to my imagination at least, is velvety. He
is the demure, pensive, and pathetic rascal; be had wished to be a clergyman,
and he is not unlike the sort of man whom one can imagine the Reverend
Laurence Sterne to have beenat any rate that traditional Sterne whom Thackeray
amused himself by impaling in the English Humourists. His aplomb is exemplary;
it is very nearly as good as innocence. Miss Austen, who is the kind of
person to accept a bon mot as expiation for a felony if the transaction
could be kept inviolably secret, is rather more tolerant of Wickham than
so responsible a woman has any right to be.
I do not think that the prodigious and portentous Mr. Collins is fully
entitled to the superlative praise he has elicited in certain quarters.
He is rather too unqualified himself to be admired without qualification.
Miss Austen's stroke is bold and blunt, and she begrudges the character
every delicacy--I mean of course artistic, not moral, delicacy--which could
impair its rollicking completeness. There is a conceptual felicity in the
union of egregious self-importance with gross toadyism. The sycophant to
rank who is boaster and bully to his inferiors is by no means a rare figure,
but the imperturbable selfrespect of the incorrigibly fawning Mr. Collins
is something for which memory is slow to parallels. His flunkyism has a
peculiar literary virtue; it is not in the least disinterested, but, in
a gross way, it is sincere. We wants the wages, but he likes the job. What
is policy in its origin becomes religion in the process; most religions
have doubless grown up in the same way. Thackeray, with his proclivity
for moral discovery, showed us later, in his account of Tom Tusher, how
caste-worship might turn inward. "Twas no hypocrisy in him to flatter but
the bent of his mind, which was always perfectly good-humoured, obliging,
and servile."
Mr. Collins is amusing, undoubtedly, but he fatigues almost as much
as he enlivens. The pungency of verbiage has been overrated. Even in the
famous and excellent Micawber, it is doubtful if the rotundity of the periods
is to be counted as yeast or dough in the ingredients of that eccentric
bread-making. The lawyers in Browning's Ring and Book are intolerable.
The chief satisfaction of laughing at a character is to feel that we are
getting the better of him, and, even while we laugh at Mr. Collins, we
feel that his mighty periods and redoubtable diction are getting the better
of us. The laughter cannot pierce the bore, but the bore, as his name wittily
indicates, can penetrate anything, including tbe laugher. What chiefly
troubles me in Mr. Collins is the reconciliation of his sophistications
with his clownishness. There is not the slightest artistic reason why a
man who writes an English far beyond the capacity of most professional
men in America, and who makes a point of scrupulous adhesion to the ritual
of politeness should not insult his kinsfolk and triumph in their misfortunes.
But, while he may be as low-minded as a carter in the substance of his
communication, I doubt if he could address a gentleman in these terms:
The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison
of this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to
suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behaviour
in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though,
at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am
inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she
could not be guilty of such an enormity at so early an age. . . . They
agree with me in apprehending that this false step in one daughter will
be injurious to the fortunes of all the others; for who, as Lady Catherine
herself condescendingly says, will connect themselves with such a family?
And this consideration leads me moreover to reflect, with augmented satisfaction,
on a certain event of last November; for had it been otherwise, I must
have been involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. This passage appears
to be enjoyed; at all events the letter is quoted in full by Goldwin Smith
as one of the "charming" things in Pride and Prejudice. To me it seems
neither enjoyable nor true. I do not quarrel with its vindictiveness or
cruelty; I quarrel with its open vulgarity. This is not the brutality of
the parsonage, though parsonages may be brutal in their kind; it is the
brutality of the sponging-house, the barrack, and the counter, with a bedizenment
of Johnsonese which those haunts could not parallel. I may add that to
laugh at Mr. Collins in this phase is almost a form of complicity, and
admission of kinship. A world in which the record of insults to sensitive
women in calamity can amuse the refined is of one substance with the world
in which their perpetration can delight the vulgar.
