“‘But you are always very much with them?’
“‘Yes, very much.’
“‘Ay, that is what I meant. He seems a good kind of old fellow enough, and has lived very well in his time, I dare say; he is not gouty for nothing. Does he drink his bottle a day now?’
“‘His bottle a day! No. Why should you think such a thing? He is a very temperate man, and you could not fancy him in liquor last night?’
“‘Lord help you! You women are always thinking of men’s being in liquor. Why, you do not suppose a man is overset by a bottle?’”
Modest as Catherine is in her unsophisticatedness, she betrays unconsciously her admiration of Henry Tilney, both to the gentleman and his sister. Fortunately, Catherine has fallen into good hands. Eleanor Tilney only likes her friend the better for liking her brother. With regard to the effect on the hero, of the girl’s tribute to his merits, Jane Austen has made a few pungent observations.
It may be that the world has grown a little wiser as well as older during the last hundred years. Certainly sensible, good young girls—however young and simple—have learnt, for the most part, to put more outward restraint, we would fain hope, in the course of some improvement on their education, on their inner sentiments. Girls have acquired a degree of the subtlety of the serpent in addition to the artlessness of the dove.
The Catherine Morland of the past is always frank, sweet, and dutiful. We can never, we are thankful, doubt her reverence and uprightness. We need never fear scandalous defiance of the laws of God and man from her. But drawn as she is, by the masterly pen of Jane Austen, Catherine is often exasperatingly foolish, and especially so in falling deeply in love, on the very slightest provocation, so far as any symptom of reciprocity of feeling on Henry Tilney’s side is made plain to the readers of “Northanger Abbey.”
Indeed, Jane Austen expressly states, with her usual dauntless candour, that the love begins on Catherine’s side, and that the agreeable—let us hope grateful—sense of the regard he has unwittingly inspired, is the spark which kindles a responsive flame in the young man’s breast.
But what would have become of Catherine had Henry Tilney been—not pre-engaged, we do not suspect him of unworthy concealment in such circumstances; of course he would have smiled the smile, bowed the bow, and danced the dance of a man whose heart and hand were bespoken;—but had he only been less complacent, less gracious, less honourable?—she must have wasted her young love, and smarted under the sense of having given it unasked and in vain. Surely Catherine, inexperienced as she was, might have had the mother-wit to anticipate such a probability, and guard against the catastrophe, by being a little more dignified and reserved in allowing scope to her imagination and inclination? I hope that at least so much forethought may be looked for from sensible girls,—I say nothing of silly ones,—in the present generation. I am free to own that if a modern girl permitted her affections to be so easily entangled, with the entanglement so transparently displayed, as was true of Catherine Morland, I for one should at once set her down as a very impulsive, heedless young woman, from whom little self-respect and discretion could be looked for, at any time.