surely have repented of his entanglement with Catherine. There is, however, this to be said, that I strongly suspect Elizabeth of being his first cousin. She is so like him that she might have failed to please him, or he may have known her from a little girl and looked on her as a sister. Or the marriages of cousins may have been as impossible among the Tilneys as in the Royal Family of Crim Tartary, where Bulbo’s beautiful Circassian cousin simply had to be allowed to die of love for him.
There are many possibilities in the combination of characters now separated by inexorable paper and ink. One can imagine a meeting at Bath between General Tilney and Sir Walter Elliott; they would clearly sympathise, and unless the General has injured his complexion by incautious zeal on active service, which seems unlikely, Sir Walter would have had “no objection to being seen with him anywhere”; he might even have walked arm-in-arm with him as he did with Colonel Wallis, who “was a fine military figure, though sandy haired.” Again, Mr. Collins would have been charmed with Mr. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, for although the two characters are not quite similarly compounded of snobbery and folly, yet there is a common substratum of meanness that must have served as a bond.
It would be interesting to treat the whole of Miss Austen’s characters as the flora of a given land is dealt with, to divide them into genera and species, and to provide an analytical key. Take, for instance, the young men: these would
correspond to a Natural Order, say the Ranunculaceae, and may be divided, as the following table shows, into two groups, Attractive and Unattractive, and these are subdivided again into four groups which correspond to genera. No. 1, which we should call Brandonia, possesses the three species Brandonia brandoni, ferrarsi, and bertrami, and so on with the rest.
Brandon, Dashwood, Ferrars, R. Ferrars, Willoughby are in Sense and Sensibility; E. Bertram, Crawford, Rushworth in Mansfield Park;
Mr. Collins, Darcy, Wickham in Pride and Prejudice; Tilney and Thorpe in Northanger Abbey; Mr. Elton, F. Churchill and Knightley in Emma; Wentworth and Mr. Elliot in Persuasion.
Then of course we should need descriptions to distinguish the species, thus in genus (ii) Darcy would be known by pride, Knightley by calm sense, Tilney by light-hearted cheerfulness, while Wentworth would be easily recognised by his sub-dull character. Naturalists would dispute whether Mr. Elton should be in the same genus as Wickham, or in the quite distinct genus (iv); or again, whether F. Churchill should not be placed with Darcy and Knightley. In the same way Captain Wentworth might perhaps be placed in the dull group with Brandon, Edward Ferrars and Edward Bertram.
I have not attempted to include in the system all the young men who occur in the novels. I leave the completion to those who can devote a life-time to the subject, and who are possessed of the necessary discrimination and patience to marshall and arrange the whole flora of Miss Austen’s world.
In connexion with this subject I have found it interesting to read for the first time quite recently Miss Austen’s unfinished novels, Lady Susan and The Watsons. It is easy to classify some of the characters—thus Mrs. Robert Watson is obviously Mrs. Elton, as, indeed, Mr. Austen Leigh points out in his Memoir.