Charlotte Lucas, who marries Mr. Collins for prudential reasons, is
hardly drawn at all, yet her sitution is strangely disquieting. In the
few plain words in which her sedate and steadfast fortitude is suggested
to the wakeful reader there is the intimation of a tragedy which awes us
like the neighborhood of death. That the martyrdom is voluntary and that
the martyr is pedestrian and calculating does not alter the decorous grimness
of a situation in the drawing of which the pencil of Mary Wilkins Freeman
might have found an acrid pleasure. Charlotte says nothing, and Miss Austen
very little; the continence of both is impressive, almost dismaying. One
thinks with heartbreak of a social order in which a woman of family and
education could find marriage with Mr. Collins the preferable alternative.
Literature has strange repercussions, and in this quiet English country-side,
amid these inexorable decorums, I catch a faint foreshadowing of the dilemma
(or trilemma) from which a nimble and bustling French dramatist was to
rend the veil with cruel abruptness in the Three Daughters of Monsieur
Dupont. Nothing makes me respect Miss Austen more than her portrayal of
Charlotte Collins.
Miss Austen requites herself for the hush in which she has enshrined
the homespun tragedy of Charlotte by the shrillness of her portrayal of
the arrogant and domineering Lady Catherine de Bourgh. They say Miss Austen
is quiet. The elderly friends of young Marlow in the Good-Natured Man said
that he was quiet. They had not seen him with the barmaids. The discoverers
of quiet in Miss Austen have surely not seen her with the titled aristocracy.
Thackeray was a high colorist, a reveller in extremes, but the difference
between Lady Kew, for instance, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the difference
between an extravagant human being and a performer, a trick mule, whom
his trainer exhibits to a delighted audience. I grant the excellence of
the training and the merit of the tricks; but the mule never steps off
the platform. Miss Austen in a quiet novel which leisurely people are to
read by a cosy fireside draws a character of the sort which Moliére
or Congreve would have adapted to the glare of a theatre--that is to say,
she excludes all points but the points of highest relief. The series of
volleys of which this woman's conversation is made is in- consistent--I
will not say with the virtue or the decency--but with the laeiness and
fickleness--of ordinary human nature. Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, is
put on the low ration of half-a-dozen sentences to an entire book, but
those few and scattered words, chosen with infallible judgment, make her
a sounder and more credible human being than her mother.
Miss Bingley, like many of Miss Austen's unpleasant characters, unites
the diction of an academician with the manners of a housemaid. She is clear
enough--unendurably clear in many particulars, but I have a sense of fissures,
of lacunse, in the de lineation. She is like a book from which handfuls
of pages have been casually torn; all is felt to be capable of unification,
but the connective tissue has been snatched away, and incompleteness puts
on the guise of incoherence. The other members of the Darcy-Bingley group
I may be passed over with the single exception of the inconspicuous but
unforgettable Mr. Hurst, of whom Miss Austen supplies the following account:
"As for Mr. Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived
only to eat, drink, and play at cards; who, when he found her prefer a
plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her." Another hint or two
of equal meagreness are furnished later on, and Miss Austen, whose concern
for Mr. Hurst seems to be patterned on his own solicitude for Elizabeth,
has completed her portrait of this porcine individual. In the normal writer--even
in the normal strong writer--this handful of vulgarities would be nothing;
yet somehow in the utterance of these meagre phrases Miss Austen has smuggled
a soul, or whatever in his primitive make-up takes the place of a soul,
into the sluggish and sensual Mr. Hurst. Of just this form of magic I am
not sure that even Shakespeare has given proof.
I have commented on sixteen distinct characters in Pride and Prejudice.
I doubt if another novel of its size can show sixteen characters who invite
or permit comment. To these might be added a list of persons who are by
no means wholly indistinct, Georgiana Darcy, Mrs. Hurst, the two Gardiners,
Mrs. Philips, Colonel Fitzwilliam, Maria Lucas, Sir William Lucas. Here
are twenty-four persons to whom individuality in various amounts is allotted
in a novel which, by the scale of Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot,
must be accounted short. Yet the novel has not that effect of being cumbered
or littered with characters which is more or less noticeable in Scott's
Peveril of the Peale and Mr. Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes. The minor
figures are not tufted or ranged in scattered groups, and the eminence
of the primary actors is never threatened by the intrusion of the subordinates.
I must not close the chapter without noting the rather frequent shifts
of place in the narrative, and the ease and convenience with which the
transfers are effected under the unhurried but unpausing conductorship
of Miss Austen.
Part of Jane Austen E-texts, etc, compiled and maintained by Cathy Dean**
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