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him, although Mr. Knightley never pandered to Mr. Woodhouse's
idiosyncrasies. Mr. Weston and Mr. Cole both liked and respected him; so did Robert Martin, while William Larkins had for him that irascible and proprietary fondness that is a tribute equally to servant and master.
The only person to whom, unsatisfactory as he is, Mr. Knightley appears to do less than justice, is Frank Churchill, and it is in connection with the latter that Mr. Knightley's very endearing weakness is made known. His otherwise concealed love for Emma is perhaps first genuinely apparent to the reader in the ball at the Crown, when Emma says she will dance with him, if he likes,
adding: "'You know, we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper'"; to which he replies: "'Brother and sister!-
-no, indeed!'" But the first manifestation of his jealousy of Frank Churchill comes at a time when it cannot be recognized for what it is.
"'I will say no more about him,' cried Emma--'you turn everything to evil. We are both prejudiced! you against, I for him; and we have no chance of agreeing till he is really here.'"
'"Prejudiced! I am not prejudiced!'"
"'But I am very much, and without being at all ashamed of it. My love for Mr. and Mrs. Weston gives me a decided prejudice in his favor.'"
"'He is a person I never think of from one month's end to another,'
said Mr. Knightley with a degree of vexation, which made Emma
immediately talk of something else, though she could not
comprehend why he should be angry."
The mainspring of his attitude to Frank Churchill is described in the paragraph which concludes the chapter in which he proposes to
Emma in the garden after the storm.
"He had found her agitated and low. Frank Churchill
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was a villain. He heard her declare that she had never loved him.
Frank Churchill's character was not desperate. She was his own Emma, by hand and word, when they returned into the house; and if he could have thought of Frank Churchill then, he might have
deemed him a very good sort of fellow."
Frank Churchill's secret engagement to Jane Fairfax is another of those episodes on which opinion today would be essentially the same as that of 1815, though the criticism would be couched in different terms. No one now supposes that any blame attaches to a secret engagement or to corresponding with a person of the opposite sex to whom an engagement has not been publicly announced. On the other hand, Frank Churchill's conduct would strike a circle of
acquaintances today very much as it impressed the people of
Highbury. To be engaged to one girl and to go about "with manners so very disengaged," almost making love to another; and for two people to have such an alliance with each other, unknown to the rest of society, and to mix with that society as if nothing of the kind existed, would certainly cause a feeling--not of moral indignation, but that an unfair advantage had been taken of unsuspecting people.
A girl who had denied all particular knowledge of a young man, when she was in fact engaged to him, as Jane Fairfax denied any special knowledge of Frank to Emma; and a young man who had
carried on with an unattached girl as Frank had carried on with her, would, today, be scarcely popular in a small town when their secret and long-standing engagement was finally announced.
Jane Fairfax herself is a most interesting creature. Her appearance is described in quite as lovely a passage as Emma's. "It was not regular, but it was very pleasing beauty. Her eyes, a deep grey with dark eyelashes and eyebrows had never been denied their praise; but the skin which she had
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been used to cavil at, as wanting color, had a clearness and delicacy which really needed no fuller bloom. It was a style of beauty of which elegance was the reigning character." We know that Jane's hair was dark, because in the happy conclusion to her story Frank was having some of the family jewels reset for her in an ornament for the head, and said to Emma: "'Will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?'"
One of her keenest misfortunes, to rank with an uncongenial home and the misery of even the illusion of disappointed love, was the prospect, though that also proved illusory, of her having to go for a governess. The vivid presentation of the horrors of such a fate is the more interesting because it occurs in the same book as Mrs. Weston, who, as "poor Miss Taylor that was," had occupied a position of such confidence and affection at Hartfield, that when she married, her one regret was to be leaving "friends who could ill bear to part with her." Emma's love for Mrs. Weston is most beautifully displayed in the sentences that open the fateful party at Randalls.
There was "not anyone to whom she related, with such conviction of being listened to, and always understood, of being always interesting and always intelligible, the little affairs, arrangements, perplexities and pleasures of her father and herself; . . . the very sight of Mrs.
Weston, her smile, her touch, her voice, was grateful to Emma."
The character of Mrs. Weston is perhaps the most attractive in the book, with its common sense only overcome by her affection for Emma, "My Emma," her extraordinary kindness to Mr. Woodhouse, her devotion to her husband and her acute anxiety that for his sake everything about Frank Churchill's behavior shall be satisfactory; nor was she, delightful as she was, undervalued by the family with whom she lived. But Jane Fairfax takes it for granted that when she
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becomes a governess she is to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope." And to Mrs.
Elton's officious inquiries and offers of assistance in helping to find a situation, she says: "'When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something--offices for the sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect.'"
"'Oh, my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave trade, I assure you, Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.'"
