Jane Fairfax has already quitted Highbury. She is restored to the comforts and refinements of her beloved home with the Campbells. The two Mr. Churchills—uncle and nephew—are also in town, and they are only waiting for the expiration of their first three months’ mourning, to celebrate the event which will remove Jane to preside over the dignified establishment at Enscombe.
After all, Emma and Mr. Knightley owe to a comical accident the power to go on with their share of the triple marriages at the time appointed, without distressing Mr. Woodhouse too much, as Emma recoiled from doing—though she perfectly believed the assurances of both the Mr. Knightleys, that when the catastrophe was over, the distress would soon be over too.
During the period of suspense, by an ill wind which blows somebody good, Mrs. Weston’s poultry-house is robbed of all her turkeys—evidently by the ingenuity of man. “Other poultry yards in the neighbourhood also suffered. Pilfering was house-breaking to Mr. Woodhouse’s fears. He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law’s protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life. The strength, resolution, and presence of mind of the Mr. Knightleys, commanded his fullest dependence. While either of them protected him and his, Hartfield was safe. But Mr. John Knightley must be in London again, by the end of the first week in November.”
The result is, that with a much more cheerful and voluntary consent than she had ever ventured to hope for from her father, his daughter is able to fix the marriage day.
“The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery and parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby and very inferior to her own. ‘Very little white satin; very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it.’ But in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.”
In some respects “Emma” stands first among Jane Austen’s novels. In construction it is as nearly as possible perfect. The unparalleled art which, from characters and incidents even simpler and more ordinary than usual, builds up a tale which never for a moment loses its charm and interest, which is made to “grow,” as in real life—the one motive and the one action springing out of the other—the characters developing and ripening in exact proportion, is carried to such a height that critics have been justified in saying—and how rarely is such an assertion warranted in fiction?—that there is not a single chapter which could have been withdrawn without serious injury to the skilfully interwoven threads of the story. For that matter, critics might have gone a good deal further, and asserted that not a scene or a conversation, hardly a paragraph, could have been abstracted or shortened, without marring in a measure the succession of clearly discriminating, exquisitely delicate touches by which the author has done her work.
It is this artistic completeness which makes it so difficult—in a sense so ungracious a task, to condense Jane Austen’s pages, or tamper with them, however carefully and scrupulously. When one thinks by contrast of the disgracefully slovenly—not to say weak and foolish—performances which are often allowed to pass muster as story-telling, it is with mortification and misery for many of the professors of the “craft.”
Besides the incomparable finish which belongs to the author’s later novels, we have a nearly unique power of reading nice varieties of character in “Emma:” whether we turn to the plaintive, cautious Mr. Woodhouse; to John Knightley in his trenchant speeches; to Miss Bates in her pitter-patter of innocent gossip, to Emma in her rash blindness; to Harriet in her sweet silliness; to Frank Churchill, in his boyish enjoyment of stolen waters and bread eaten in secret, and the general mystification of his friends and acquaintances, no less than in his wilful, yet lovable and loyal passion for Jane Fairfax; to Mrs. Elton in her vain airs and clamorous self-assertion; to Mr. Knightley in his unpretending, kindly manliness.
