Elizabeth Bennet would have died rather than proclaimed the shortcomings of her family—far less have been so lost to all wholesome shame as to have made game of what formed her greatest affliction. She is removed, by a world of good principle and good feeling, from those heroines of the present day whose authors write as if they considered the absence of all reverence and tenderness, in the sacred relation in which children stand to parents, as a mark of emancipation from old-fashioned prejudices, of freedom from what is goody-goody, narrow and obsolete. These desperately ill-bred, benighted, worse than heathen young people, in their professed confessions to the public, or their confidences to their fellow-puppets, speak evil of dignities with a vengeance, have nothing save an ugly grimace or a heartless gibe for all that is honourable in years, wisdom, or virtue, and for all that is holy in natural affection. They pour forth their railings and mockings at the authors of their being with an absolute profanity, a base disloyalty, and an absence of common decency in their family disclosures, which would be altogether horrible and hideous, were it not also absurdly false and despicable, as well as odious.
Elizabeth Bennet was a very different being—an essentially Christian and civilized gentlewoman.
But one is impelled to wish that, especially where her mother was concerned, there had been a greater reluctance, even an incapability, to judge and condemn—a piteous veil drawn by the strong over the weak, in a relationship in which these attributes ought to have been reversed. For, whether the offence be wickedness or vulgarity,—
“A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.”
Jane Austen would have said probably that if Elizabeth Bennet’s nearest relations were guilty of impropriety and folly, she could not help seeing it. We know that the author herself was very happy in the family relations of which she proved herself worthy. She was a devoted daughter and loving sister, tempted to rest content with her own family circle, and to refuse, with a certain refined churlishness, other and wider associations. She may have been in his position who
“Jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
She could hardly perhaps realise, though she excelled in realising, how a good, affectionate girl, while forced in her sense and sincerity to condemn the failings of her kindred, yet instinctively shuts her eyes to them, so far as she can do so without moral injury to herself and others; or sees them through a half-shrouding mist of eager respect and faithful fondness for the merits which, in most cases, we may be thankful, balance the failings.
Besides, Jane Austen was very young when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice,” and gentle in some respects as youth may be, it is not from it that we are warranted in expecting charity. Youth at its best—a very sweet best, but with its sweetness consisting mainly of the unbounded promise of still better things—is in its ignorance, rashness, and unshaken self-confidence, impatient of all wrong-doing, nay, of all blundering, and intolerant to the wrong-doers and blunderers. It would be to rob the bountifulness of riper years of one of their chief gains if we were to deny them their prerogative of greater long-suffering with stupidity and pity for error.
In none of her other novels was Miss Austen quite so unsparing in her censure and withering in her satire—sufficiently provoked though it was—as in “Pride and Prejudice.” She is gentle to the comparatively harmless, kindly silliness and selfishness of Lady Bertram in “Mansfield Park;” while she is really tender, with a touch of pathos, to that worthiest and most lovable of old chatterboxes, Miss Bates, in “Emma.”