"'I did not mean--I was not thinking of the slave trade,' replied Jane;
'governess trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different, certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on, but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.'"
In Mansfield Park, when the casting of "Lovers' Vows" is under discussion, and it is proposed that Julia should take Cottager's Wife, the enamored Mr. Yates exclaims: "'Cottager's Wife! What are you talking of? The most trivial, paltry, insignificant part; the merest commonplace; not a tolerable speech in the whole. Your sister do that! It is an insult to propose it. At Ecclesford the governess was to have done it. We all agreed that it could not be offered to anybody else.'"
On the whole it must be confessed that the position occupied by Lord Ravenshaw's governess was more typical of the governess in general than that of Miss Taylor at Hartfield. At the same time it is almost impossible, when one considers Miss Taylor at one end of the scale, and Agnes Gray at the other, to form a generalized estimate of the position of the governess in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Barnard's Miss Meadows, and Dickens' Ruth
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Pinch--we fully believe in the authenticity of each. It can only be supposed that a position which depended for its comfort almost entirely on the character of the employer, varied as much as human nature itself. Jane Fairfax was thinking of the misery of exile from friends, uncongenial occupation and society in which she held, on however easy a tenure, the position of an upper servant; but as regarded the physical conditions of employment, an elegant, well-bred girl, as highly accomplished as herself, going into a family who could afford to pay for her, might, according to Mrs. Elton, be very fairly comfortable. "'Your musical knowledge alone would entitle you to name your own terms, have as many rooms as you like, and mix in the family as much as you chose; that is--I do not know-
-if you knew the harp, you might do all that, I am very sure; but you sing as well as play; yes, I really believe you might, even without the harp, stipulate for what you chose,--and you must and shall be delightfully, honorably and comfortably settled, before the
Campbells or I have any rest.'"
"'You may well class the delight, the honor and the comfort of such a situation together,' said Jane, 'they are pretty sure to be equal.'"
The humor of Emma is implicit in every turn of the work; and it has not only excellent comic characters such as the Eltons and Harriet Smith, but it is decorated, in the persons of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates, with two of the masterpieces of English comedy. To this gallery Jane Austen had already contributed the portraits of Mr.
Bennet, Mr. Collins and Mrs. Norris; but in their way the two latest achievements surpass even the earlier ones; at least they represent the apotheosis of that method that consists in picking up garden pebbles with the hand of Midas. Mr. Bennet was a man of unusual intellect, Mr. Collins one of nature's strongest
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efforts in foolishness; Mrs. Norris was a singularly disagreeable woman; but there is, in the abstract, nothing outstanding about either of the supreme comic creations of Emma; one is a feeble and silly old man, the other a garrulous and boring old woman. But not when we see them as Jane Austen saw them; never has such commonplace human material been so filled with light. Mr. Woodhouse makes
many appeals to our sympathies. He is touching, when he tries to remember a charade for the girls, and tells Emma regretfully that her mother had been so clever at that kind of thing; when he "fondly notices" the beauty of Emma's dress before she goes to the Coles'
dinner party; when, as the company are playing Word-Making and Word-Taking, he occasionally picks up a letter to remark how well Emma had written it; in his apologetic courtesies to the guests at Hartfield, wishing his health allowed him to be a better neighbor; but none of these appeals is made directly; they steal upon us with unresisted power as we watch the presentation of Mr. Woodhouse, and that is made purely through the medium of comedy. Mr.
Woodhouse is first and foremost a comic character; his
valetudinarianism is a charming folly because it takes as much thought for other people's nerves, colds and indigestion as for his own; his great scenes are concerned with his proposing a boiled egg to Mrs. Bates, or his suggesting that the company, which includes Mr. Knightley and Mr. John Knightley, shall join him in a basin of gruel, or finding fault with the portrait of Harriet Smith because it makes her look as if she were sitting down outside: "'But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer; a warm day in summer. Look at the tree.'"
"'But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear.'"
