“SENSE AND SENSIBILITY,” AND “MANSFIELD PARK.”
Of the two novels for which I have not found space here, the one belongs to the first, and the other to the second series of Jane Austen’s tales.
“Sense and Sensibility” in its original form was, with the exception perhaps of “Lady Susan,” the first written of the author’s stories which have come down to us. It has always seemed to me inferior to the novels which follow it, though its writer not only re-wrote it in her youth, but prepared it again for the press in her mature years, and brought it out before “Pride and Prejudice.” The astonishing precedence thus given might, however, have been accidental, or it might have been the result of the publisher’s choice. It might also have been an instance of Jane Austen’s confidence in her own powers and steadfastness of purpose. Certainly she appears to have valued “Sense and Sensibility” as highly as her other novels: an example of the proverbial blindness of authors to the proportion of merit in their own writings.
To say that “Sense and Sensibility” is inferior to its companions is by no means to suggest that it is without excellence. It has many of the attractions of Miss Austen’s work. It is bright, clever, interesting and exceedingly life-like. Here and there, as in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Mrs. Jennings there is a good deal of the author’s critical acumen and dry humour, yet they hardly arrive at their subsequent perfection. Thus Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, who are a little like Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in their youth, lag behind that entertaining couple.
In accordance with the name,[67] the story turns upon the relative advantages and disadvantages of sense and sensibility, the verdict being given, as might have been expected from the author, in favour of sense.
Two sisters, Ellinor and Marianne Dashwood, equally good, but the one full of quiet self-control, the other of impetuous feeling, which she never seeks to restrain, rather priding herself on its indulgence, as a proof of the strength and depth of her opinions and affections, have an oddly similar fate, being both in turn disappointed in love, and in a manner jilted by their respective lovers—Edward Ferrars, the reserved, sober-minded, somewhat sad, young clergyman; and John Willoughby, a frank, fervent, reckless young fellow, the masculine type which matches with the style of girls like Marianne Dashwood.
The causes and ends of the two sisters’ histories are quite different from each other. And the happy termination of Ellinor’s trials is not made a consequence of her superior wisdom and moderation—a nice distinction, with its appreciation of the facts of life, and of the rewards and punishments which must be inward, not outward, certainly remarkable in a young author.
Edward Ferrars’ unwitting injury to Ellinor proceeds from his too great susceptibility to her attractions, and his involuntary betrayal of his attachment when he is thrown much in her company, while all the time he is an unresisting victim to a foolish youthful engagement. The lady is a pert, underbred Lucy Steele, with an irrepressible sister Anne; both of them determined not to lose sight of a great match for Lucy.
Willoughby, after a romantic introduction to Marianne, first compromises himself by paying the most marked attention to the girl; and then, to meet the views of the relative on whom he is dependent, consents to give her up with the most cruel abruptness and harshness, and to pay his addresses to an heiress who is, in every respect save her fortune, repugnant to him.
Ellinor, who is made painfully aware of her lover’s entanglement by the cunning of Lucy Steele in selecting the very girl whom Edward Ferrars prefers for her confidante, behaves not merely with perfect honour, but bears the mortification and grief with such gentle dignity and patience, and such magnanimous consideration for the unhappiness of Edward and the rights of Lucy, as to rob her unhappiness of half its sting, and to escape all humiliating exposure to the speculation and pity of her friends and acquaintances.
Marianne—who, far from checking, has gloried in Willoughby’s extravagant devotion, and has never dreamt of concealing her answering devotion, which she regards as his due—abandons herself in the same proportion to incredulity, anguish, and despair on his desertion, until her life nearly pays the forfeit, and she has rendered herself an object either of ridicule or compassion to her whole circle.
At last Edward Ferrars is released, without dishonour on his part, from his rash engagement to Lucy Steele, by that calculating young lady’s having found a still better match in Edward’s less worthy brother, who is, however, the favourite son of their rich, tyrannical mother. The jilted man is thus free to consult his heart, and lays his tithes and parsonage at the feet of Ellinor Dashwood, who, on her part, is not too intolerant to accept the offer.
Marianne is cured of her folly by the shock of the illness which brings her to the brink of the grave, and by such atonement as Willoughby can offer, in the violence of his self-accusation and misery, when he believes she is dying, really killed by his barbarity. He takes a long night’s journey to inquire for her, and makes a clean breast to Ellinor of the reality of his love for her sister, and his remorse for the ill usage which, in his cowardliness and selfishness, he has inflicted on her.
