William Deresiewicz

by Unknown

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  Dear friends” (ll. 2830), as if there were no closer bond, no dearer name, no higher term of appeal. The poet in “The Last of the Flock” greets the weeping stranger with “My friend, / what ails you?” as the warmest possible earnest of his sympathy (ll. 15). Friendship, a name applied equally to kin and stranger, thus becomes a flexibly ambiguous or multivalent relationship in just the sense we have been developing. It also becomes a democratic one: that “My friend” in “The Last of the Flock” signals a spirit of equality and a programmatic embrace of humanity that anticipates Whitman. It is in that spirit, of course, that the collection as a whole, with its elevation of the marginal and wretched to literary status, is written. Wordsworth’s usage here is thus connected to yet another element within the eighteenth-century complex of ideas about friendship, one that achieved a new relevance around the turn of the nineteenth century: Shaftesbury’s notion of social sympathy. This is friendship in its most explicitly political dimension, for sympathy was Shaftesbury’s answer, in 1711, to Hobbes’s pessimism about human nature, and for well over a century following Shaftesbury, sympathy was understood to rank among the most important bonds that held society together.57 What is more, as Caleb Crain explains in his study of male friendship in the early American Republic, the replacement of monarchy by democracy in the new nation meant that “friendship in America became charged with a new meaning,” as the only bond that now held citizens together.58 The relevance of this development to the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads— as he moves from direct political investment in the democratic ideals of the French Revolution toward their embodiment in poetry—need hardly be emphasized. Friendship becomes not only, as in “Tintern Abbey” and the Matthew poems, the ideal of one-to-one relatedness, but also the basis for a revivified human collectivity, a new human community. It is a community that—like the poet and the stranger in “The Last of the Flock’” meeting “[a]long the broad highway” (l. 7), like Wordsworth and his figures in so many of his poems, wanderers all along the broad highway—stands symbolically outside the hierarchical structures of nation and society. Wordsworth thus revolutionizes the classical-romantic tradition of friendship in a second respect. He retains its intensity but discards its exclusivity, calling upon us to bring that kind of presence—erotic in its ardor—to all of our relationships. That this ideal is indeed made into a moral imperative aimed at his readers Wordsworth makes clear through the sleight-of-hand he performs with the word “friend” in the very first two poems of Lyrical Ballads’ reordered first volume. While “Expostulation and Reply” is a dialogue between the

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  poet and his “good friend Matthew,” Matthew drops out as a speaker in “The Tables Turned,” a maneuver that unmistakably puts the reader in his place. The poem’s opening address—“Up! up! my friend, and quit your books”—must be read, then, as directed at us (an idea reinforced by the purport of that address, since it is of course we who are reading at that moment). In this, the first of many moves in Lyrical Ballads by which Wordsworth signals the kind of reader he wants us to be and the kind of relationship he wants to have with us, he names that relationship as one of friendship—with all the intimacy, ardor, and productive ambiguity that it will later, in “Tintern Abbey” and the Matthew poems, come to imply, but also with the sense of equality and democratic inter-involvement with both the poet and his subjects that it will very soon, in “The Last of the Flock,” come to imply. In Lyrical Ballads, as later in Emma, we find an artist both seizing upon and adding fresh impetus to the fact that friendship at the turn of the nineteenth century was not only undergoing a rapid expansion of meaning, it was also beginning an enormous elevation in importance. In both Wordsworth and, following him, in Austen, friendship becomes the essential context of the new values of affective individualism, with its drive toward an increased intensity of, esteem for, and mindfulness toward interpersonal relationships. These, then, are the various streams that fed into the idea of friendship at the time Austen was writing Emma: “friends” as elder kin and benefactors; “friends” as neighbors; the (to us) commonsense notion of a “friend” as a familiar companion for whom one feels affection; friendship as the political phenomenon of social sympathy; the conjugal friendship of the companionate marriage, a selfconsciously English institution; the classical-romantic tradition of intense nonsexual friendship; and the Romantic inversions of that ideal to make it an experience particular to youth, perhaps prolongable into adulthood with special determination, and universalized into a common human bond. Now as I already noted, Austen had been familiar with a number of these ideas, and had been working with them in her fiction, since very early in her career. Indeed, critics have noted from the very first that friendship is her highest social ideal, her image of what marriage should be.59 But in recognizing that, criticism has taken the idea of friendship too much at face value. Yes, Austen valued friendship above all things; the question is—given the rapidly-evolving welter of possibilities available to her, the enormous

