- 75 -
from the face and arranged in so carefully careless a manner that it seems to be wandering at will. One of the indications that Sense and Sensibility was composed fourteen years at least before its publication may be found in the incident of Willoughby's cutting off a piece of Marianne's hair, as, although they were in the parlor, she was sitting with it "all tumbled down her back." The gentleman who had raped a lock from the Grecian coiffure of 1811, would have caused his victim to cry out with Belinda:
O hadst thou, cruel, been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!
Nowhere in the novel is the author's unerring touch upon character better shown than in the fact that Marianne, with all her exasperating faults, was of the type which was, quite irrespective of her personal beauty, strongly attractive to the opposite sex. "Gaiety was never a part of my character," says Edward Ferrars. Elinor replies: "Nor do I think it a part of Marianne's. I should hardly call her a lively girl--she is very earnest, very eager in all she does--sometimes talks a great deal, and always with animation--but she is not often really merry."
But Marianne's earnest animation was bewitching, and her
"eagerness of fancy and spirits" seized on the imagination more than any frivolity, however entertaining. Nor was her charm diminished by the fact that she was quite without a sense of humor. The present age has added so many decades to the period of youth that it is a little difficult to understand the impression Jane Austen meant to make in saying that Colonel Brandon was thirty-six; but a rough calculation is sufficient for one to realize the absurdity of Marianne's remarks when she debated the possibility of the
- 76 -
Colonel, old as he was, finding some woman of seven and twenty or so who might be pleased to marry him.
"'A woman of seven and twenty,' said Marianne after pausing a moment, 'can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife. In his marrying such a woman, therefore, there would be nothing unsuitable. It would be a compact of convenience, and the world would be satisfied. In my eyes it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing'"; though the full effect of this pronouncement is perhaps not appreciated until it is discovered that Marianne herself, at the age of nineteen, became the Colonel's loving and devoted wife. The wrong-headedness of
Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, in the one case leading her to hasty and altogether erroneous judgments, and in the other hurrying her favorite child to calamity, does not detract from the charm of its possessors any more than it would in real life; the opposite quality is the one dangerous to fascination; it is not that men positively admire a woman for defective powers of judgment, but that they feel
instinctively ill at ease with one of calm and acute perception. Elinor was of the latter sort, and if the portrait of her lover Edward Ferrars seems colorless and flat, one can say at least this for it: that it represents the kind of man who might reasonably be expected to fall in love with Elinor.
Marianne's firm conviction that no one who understood the meaning of love could ever feel it twice was in harmony with all her other ideas and tastes. It seems strange to us that the sensitive, gentle, melancholy Cowper should have afforded such ecstatic delight to a mind as ardent as Marianne's,
- 77 -
but that does not mar our appreciation of the scene where she was obliged to listen to his verses read aloud by the well-meaning Edward. "'I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!'"
"'He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper.'"
"'Nay, mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!'" Edward was equally deficient in a taste for the picturesque; he visited them at Barton, and when the sisters were showing him the views of the neighborhood, he said the country was beautiful but that the bottoms must be dirty in winter; to which Marianne exclaimed: "'How can you think of dirt with such objects before you?'"
"'Because,' he replied smiling, 'amongst the rest of the objects before me, I see a very dirty lane.'"
"'How strange!' said Marianne to herself as she walked on.'"
Edward gives an amusing comparison between the terminology of
the student of the picturesque and that of the ordinary observer.
When Marianne questions him eagerly as to the parts of the scenery he has most admired, he says: "'You must not inquire too far, Marianne. . . . I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. . . . It exactly answers my idea of a fine country . . . and I daresay it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories,
- 78 -
grey moss and brushwood, but they are all lost on me.'" Marianne was not offended; she had too settled a conviction that she herself was right. Her sensibility was dangerous because it was so genuine; the impossibility of Elinor's task in trying to induce her to be more guarded in her attitude to Willoughby lay in the fact that Marianne thought that reserve or caution towards a man for whom she felt a mutual affection, though he had not as yet proposed to her, was not tiresome or prudish merely, but utterly ignoble. On every occasion where she might have been more comfortable by exercising self-control she regarded it as a moral obligation to herself to be as uncomfortable as possible. The day after Willoughby had left
Devonshire, albeit his return was expected almost immediately,
"Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting with Willoughby.
