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