Elizabeth Bennet is so conscious of the risk and harm to Lydia, in allowing her to go to a town which combines all the disadvantages of a watering-place and regimental quarters with such slender guardianship as that of her friend, Mrs. Foster, that the elder sister feels bound to risk giving mortal offence to Lydia, and incurring the indignation of their mother, who is nearly as bent on her daughter’s paying the undesirable visit, as is the forward, spoilt girl of sixteen on her own account. So Elizabeth goes to her father, and urges him to keep her youngest sister at home.
But Mr. Bennet will not be stirred up to exercise his authority. He is as convinced as anybody can be of the silliness and folly of Lydia, but, acting on his usual plan, he is more inclined to laugh at her than to try to restrain her. Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself at some public place, and she could never do it at less expense and inconvenience to her family. They will have no peace at Longbourn if she does not go to Brighton. As the officers will find women better worth their notice there, let her relations hope Lydia may be taught her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorising them in locking her up for the rest of her life.
III.
Elizabeth has a gratification in store for her, to which she has long looked forward, so simple and common a one in this generation, that it is refreshing to hear how much, even in anticipation, a trip to the Lakes or to Derbyshire has been to the untravelled girl, with her fresh, unjaded tastes. In the same way, it is touching to read in some of the last published letters of Charlotte Brontë how the gifted, hard-faring woman was disposed to think a week by the sea, which she had not seen before, in the company of a congenial friend, implied almost too much happiness for this world.
The Bennets have an uncle and aunt in London, in trade, like the rest of their mother’s relations, inhabiting a house in the City region of Gracechurch Street, but who are in all other respects different from Mrs. Bennet and the Philips in Meryton. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner are sensible, intelligent, amiable people, much esteemed by their elder nieces. The couple have promised to take Elizabeth with them on a summer tour of a month’s duration to the Lakes; the idea cheers and consoles the girl under a hundred depressing and mortifying influences.
As it happens, Mr. Gardiner cannot go so far as the Lakes, and the expedition is limited to Derbyshire, with its dales, towns, and great houses, its Peak, and its caverns. Elizabeth enjoys herself heartily, without an arrière pensée, till the excursion brings the party to the little town of Lambton, where Mrs. Gardiner had once lived for several years, and where she has still old acquaintances. Elizabeth is aware that Lambton is within a mile or two of Mr. Darcy’s estate and house of Pemberley. She cannot be without some curiosity to see the fine place, of which, had she so chosen, she might have been by this time mistress. Therefore, when her companions, who are in complete ignorance of their niece’s special interest in Pemberley, propose to drive to it, as one of the show-places of the neighbourhood, Elizabeth, having carefully ascertained that not one of the family is at home, willingly consents to accompany her uncle and aunt.
Jane Austen hardly ever describes scenery. The criticism on a recent tale, that there is not much of human nature but a great deal about the weather in the book, could never have been spoken of her stories. The fashion in the fiction of her day tended to two extremes—to the gorgeous ideal foreign landscape of Mrs. Radcliffe, or to the ignoring of inanimate nature in all save the barest accessories, practised by Mrs. Inchbald and Fanny Burney. Jane Austen preferred the latter style of treatment; her interest is not merely centred in her men and women, it is monopolised by them. As in the old tragic ballads, which were yet so far removed from her stories, there seems no time for elaborate analyses of earth, sea, and sky, with the moulding of these mute forces into subtle sympathy, or clashing discord with men’s moods, a tendency which belongs to artificial and self-conscious art.
Yet we receive the impression that Jane Austen loved the country and country walks. Once and again she paints little landscape pictures which indicate her taste and feeling. As might have been expected in her generation, she shows her preference for rich, cultivated, smiling, or at most prettily picturesque, thoroughly domestic scenery. Her description of Pemberley Park is one of her rare bits of landscape. She dwells with much approbation—not only on the large, handsome stone building (the age which revels in mellow brick, and puts Queen Anne, not to say Queen Elizabeth, houses, far before Georgian mansions, had not yet arrived), standing well on a rising ground—but also on the ridge of wooded hills which forms the background, and on the stream of some natural importance, and “swelled” into still greater, but without any artificial appearance, with banks which are neither formal nor falsely adorned, that constitutes the foreground. One has no difficulty in conjuring up the place—somewhat heavy, yet stately and tranquil, with its stretches of fine wood, its open vistas contrived for “prospects,” and its careful adaptation of the fall of the ground to “a valley narrowing into a glen,” according to the principles of the landscape gardening of the period.
Elizabeth is disinterestedly delighted. She feels that to be mistress of Pemberley might have been something. She is no less pleased with the house, and its lofty, well-proportioned rooms, each window commanding a charming view; the furniture suitable to the fortune of the owner, but neither gaudy nor needlessly fine, with less splendour but more real elegance than the furniture at Rosings. “And of this place,” thinks Elizabeth, with some pardonable hankering, “I might have been mistress. With these rooms I might have been familiarly acquainted. Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But, no—” a wholesome recollection stops the current of her thoughts in time—“I should not have been allowed to invite them.”
The housekeeper, an elderly, respectable-looking woman, much more civil and less fine than Elizabeth had expected, shows the visitors over the house. After Elizabeth has recovered from a momentary alarm, and made a mental note of thanksgiving that they have not come a day later, on the servant’s observing that she expects her master the next morning with a large party of friends, the girl is able to listen with a mixture of feelings, in which wonder and bewilderment are not the least, to the talk which goes on among the others as the family pictures are being looked at. The housekeeper, on finding by some words which drop from Mrs. Gardiner that Elizabeth is acquainted with her master, begins to speak of him with honest pride and warmth. How good a master and landlord he is! How affectionate a brother! How kind to the poor! Does the young lady not think him a very handsome gentleman?