Marianne Dashwood is so effectually cured—there is much hope for the broken heart of eighteen—that she listens before long, with gratitude and sympathy, to the constant, tender suit of that Colonel Brandon whom she had formerly laughed at and scorned as a lover, because he had reached the advanced age of thirty-five, had to take precautions against rheumatism, and confessed to having, when a young man, suffered from an unfortunate attachment; while Marianne Dashwood has not believed hitherto in any love save first love.
The evil of the gushing sensibility or sentimentality which, during the last century, girls were understood to cherish till it disqualified them for sober duty and rational behaviour, against which their mentors—whether young, blooming, and arch, like Jane Austen when she wrote “Sense and Sensibility,” or old, wrinkled, and grave, like Dr. Gregory when he delivered his advice to his daughters—were constantly warning young women, has given place in many quarters in this nineteenth century to a rollicking pretence of no feeling, a fast assumption of hardness, heartlessness and utter carelessness. Of the two evils the last would be the worse, if we could believe in its being anything more than an unlovely mask, in which bad manners and bad taste are occasionally combined with morbid shyness and sensitiveness, which, rather than betray themselves, assume the guise of levity, worldly-mindedness, or stolid indifference.
But the old frantic manifestations of love, hatred, and anguish are still to be found in a coarse, crude enough fashion; and, strange to say, are welcomed when found by the very readers who reprobate the existence in their own breasts of a pin’s prick of the piled-up agonies which they enjoy in print in not a few modern novels.
“Mansfield Park,” one of Jane Austen’s later tales, is also one of her best. The story is intended to show the wrong and suffering, the positive moral taint produced by an entirely worldly education—whether the worldliness has been confined to practice in opposition to principles, or whether the very principles have never been inculcated, or have been presented in such a distorted form as to lose all power for good.
The handsome, healthy, wealthy, well-born and well-bred sons and daughters of Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, have been fortunate in inheriting all the good things of this life; and not the least fortunate in possessing an honourable and upright father—though his social prejudices and his partiality to his own flesh and blood somewhat warp his judgment and dull his perceptions—and a mother who, though an indolent, self-indulgent woman, is utterly incapable of active unkindness or wrong-doing.
The counteracting, overbalancing loss against so much gain is, that the young Bertrams, with one exception, have never learnt the first rudiments of self-denial and self-restraint. Tom, Maria, and Julia Bertram, under a thin varnish of polish and liveliness, are thoroughly selfish, self-willed young people, not really happy amidst all their advantages and the popularity secured by them, and altogether unprepared for the temptations and vicissitudes of life. Only Edmund Bertram—who, as the younger son, brought up to fill the family living, may by comparison have borne the yoke in his youth—is manly, generous, and kind.
The Bertrams’ great friends, Henry and Mary Crawford, who had been left as orphans to the care of an uncle and aunt—of whom the first was one of the worst specimens of the coarse and vicious naval officer[68] of the day, and the second had lived a cat-and-dog life with her husband—have missed what ought to have been the firm foundation of the Bertrams’ characters.
No sacred sense of duty, no fine perception of rectitude extending to word and thought, no unsullied purity of tone, had been, even in theory, instilled into the Crawfords by the couple who, with all their faults, had still loved and petted the boy and girl entrusted to them; and so had been in one sense armed with deadliest weapons to destroy the children’s moral nature.
Henry and Mary Crawford have, according to a graphic old saying, hung as they grew, without training, unless in evil. They have been endowed with many fine natural gifts and qualities, in addition to the accessories of rank and wealth. With regard to the last, Henry has a good estate in Norfolk, and Mary possesses a fortune of twenty thousand pounds. In reference to the first, Mary is a lovely brunette, as well as a witty, merry, good-natured woman, who can play on the harp and sing in the long summer evenings to distraction—so far as young men are concerned. Henry, though not handsome, has a good figure and “a fine countenance,” by which old-fashioned phrase I understand a highly agreeable and intelligent expression of face. He is even wittier and more talented than his sister, frank, equal to any difficult occasion of social life, and capable of winning golden opinions in all; a special treasure in a dull country house; “a charming fellow”—in short, a very fascinating young man.
The two Crawfords present the fairest exterior on first acquaintance. They are cast in an altogether finer mould than Tom Bertram and his sisters, and are fitted for better things by a subtle touch of their author’s art. It takes time and trial to discover that under the winning surface there is neither soundness nor steadfastness: the very core is corrupt.
