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.