It is a wretched business, Emma decides when she has retired for the night, and her maid has curled her hair—in those days of curls—and she is left alone with full opportunity for the unpleasant operation of thinking. Such a blow for Harriet! That is the worst of all. Emma’s conscience and heart are in the right place, though her wilfulness and self-confidence may carry her away; so her first thought is, “If I had not persuaded Harriet into liking the man, I could have borne anything. He might have doubled his presumption to me—but poor Harriet!”
Emma cannot spare any pity for Mr. Elton’s disappointment. She has never been personally vain, as George Knightley noted, and she is shrewd enough to comprehend the kind of attraction of Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, and her thirty thousand pounds, to Mr. Elton, the vicar of Highbury, without any connections to speak of, with only a moderate income, and nothing but his situation and civility to recommend him. She feels inclined at first to accuse him of double dealing in his manner towards Harriet and herself; and it is hard for her to be dislodged from the most sincere conviction that she has lent his forward advances to intimacy with herself, and his delusion as to her partiality to him, no encouragement.
But Emma’s honesty is too great for her and her present peace. On looking back, she cannot help seeing how many incidents in connection with the miniature, his charade, &c., might have had a double significance. How far her own fancy had coloured looks and words; how much the wish had been father to the thought! Then, when she passes in review before her, her own constant invitations to Mr. Elton—the complaisance with which she treated all he said and did—her furbished-up apology for entering the vicarage, she blushes with shame at the misconstruction he might have put on such behaviour, and the sufficient though mistaken warrant she had afforded for such misconstruction. She heartily repents what she has done, wishes she had submitted to be warned by Mr. Knightley—almost wishes she had consented to Harriet’s marriage with Robert Martin.
It is a great relief to Emma when, by the time the snow-storm has ended, and Mr. and Mrs. John Knightley have returned to London, a ceremonious note comes from Mr. Elton to Mr. Woodhouse, announcing that he is about to comply with the pressing entreaties of some friends to pass a few weeks in Bath. His absence could not be better timed, and the unpleasant task of breaking to Harriet Smith his defection—or, rather, the worse explanation that he has never been her suitor—will be got over before he comes back. Emma is fain to trust that Harriet has not a retentive nature, and will soon forget her imaginary lover. But the match-maker is punished by Harriet’s very meekness and uncomplainingness under the double injury—though it is some time before Emma recognises in her friend the weak tenacity of a nature which is feeble in its gentleness and guilelessness.
II.
Jane Fairfax enters presently on the scene. Jane is the grand-daughter of the old vicar, the daughter of a young officer who fell in action, and whose wife did not survive her loss. Their little child had been committed to the care of her affectionate grandmother and aunt, who, however, could only have afforded her the most slender advantages in the way of education, had a compassionate fellow-officer of her late father not stepped forward, and taken the little girl to be educated with his own daughter. Jane’s home from childhood to womanhood has, therefore, been with the family of Colonel Campbell, and she has only returned at intervals to visit her relatives, Mrs. and Miss Bates, at Highbury.
The intention had been that the unprovided-for girl should be trained to render herself independent by teaching. But her friends shrank from anticipating what Jane Austen calls “the evil of Jane Fairfax’s going out into the world to earn her bread.” Farther on in the book, the author expresses still more decidedly, through her heroine, her pity for a woman in Jane Fairfax’s position. These were the settled opinions of gentlewomen in Jane Austen’s generation. We cannot now regard them as either very liberal or very wholesome, in the light of what has been developed of womanly independence, usefulness, courage, and cheerfulness. Most people of native spirit and intelligence, whatever their grade, would now be disposed to regard Jane Fairfax’s position, after she was grown up, in Colonel Campbell’s family—however good and kind they might be—as more detrimental to Jane’s self-respect, more disparaging in the eyes of others, more trying in every way, than encountering the ordeal of working for herself among comparative strangers.
Another—what I must call weakness and prejudice of the gifted writer, is visible here and elsewhere. In dwelling on the superior cultivation and refinement of the more intelligent and polished society which Jane Fairfax shared, while she resided in the London house of a man of good position and large income, to what she must have submitted to in the village of Highbury, in the house of her excellent but poorly-educated grandmother and aunt, whose narrow means are in keeping with their confined interests, I think Jane Austen’s aristocratic bias carries her too far in the line of mere superficial advantages. True culture is not so dependent on rank and wealth; and culture, though something, is hardly of such importance as she makes it. A rough diamond is a great deal better worth than a polished pebble. But Jane Fairfax is the diamond, not the pebble; so that polish is not wasted on her. She has a very pleasing person, a good understanding, and, what is more to the purpose, an excellent heart, which is not injured by her undesirable circumstances. She does not learn to despise and undervalue Highbury or her homely kindred, in London, among her influential friends. She is a sort of heroine in Highbury, when she comes there on her periodical visits.
Jane Austen gives Emma Woodhouse’s impression of Jane Fairfax, when Emma sees Jane, after two years’ absence. Jane is very elegant, remarkably elegant (an exploded term of commendation often used by Jane Austen, when she desires to impress on her readers somebody’s special grace and refinement); and Emma has herself the highest value for elegance. “Her height was pretty, just such as almost everybody would think tall; her figure particularly graceful; her size a most becoming medium between fat and thin, though a slight appearance of ill-health seemed to point out the likeliest evil of the two. Emma could not but feel all this; and then her face, her features—there was more beauty in them altogether than she had remembered: 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 been used to cavil at as wanting colour, had a clearness and delicacy which really needed no fuller bloom. It was a style of beauty of which elegance was the reigning character, and as such she must in honour, by all her principles, admire it; elegance of which, whether of person or mind, she saw so little in Highbury. There, not to be vulgar was distinction and merit.”
Yet Emma has no inclination, or only the most fleeting disposition, to cultivate Jane’s friendship. The fact is, the two girls, of the same age, have all their lives been held up to each other as most desirable companions and friends, until human nature, in its waywardness, has rebelled against the obligation.