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  semantic complexity encoded in that seemingly innocuous word, “friend”— what did she mean by friendship? She herself seems to have taken the concept for granted before Emma, or at least before about the middle of Mansfield Park. Northanger Abbey balances that commonsense form of friendship, the kind Catherine has with Eleanor Tilney, against a bad form, the faux-sentimental, the kind she has with Isabella Thorpe. Sense and Sensibility sets that same good form against another evil alternative, “friends” as unloving and mercenary relations. And both novels, as well as Pride and Prejudice, hold out that same good form as the basis of a newly profound version of conjugal friendship, one that begins to develop even before marriage.60 Then, in Mansfield Park, with its musings on “the different sorts of friendship in the world” and its own evident ambivalence about whether Fanny’s friendship with Mary is good or not, we find that these certainties begin to get shaken (298). Finally, in Emma—in response, it seems, to the stimulus of Wordsworth’s exploration of ambiguous relationships in general and of a reimagined friendship as the radical form of such relationships in particular—Austen starts to take the full measure of the concept’s complexity in her time, and of the opportunities inherent in that complexity, starts to put the word “friend” in vigorous motion, forces its incongruous and even contradictory semantic alternatives to confront one another, experiments with what friendship can and ought to be by creating situation after situation that tests and stretches its possibilities. To begin with, the novel itself arrays its conceptions of friendship along a historical axis. I noted in the second chapter of this study that the community of Highbury experiences slow but steady change throughout the novel, as families like the Coles, Perrys, Eltons, Martins, and Westons gradually rise, and the Bateses gradually sink. What I did not note at the time is that the community is portrayed as being, initially, in a state of senescence. We are told, during Emma and Frank’s preparations for the ball, that a large room had been added to the Crown Inn “many years ago for a ballroom, and while the neighborhood had been in a particularly populous, dancing state, had been occasionally used as such” (164). “[B]ut such brilliant days had long passed away,” and the room is now employed as a club for “the gentlemen and half-gentlemen of the place.” The image is one of youthful vigor and excitement declining into aging indolence, and as such reinforces the impression we have had all along, of a community dominated and, as it were, held in check by the feebleness of its most powerful member, Mr. Woodhouse, and the cramped frugality of its most pervasive presence, Miss

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  Bates.61 The two of them, the second also because of her association with her invalid mother, embody the community’s past and the attitudes and practices of that past, still maintaining their hold on the present. One of the most important of those attitudes is the idea of friendship Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates share. It is essentially the one that A History of Private Life contrasts with the classical idea
l: friendship as “everyday social relations”—friends as neighbors—except that it carries a much greater significance than that pallid phrase implies. For these two figures, their neighbors are indeed all friends. It is an attitude that cuts both ways, for while it implies far less intimacy than we normally associate with friends, it implies a great deal more goodwill and sense of mutual responsibility than we associate today with neighbors. Miss Bates, she announces at one point, feels herself most fortunate to be surrounded by “so many good neighbors and friends,” a phrase that—given that we have just been told that “[s]he loved every body, was interested in every body’s happiness” (20)—signifies the identity of its two terms rather than their difference. Again, as she makes her way into the ball, greeting a whole raft of characters we have never heard of before and will never hear of again, she exclaims in pleasure at “[s]uch a host of friends!” (267). Mr. Woodhouse’s characteristic way of expressing his goodwill toward his neighbors is to refer to them as his “old friends” or even his “very old friends” (143, 317, 320). Of the Bateses he says “[t]hey are some of my very old friends. I wish my health allowed me to be a better neighbor” (241)—a statement that not only reinforces the identity of “friends” and “neighbors” for the community’s most conservative members, but confirms that this idea of friendship has the limitation we suggested before. Mr. Woodhouse’s practice of friendship is as shallow as it is broad, and it is interesting that we are told that he is “everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart,” for to say that someone has a friendly heart is not quite the same thing as saying that he is friendly (8). Mr. Woodhouse’s friendliness is more a matter of intention than performance. Into this settled, self-enclosed world irrupt two highly energetic agents of change: Frank Churchill and Mrs. Elton.62 I will consider Frank below; Mrs. Elton, needless to say, brings to Highbury a new and thoroughly vulgar idea of friendship, one rooted in some of the same soil as Wordsworth’s but trained in a very different direction. If Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates’s way of relating to the people around them is inadequate for being premodern, Mrs. Elton’s is all too modern. With everyone she is instantly intimate, as her famous “Knightley” suggests (228). In one respect, this new style

