Elizabeth arrives with draggled skirts and rosy cheeks. She cheerfully surmounts Miss Bingley’s and Mrs. Hurst’s contemptuous amazement at what they regard as Miss Eliza Bennet’s uncalled-for Amazonian feat. At last they are under the necessity, in common civility, of requesting Elizabeth to remain with her sister; and the patient, suffering Jane is ill enough for the moment to make Elizabeth thankful that she has come, and to justify her in the step she has taken.
Besides, Elizabeth is gratified by the master of the house’s cordial reception, and by his unfeigned anxiety on behalf of his invalid guest. As to the fact that Darcy is successful in silencing the strictures of the ladies of the house on the “fright” Miss Eliza Bennet has chosen to appear before them, by dwelling on the additional brilliancy the early walk has lent to her complexion, and by maintaining that certainly the expedition proves her to be a most affectionate sister, Elizabeth remains profoundly ignorant of his championship.
Two new figures appear on the stage. The first is Mr. Collins, the vicar of Hunsford, in Kent, and the cousin, hitherto a stranger to the Bennet family, who, by the terms of the entail, succeeds to the Longbourn estate after Mr. Bennet’s death. He proposes a friendly visit, in a letter which is the reflex of the writer, who is a stupid, narrow-minded young man, while yet perfectly respectable and not ill-intentioned. His pompous self-importance, in which there is some family likeness to the leading mental traits in his cousin Mary Bennet, is blended with an equally natural subserviency and obsequiousness, with such a breadth of skill and comicality, that he is one of the great artist’s triumphs.
Jane Austen was a good woman and a good church-woman. She was a clergyman’s daughter, and two of her brothers were clergymen. The parsonage as well as the hall had a special place in her novels. In “Mansfield Park” she insisted on the honourable office of a clergyman. She was the last person wantonly to bring disrespect on her father’s cloth, but she was also the most sincere of women and of artists. She was acquainted with the Collins type of clergymen, which had replaced the still more accommodating, even vicious, family chaplain, under the lower and coarser moral standard of previous generations. Her Mr. Collins is not unprincipled or unconscientious, but his patroness engrosses his small, mean mind, and usurps the rights of his other parishioners; until, to give satisfaction at the great house—to come in there as an acknowledged, privileged dependent—to carve a joint—to help to make up the card-table—to amuse the old and the young—to pass away a dull hour—to take upon himself any troublesome task he can appropriate, are looked upon by him as at once among his chief duties and greatest advantages.
With unshrinking, incisive hand, Jane Austen did good service to all the churches by aiding in ridding them of despicable toadies.
Mr. Collins is all in a piece, while he is of complex fabric, with his haunting self-consciousness, his perpetual references to his “humble abode,” and his “revered patroness, Lady Catherine,” with her splendid establishment at Rosings, to which he is so affably summoned several times a week. His densely thick-headed, sycophantish homage is extended to Lady Catherine’s kindred in the person of her nephew, the resisting, disgusted Mr. Darcy. Mr. Collins’s self-complacent, over-done, heavy civility is bestowed freely on everybody, and he promises liberally beforehand formal letters of thanks to his hosts for their esteemed hospitality.
Such a man, however diverting to her strong sense of the ludicrous, cannot but be odious in other respects to Elizabeth Bennet, yet it is at Elizabeth’s feet that he lays his dull, conceited, exasperatingly considerate proposals.
Lady Catherine is of opinion Mr. Collins, as a clergyman, should marry soon. His solid merits and unexceptionable position in life warrant him in seeking a wife. He is led to Longbourn with the laudable intention of making some reparation to his fair cousins for the circumstance that, on the death of their respected father, Mr. Collins must inherit the property; and in Elizabeth he flatters himself he has found the excellent, charming, economical young woman who will at once secure to him the felicity he is entitled to expect, and satisfy the just expectations of Lady Catherine.
To the extreme mortification of her mother, but with the entire approval of her father, Elizabeth declines the obliging proposal. The scene is unique and unapproachable, in which the sublimely confident, quite unembarrassed Mr. Collins does not so much plead his cause solemnly as unfold his credentials, while Elizabeth refuses him in stronger and stronger language, for the suitor will not accept his congé, and persists in attributing it to the becoming coyness of “an elegant female.”
At last Elizabeth escapes, referring Mr. Collins to her father, protesting in despair that whatever his answer may be, at least Mr. Collins cannot interpret Mr. Bennet’s behaviour as the becoming coyness of “an elegant female.”