“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”
“‘Udolpho’ was written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
“No, sure; was it? Ay, I remember; so it was. I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they made such a fuss about; she who married the French emigrant.”
John Thorpe’s manners do not please Catherine, inexperienced though she is; but he is James’s friend, and Isabella’s brother. Besides, Catherine is told by Isabella that John finds her the most charming girl in the world, and John himself engages her for one of the dances at the evening’s assembly. Jane Austen points out—and here she has a gentle explanation of a girlish weakness—that, had Catherine been older and vainer, such attacks might have done little; but where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner.
The young Morlands and Thorpes, with the good-natured concurrence of Mr. and Mrs. Allen, form many morning and evening engagements together. In the course of these engagements, Catherine likes John Thorpe less and less, in spite of his boisterous professions of admiration. She even begins to have painful doubts of the perfect amiability and good taste of her bosom friend and future sister—a prospective relationship which Catherine hailed with delight in the beginning.
Indeed, Isabella behaves with all the rampant selfishness, reckless disregard of appearances, and insatiable appetite for admiration with which a vain, coarse-minded, heartless Isabella Thorpe can behave. Her loud, insincere professions, which her practice contradicts so glaringly, could not have deceived Catherine even so long as they did, had it not been that the younger girl, brought up in the worthy clergyman’s upright, kind-hearted household, is unsuspicious of evil, and guileless as a dove.
In broad contrast to the two wilful, wild Thorpes, are Henry Tilney and his sister, a sensible, good, pretty, and well-bred girl, who is young and attractive, and can enjoy herself at a ball, without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence.
In these blasé, nil admirari days, when many young people find nothing worth the trouble of being excited about, when enthusiasm is dead, and even moderate interest seems fast expiring, it may be thought that such warnings as are conveyed in the praise of Eleanor Tilney are not required. But I suspect it is a case of scratch the Russian, and you will find the Tartar. It is the fashion to appear indifferent and cynical, and so our very children—held up to us in the mirror of “Punch”—babble weariness with the world, and misanthropy. But the languor and scorn—happily for humanity—form a mere accidental crust, beneath which, more or less visible, are the old ardour and impetuosity, which need to be tutored to temperance and prudence, and charged never to forget their Christian baptism of generous self-forgetfulness and chivalrous magnanimity, in a peaceful drawing-room as well as on a stricken battle-field.
The Tilneys, to whom Catherine is so strongly attracted, though perfectly civil in any encounter with the Thorpes, instinctively recoil from them. The different qualities of the young people, no less than the different sets in which they move, prevent amalgamation.
Many capital scenes in “Northanger Abbey” exhibit young Catherine Morland’s puzzled distress at the clashing social elements among which she finds herself, with her own decided preference for the Tilneys, opposed to what she conceives is her allegiance, alike of friendship and sisterly fidelity, to the Thorpes.