In broad contrast to the Crawfords and the Bertrams—all save Edmund—are Fanny and William Price, the daughter and son of the poor, worthless Lieutenant of Marines. They have been called upon from their earliest childhood to be helpful, contented with little, and self-forgetful. If Jane Austen dwelt somewhat strongly in “Emma” on the blessings of prosperity, in “Mansfield Park” she had already taught, and never with greater effect, how sweet were the uses of adversity.
Probably, of all the author’s heroines, Fanny Price, if not the most charming, is the greatest triumph of genius, for one can hardly conceive two natures moulded by circumstances more unlike than the life of Jane Austen in her youth, and that of the timid, shrinking, sickly Fanny Price. She comes as a humble protégée to Mansfield Park, and has to endure all the well-meant but somewhat oppressive patronage of Sir Thomas, the perpetual fault-finding of her aunt Norris, and the alternate condescension and snubbing of her cousins—always excepting her champion, Edmund. But a little later on, even Edmund turns without knowing it against his little cousin, whom he has defended, encouraged, and been fond of ever since she came to Mansfield Park. For it is the worst heart-ache of all to Fanny to see the cousin Edmund whom she has looked up to, and loved all these years, about to throw himself away on Mary Crawford, whom Fanny knows, by sure instinct, to be unworthy of him. Edmund in his blindness insists on making his friend-pupil the confidante of his hopes and fears; nay, as if to add insult to injury, in his affectionate zeal for his young cousin’s welfare, he presses on her to accept the suit of another man.
So completely did Jane Austen realise all the softness and sweetness, and yet the staunchness—all the fragrant, white-violet-like charm of Fanny Price—so well did the author describe the pangs of wounded love in the tenderest of hearts—the meek mortification of a gentle nature which bore no grudge against its enemies—the pensive joys, the tremulous apprehensions of the situation—that Archbishop Whately went near to asserting the conviction that only a woman who had been herself crossed in love could thus fully interpret her heroine.
Mrs. Norris—Fanny’s terrible Aunt Norris, with her unslumbering activity, her restless meddling, her good deeds done by proxy in the parsimony which was stronger even than the love of rule, her doting indulgence to the young Bertrams, her carping snappishness to Fanny Price and her brother William—is an unsurpassed representation of a domineering, time-serving, radically harsh and mean nature, under all its pretensions and self-deceptions, as well as an inimitable piece of genteel comedy.
William Price—Fanny’s frank, light-hearted young sailor brother—with his pride in his profession, and his fondness for his sister, is also very good.
I do not wish to tell in a few words how Fanny escaped the imminent peril of being won by Henry Crawford. Indeed the peril, in the author’s fidelity to nature, is so imminent, in spite of Fanny’s pre-engaged affections—granting that they were hopeless—and the reader is so enchanted with the flattered young prince’s sudden keen appreciation of the neglected Cinderella, that he or she is tempted against reason, almost against conscience, to long that Henry Crawford’s love may prevail over his levity, vanity, and lack of settled principles, and earn its reward, rendering him at once a better and a happier man.
But Jane Austen knew better, and the grievous sin and shame which separate for ever Henry Crawford and Fanny Price, is made to open Edmund Bertram’s eyes to the moral gulf between his nature and that of Mary Crawford, which, no less than his sister’s degradation, simply renders it impossible for him to marry Mary.
The obstacles between the couple, who have been fitted for each other from the first, thus doubly swept away, Jane Austen does not waste many words in bringing them together, and leaving them happy for ever afterwards.
The scenes during the private theatricals—when Sir Thomas is lending dignified encouragement to Mr. Crawford’s attentions to his niece, by giving a ball at Mansfield Park—when Fanny is sent to pay her visit to her home at Portsmouth, not so much to punish her for her obstinate refusal of her gallant, undaunted lover, as to teach her when she is well off, and how she ought to prize the good fortune within her reach—are among the best Jane Austen has painted.
Jane Austen had something of a parental affection for her books. She wrote to a friend, whose little daughter had been lately born, “I trust you will be as glad to see my ‘Emma’ as I shall be to see your Jemima.” She did not dismiss from her mind the creatures of her fancy with the narrative in which they had figured. She seemed to like to follow them in imagination in the careers into which she had launched them. They were real men and women[69] to her. She would, when asked, supply further particulars of the history of some of these brain-children. Her friends learned in this way that Anne Steele found a husband in the doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her Uncle Philip’s clerks, and was content to be considered a star in Meryton; that the considerable sum given by Mrs. Norris to William Price was one pound; that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the one word “pardon!” and that Mr. Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage, and kept her and Mr. Knightley from Donwell about two years.