"'Come here, child,' cried her father as she appeared. 'I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?' Elizabeth replied that it was. 'Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?'
"'I have, sir.'
"'Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?'
"'Yes, or I will never see her again.'
"'An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.'"
There is nothing "commonplace" about this. What matter that the characters are only middle-class and "respectable," if they can afford material for such excellent wit?
In one respect, judged by the present standard in fiction, Jane Austen's work assuredly is "commonplace." No novelist was ever less troubled in the search for names. She merely took those of people she had heard of or met, preferring the common to the unusual. Bennet, Dashwood, Elliot, Price, Woodhouse—names that the modern "popular" novelist would reject at sight, served her turn, a Darcy or a Tilney being her highest flights in nomenclature. As for the Christian names, they are of the most ordinary and are used over and over again. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, three of the prominent characters are named John—John Dashwood, John Middleton, and John Willoughby. There are two Catherines in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeths, Fannys, Annes, Marys, Henrys, Edwards, Roberts, "fill the bills," and such a name as Frank Churchill seems recondite. It is much the same in the letters, the truth being that the Gwladyses, and Evadnes, and Marmadukes of those days were very rare, and almost unknown in rural society. The burden which her sister Cassandra bore must have strengthened Jane's determination that her heroes and heroines should not have unusual names, and so we have our Elinors and Elizabeths, and Fannys, with their Edwards and Edmunds, and Henrys. The Darcys are almost the only exceptions that try the rule; "Fitzwilliam" and "Georgiana" are more in the style of the ordinary novel of "high life."
So much for names. How are the men and women who bear them "introduced" to us? When a Colonel Newcome, or an Alfred Jingle, or a Sylvain Pons comes upon the scene, we hear a good deal about his personal appearance, his manner of dress, his bearing, and those who introduce him have a huge circle of men and women to bring before us with similar formalities. Jane Austen, like a casual hostess at a modern dance, leaves us, as often as not, to make acquaintance in any way we can. Scott, with his wealth of character-studies among high and middle and low, his kings and cavaliers and covenanters and crofters, was the most generous giver of types among Jane Austen's contemporaries; Maria Edgeworth in depicting the gentry and peasantry of Ireland, and John Galt the small shop-keepers and their customers in the Scottish country-towns, managed to present us to a large circle of new acquaintances, of various classes and occupations. Jane had no use for characters, or centres of social life, that required to be specially described for a particular purpose. Only in one of her novels (Sense and Sensibility) is the busy life of London made the subject of any but the most casual description, and even then it is but the transference of the country people to town, and of the two or three towns-people back to their London houses from their country visits that is effected. (The general life of the metropolis, its theatres, parks, and bustle are left, to all intent, unnoticed. Yet, as we know from many passages in her letters, Jane during her visits was a keen spectator of the pageantry of life in a city which, she jestingly declared, played havoc with her character. "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice," she writes from Cork Street in August 1796, "and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." And in the next month she sends this little message to Mr. Austen: "My father will be so good as to fetch home his prodigal daughter from town, I hope, unless he wishes me to walk the hospitals, enter at the Temple, or mount guard at St. James'." She was not "prodigal"—save in gloves and ribbons—but she enjoyed the delights of the country-cousin in town. She went very often to the play, so often at times as to be weary of it. The Hypocrite (Bickerstaff's "alteration" of Cibber's "adaptation" of Tartuffe) "well entertained" her, Dowton and Mathews being the chief actors; and she saw Liston, Miss Stephens, Miss O'Neill, and Kean at the outset of his fame. "The Clandestine Marriage" was a favourite piece, and on one occasion she notes that her nieces, whom she sometimes took to the theatre, "revelled last night in Don Juan, whom we left in hell at half-past eleven." Such joys, however, did not move her mind enough to seduce her from the country as a source of inspiration for her work.
"All lives lived out of London are mistakes more or less grievous—but mistakes," said Sydney Smith, adapting, consciously or not, the saying of Mascarille to the Précieuses: "Pour moi, Je tiens que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnetes gens." The life of Jane Austen, whose humour the author of the Plymley Letters, the father and uncle of a hundred diverting anecdotes, so greatly enjoyed, may serve to show the weakness of such unreserved generalization. Her subjects were found in the restful backwaters of life, not in the crowded centres where mankind is more and more bewildered by the failure of wisdom to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.