She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it." But at the climax of the affair, when Willoughby's desertion is made plain and announced in a manner of such startling brutality, the criticism of Marianne which is so perpetually implied is for once quite absent, and the scene is offered whole and entire in impartial conviction.
"Before the housemaid had lit their fire next day, or the sun gained any power over a cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her. In this situation, Elinor, roused from sleep by her agitation and sobs, first perceived her; and after observing her for a few moments with silent anxiety, said, in a tone of the most considerate gentleness,
- 79 -
'Marianne, may I ask--' 'No, Elinor,' she replied, 'ask nothing. You will soon know all.' The sort of desperate calmness with which this was said lasted no longer than while she spoke, and was immediately followed by a return of the same excessive affliction. It was some minutes before she could go on with her letter; and the frequent bursts of grief, which still obliged her at intervals to withhold her pen, were proof enough of her feeling how more than probable it was that she was writing for the last time to Willoughby."
She spent the time till breakfast wandering about the house, avoiding everybody, and after breakfast, during which Elinor had done her best to distract the attention of Mrs. Jennings, "a letter was delivered to Marianne which she eagerly caught from the servant, and, turning of a deathlike paleness, instantly ran out of the room. Elinor, who saw as plainly by this as if she had seen the direction, that it must come from Willoughby, felt immediately such a sickness at heart as made her hardly able to hold up her head, and sat in such a general tremor as made her fear it impossible to esca
pe Mrs. Jennings'
notice. That good lady, however, saw only that Marianne had
received a letter from Willoughby, which appeared to her a very good joke, and which she treated accordingly by hoping with a laugh that she would find it to her liking." She went on to talk of their forthcoming marriage, which had been the standing topic of
conversation at Barton for the past several months; and Elinor tried in vain to make her believe that Marianne and Willoughby were not formally engaged; Mrs. Jennings put down all these denials to
slyness, and assured her that she was not to be taken in. Elinor at length gave up the unequal struggle; "eager at all events to know what Willoughby had written, [she] hurried away to their room, where, on opening the door, she saw Marianne stretched on the bed, almost
- 80 -
choked by grief, a letter in her hand, and two or three others lying by her. Elinor drew near, but without saying a word, and seating herself on the bed, took her hand and kissed her affectionately several times, and then gave way to a burst of tears which at first was scarcely less violent than Marianne's. The latter, though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behavior, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor's hands, and then, covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony."
Allowing for the natural difficulty of one great creative artist properly to estimate another, it is not easy to understand what Charlotte Brontë meant by saying that Jane Austen's heroines have only so much acquaintance with the passions as their author would think lady-like.
After a period of distraught, oblivious misery, Marianne allowed Elinor to accept for them an invitation to go with Mrs. Jennings to the Palmers' house at Cleveland: because Marianne wanted to be at home and thought that this would be the quickest means of getting there. The Palmers were wealthy enough to have a house constructed on the rules of taste. It was "situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and like every other place of the same importance, it had its open shrubbery and closed wood-walk; a road of smooth gravel winding round a
plantation, led to the front; the lawn was dotted over with timber; the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain ash and the acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices." Marianne, whose heart "swelled with emotion" to think that Willoughby's seat, Combe Magna, was not thirty miles distant, determined that she would make her stay endurable with the relief of
- 81 -
long walks alone in the twilight; and "while the others were busily helping Charlotte show her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, and stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of the hills in the horizon and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna could be seen."
The long course of wretchedness in which Marianne had indulged made her so low in health that when she caught a chill it developed into something serious. "Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had--assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings--given Marianne a cold so violent, as, though for a day or two trifled with and denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of everybody."
The cold and sore throat having developed into what the apothecary diagnosed as a putrid fever, Mrs. Palmer, nervous for her baby, left the house for a relation's and took Mr. Palmer with her. Mrs.
Jennings and Colonel Brandon remained to help and comfort Elinor, and when at last Marianne became desperately ill the Colonel went off in his own carriage to fetch Mrs. Dashwood from Barton. While he was actually gone, Marianne took an unexpected turn for the better, and Elinor, who at first scarcely dared to believe her eyes, longed with passionate impatience for her mother to arrive and receive the good news herself.
- 82 -
"The night was cold and stormy. The wind roared round the house, and the rain beat against the windows; but Elinor, all happiness within, regarded it not. Marianne slept through every blast; and the travellers--they had a rich reward in store, for every present inconvenience."