It is the same thing with Miss Bates; Miss Bates is a more exemplary and sympathetic character than Mr. Woodhouse;
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when the latter was not the prey of his almost unceasing agitation on the score of his own and other people's health and safety, he was having a very pleasant time of it, living in a beautiful house and surrounded by an adoring daughter and friends, whose first concern it was that he should be made as little uneasy as possible on every occasion. But Miss Bates lived on the extremest verge of genteel poverty, with the care of an infirm old mother; yet she was
nonetheless overflowing with cheerfulness, good will, and gratitude for the innumerable blessings she felt that she enjoyed. At the same time, she also is presented to us, her comic aspect foremost. She has been described as a bore; indeed, Emma thought her so; but the flow of her garrulity has that balanced and dramatic quality which it is stimulating to listen to; the sentences frequently run into each other, but they have that emphatic vividness that shows a mind thoroughly alive to diverse interests; her tiresomeness consists in a tendency to what the psychoanalysts describe as "total recall," and it is precisely this quality which makes her superbly comic. Miss Bates' bravura passages are all of great length: as, for example, her conversation, partly delivered out of the window to Mr. Knightley, partly to the company who have come to hear Jane Fairfax's new piano, and the monologue which she keeps up as Frank Churchill conducts her and Jane from the ballroom to the supper room at the Crown. It is not that what she says is ridiculous, but quite the contrary; her comments and remarks are all, in themselves, evidence of a nature that is only too trusting and easily pleased; it is simply that they are poured forth in such unstinting abundance that the listener becomes hypnotized beneath their flow. But though Miss Bates is presented for the purpose of making us laugh, we are not allowed for a moment to lose sight of a proper scale of human values. At the Box Hill picnic Emma
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makes a pert remark to Miss Bates on the subject of her verbosity, and without any sentimentality, indeed with unadorned severity, Mr.
Knightley afterwards takes her to task about it, and Emma drives home with the tears running down her cheeks.
Lord David Cecil has accounted for the extraordinary depth of the impression which Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates make upon us by
the explanation that, highly individualized as each character is, they are not only characteristic of themselves, but of the whole world of the feeble and the foolish as well: that is perhaps why, when we read of Miss Bates and the baked apples, and Miss Bates and her niece's letters, and of her imperceptive, generous gratitude to Mrs. Elton, and her pure, unselfish bliss at the publication of Jane's engagement ("Miss Bates looked about her, so happily")--we are touched far more deeply than the mere occasion seems to warrant.
The figure of Miss Bates is the production of a genius, the touch that called her into life is something we believe in but can never
understand; but that a hint, a spark that set imagination alight may have been caught by Jane Austen from one of her most prosaic
rounds of visiting, is the suggestion of Mr. A. B. Walkley.
In the circle of Godmersham acquaintances visited in Canterbury were included a Mrs. Miles and her daughter. Jane Austen liked old Mrs. Miles "because she is cheerful and grateful for what she is at the age of 90 and upwards." In her Godmersham visit of October 1813 she described a call the party made on Mrs. Miles, in the course of which her daughter came in. Jane said of her: "Miss Miles was as queer as usual and provided us with plenty to laugh at. She undertook in three words to give us the history of Mrs. Scudamore's reconciliation, and then talked on about it for half an
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hour, using such odd expressions, and so foolishly minute, that I could hardly keep my countenance. The death of Wyndham
Knatchbull's son will rather supersede the Scudamores. I told her that he was to be buried at Hatch. She had heard, with military honor at Portsmouth. We may guess how that point will be discussed
evening after evening."
Jane Austen's novels all reflect her view that physical health was essential to female beauty. Marianne Dashwood and Catherine
Morland with their fondness for the open air, and even more the lively, agile Elizabeth Bennet, are in keeping with this kind of attraction. The effects of ill health seemed to Jane Austen nothing but a disadvantage, the destruction of attractiveness. She was entirely at variance with the attitude, so popular with the nineteenth-century novelist, that ill health could be interesting, that the symptoms of consumption were beautiful, or that a hot-house
delicacy of figure or complexion conferred a charm. In none of the heroines, however, is the ideal of vital beauty realized so fully as in Emma. Mrs. Weston says of her: "'There is health not merely in her bloom but in her air, her head, her glance. One hears sometimes of a child being "the picture of health"; now Emma always gives me the idea of being the complete picture of grown-up health. She is
loveliness itself.'"
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17
EMMA HAS been described as being, in some respects, the most
polished example of that method of novelwriting which Jane Austen made particularly her own; an by a strangely apt coin
cidence, the year of its composition was also the year in which she wrote a series of letters containing advice on the method of novel-writing, as practiced by herself.
Anna Austen was not married till the November of 1814, and she amused herself during the summer of her engagement in writing a novel. First of all it was called Enthusiasm, and then the title was changed to Which is the Heroine? She sent the chapters, as they were written, to her Aunt Jane, and though her aunt was writing Emma at the time, she had the leisure to read them and be amused by them and return them with her comments.
Which is the Heroine? must have been good, because Jane not only treated it with the generous enthusiasm she kept for the doings of her nephews and nieces, but she said over and over again that she had been amused with the manuscript and looked forward to reading the next installment. Considering her own preoccupation at the time, her interest was a high tribute to Anna's powers of entertainment.
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The bulk of the criticism is directed to the ends of naturalness and probability, and its importance lies much more in its relation to her work than to novel-writing as a whole. Many female writers, perhaps most, possess keen powers of observation; many are accurate and painstaking; there may be some who would never have made even
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