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  seems to resemble the old; like Mr. Woodhouse, she, too, regards her neighbors as friends. But there are two crucial differences. The first is the quality of their respective friendships, the degree of their presumed intimacy, which in Mrs. Elton’s case seems to know no bounds. The second is her failure to make distinctions between degrees of friendship. Mr. Woodhouse may regard everyone as a friend, but for that very reason he needs to make distinctions between kinds of friends; there are those, as we have seen, who are his “old friends,” and there are those who are not, but whom, like Mrs. Elton herself, he is prepared to accept anyway. Miss Bates, too, has her “steady friend[s]” and “true friend[s]” (313). But not only does Mrs. Elton presume to called Knightley her “good friend” after only a few days’ acquaintance (294), she refers to him, speaking to Emma, as “our friend Knightley” (375), as if the two were equally his friend.63 But why shouldn’t they be, since Mrs. Elton requires so little time to form her deepest attachments? “I like [the Westons] extremely,” she says, “Mr. Weston seems an excellent creature— quite a first-rate favorite with me already” (228). Mrs. Elton’s hyperventilated rhetoric and lack of emotional decorum recall Austen’s adolescent spoof of sentimental friendship (“We flew into each other’s arms … “). She is no parody figure, however, but one Austen intends as a picture of a real and peculiarly modern kind of monster, one who, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “cultivates the style of sensitivity.“64 There is a direct line from that “Knightley” to the confessionalism of the daytime talk-show. She is affective individualism run wild, and as such, represents the negative image of Wordsworth’s ideal. Mrs. Elton wants the thrills and trappings of a general intimacy without doing the work necessary to attain it— the work, as Wordsworth performs it in “The Last of the Flock” and so many other poems, of listening to other people’s stories in a spirit of wise passiveness, without seeking to foist his will upon them. Austen’s ideal, or at least a large part of it, is something quite similar, but with an important difference that is characteristic of other differences between the novelist and the poet. As we saw on a number of occasions in considering Mansfield Park, their different treatment of the same themes can be traced to the fact that, whereas Wordsworth’s figures are solitary, Austen’s are firmly embedded in their social matrix. The new human community Wordsworth seeks to forge one encounter at a time “along the broad highway” Austen seeks to construct within the confines of the old, structured community itself. For if Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates’s kind of neighborly friendship is increasingly anachronistic and increasingly inadequate in an age of affective individualism, with its drive for deeper intima110 Emma