"The clock struck eight. Had it been ten, Elinor would have been convinced that at that moment she heard a carriage driving up to the house; and so strong was the persuasion that she did, in spite of the almost impossibility of their being already come, that she moved into the adjoining dressing-closet and opened a window-shutter, to be satisfied of the truth. She instantly saw that her ears had not deceived her. The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view. By their uncertain light she thought she could discern it to be drawn by four horses; and this, while it told the excess of her poor mother's alarm, gave some explanation to such unexpected rapidity."
"Never in her life had Elinor found it so difficult to be calm, as at that moment. The knowledge of what her mother must be feeling as the carriage stopped at the door--or her doubt--her dread--perhaps her despair?--and of what she had to tell?--with such knowledge it was impossible to be calm. . . . The bustle in the vestibule as she passed along an inner lobby, assured her that they were already in the house. She rushed forward towards the drawing-room--she
entered it--and saw only Willoughby."
The dramatic surprise of this entry is sustained by the unexpected but convincing fashion in which Willoughby explains his conduct, though he cannot explain it away. His account of what led him to appear a scoundrel is not one of the arresting psychological studies, such as are furnished by the comic or satirical episodes; but it is perhaps, with the conversation of the second chapter, the soundest, most searching
- 83 -
analysis of motive in the book. There are portions of the novel which one imagines may be the fruit of revision; when, for instance, Elinor disclosed to Marianne that Edward had for two years been entangled in an engagement with Lucy Steele, Marianne considered Lucy "so totally unamiable, so absolutely incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she could not be persuaded at first to believe, and
afterwards to pardon, any former affection of Edward for her. She would not even admit it to have been natural; and Elinor left her to be convinced that it was so, by that which only could convince her, a better knowledge of mankind." One does not know whether that last sentence was written by Jane Austen at twenty-two or Jane Austen at thirty-six; but the conduct of Willoughby is so integral a part of the story that it must have been conceived, with all its understanding of a weak, vicious yet fascinating character, at the time of the story's origin. The episode of Marianne and Willoughby is indeed
condemned from its outset; it brings out the worst characteristics in each, and Marianne at least recovers from it as if from some painful disease; yet it is a thing of beauty, and it sounds a note Jane Austen never repeated, when Willoughby says to Elinor in asking her to tell Marianne of his confession: "You tell me she has forgiven me already. Let me be able to fancy that a better knowledge of my heart, and of my present feelings, will draw from her a more spontaneous, more natural, more gentle, less dignified forgiveness."
Even in this early work, Jane Austen's achievement suffers great injustice from an attempt to discuss it in parts, to illustrate it by detached quotations; for her very first novel shows a capacity for construction, and for making all her characters act upon each other amazing in a writer who was so young that one would have expected the book to be a
- 84 -
series of passages, brilliant in themselves but not making each one an indispensable contribution to the whole. Art lies in c
oncealing art, and it is true that the framework of Sense and Sensibility is obvious; that, in a sense, is why it is so remarkable; beneath the enthusiastic delight in creating character, the conscious preoccupation with some favorite ideas about conduct and common sense, the light and shade of romantic passion, and the itch that besets us all, to make a personal comment upon the trends and fashions of the day, is the instinctive, faultless sense of balance, the intellectual attack upon form, which matured into that unique quality of hers, the power to impose a shape upon her material without sacrificing anything to probability.
- 85 -
7
JANE AUSTEN'S existence was apparently without incident; the
answer to such a comment lies in six works of art, and one cannot avoid the question of how much actual experience of character and scene she incorporated into her novels in recognizable form. Of trivial details there are not many, but there are some; perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some knowledge of her daily life enables one to guess, here and there, with some degree of
confidence, that she is at least modelling her creation on experience, especially, one believes, with reference to visual description: the view from Mr. Darcy's drawing room windows, the vast kitchen
premises of Northanger Abbey, Donwell Abbey "with all the old neglect of prospect." A few, a very few minor characters seemed to her family ascribable to people they knew or had known. We
ourselves are occasionally tempted to think that in the relationship, at least, of one character to another, if not in the characters themselves, as in Jane Bennet's influence on her brilliant sister, Emma Woodhouse's grateful affection for her older friend Mrs.
Microsoft Word - Copy of Jane Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins.doc Page 8