  cies, Austen does not for that reason seek to discard it, but rather to preserve and extend it. We can best see why in an encounter the likes of which can be found in none of her other novels, the conversation between Jane Fairfax and John Knightley during the evening of Emma’s dinner for the Eltons at Hartfield. It is uniquely characteristic of Emma, and directly related to its interest in the kinds of friendships possible within communities, that the novel shows us this interaction at all, one that takes place away from the main lines of the plot and involves neither the heroine nor the hero. What Jane and John Knightley first talk about, in fact, is “the value of friendship” (241)—Austen announcing the theme of the passage even as she develops it. But more important, for now, than what they say on the topic is the fact that John Knightley refers to Jane as his “old friend”—a surprising enough statement considering the scant amount of time they have likely spent together, but all the more so given that just a page earlier he had thought of her merely as “an old acquaintance.” The point is that, in the world of Emma, the two things are the same. Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates’s style of friendship, the norm for all personal relationships at Highbury, gives Jane and John Knightley a share in each other’s concerns, creates an assumption of mutual benevolence, and in so doing sets them on the road to an intimacy of which neither Mr. Woodhouse nor Miss Bates is capable but which is nevertheless available for more sensitive, more modern spirits to pursue. Here, the old style enables John Knightley, speaking as just such a friend, to express a delicately phrased hope on a very personal and poignant subject: “As an old friend, you will allow me to hope, Miss Fairfax, that ten years hence you may have as many concentrated objects as I have [i.e., have a family—a rather unlikely prospect].” He speaks the wish as a friend, and she receives it as one: “It was kindly said, and very far from giving offense.” The moment swells with feeling: “a blush, a quivering lip, a tear in the eye.” Like the poet consoling the weeping stranger in “The Last of the Flock,” albeit in a very different way, John Knightley has listened to another person’s story and caught her tears. I noted before that Jane and John Knightley have a relationship for which no name seems to exist; we can now recognize that the name is “friendship.” It is a friendship that blossoms almost miraculously between these two rather unlikely intimates: they may never have another exchange like this in their lives, but the old style of Highbury friendship, creating the conditions of its own transcendence, has allowed them to have this one. And then Mr. Woodhouse himself claims Jane’s attention to express solicitude in his own way: “I am very sorry to hear, Miss Fairfax, of your being

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  out this morning in the rain. Young ladies should take care of themselves.— Young ladies are delicate plants.” These are formal, even formulaic expressions of goodwill, for this “kind-hearted, polite old man”—“making the circle of his guests,” speaking “with all his mildest urbanity”—is performing what amounts to a ceremonial, almost a public function. His insight into Jane’s situation and feelings does not remotely approach that of his son-inlaw—really, he has none at
all—and he does not talk with her so much as at her. And yet she receives his words with equal gratitude: “I am very much obliged by your kind solicitude about me.” Part of the value of this old style of friendship, as I suggested before, is that it is itself highly flexible, highly ambiguous in exactly the way we looked at before in examining the scene between Emma and George Knightley. Jane can communicate on one level with Mr. Woodhouse and on an entirely different one with John Knightley, and yet the kind of generalized friendship that prevails in Highbury accommodates the two exchanges equally well. The community’s close-knit social structure, in other words—the fact that individuals there typically interact within the context of a larger group, as they do in this scene—does not prevent the development of the kind of higher friendship to which Wordsworth is committed; it enables it. Indeed, the scene continues with two more people addressing Jane on the matter of her health, Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Weston. The latter “kindly and persuasively” advises her not to go out in the rain (242): after four iterations in less than a page, we cannot by now miss the scene’s leading verbal motif— the word “kind.” In fact, the word occurs again and again in Emma as the hallmark of the novel’s sense of a common human community, its belief that we are all of the same “kind.” It is a word, then—as these exchanges make very clear—that entails Shaftesbury’s notion of social sympathy, one that I earlier connected with the new democratic spirit taking shape both on the far side of the Atlantic and in Wordsworth’s poetry. Emma, of course, like that poetry, was written in a society in which traditional vertical ties still possessed enormous strength. Sympathy—or to revert to the novel’s language, kindness—did not need to be relied upon as the sole basis of social relations, as Mansfield Park abundantly shows. But as many critics have recognized, Emma represents a visionary act of social imagination. Trilling calls it an idyll, quoting Schiller’s definition of the genre as one that “presents the idea and description of an innocent and happy humanity.“65 But I do not think that Austen meant us to take her vision as quite so utopian as that, quite so unattainable. She may not have been a democrat, but neither was she the conservative as which she has so