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- pride-and-prejudice
- text
- only genius knows. The one was humanity, and the other was art. On the
first head she could not make a mistake; her men, though limited, are
true, and her women are, in the old sense, “absolute.” As to art, if she
has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes
the false realism of our own day look merely dead-alive. Take almost any
Frenchman, except the late M. de Maupassant, and watch him laboriously
piling up strokes in the hope of giving a complete impression. You get
none; you are lucky if, discarding two-thirds of what he gives, you can
shape a real impression out of the rest. But with Miss Austen the
myriad, trivial, unforced strokes build up the picture like magic.
Nothing is false; nothing is superfluous. When (to take the present book
only) Mr. Collins changed his mind from Jane to Elizabeth “while Mrs.
Bennet was stirring the fire” (and we know_ how _Mrs. Bennet would have
stirred the fire), when Mr. Darcy “brought his coffee-cup back_
himself,” _the touch in each case is like that of Swift--“taller by the
breadth of my nail”--which impressed the half-reluctant Thackeray with
just and outspoken admiration. Indeed, fantastic as it may seem, I
should put Miss Austen as near to Swift in some ways, as I have put her
to Addison in others._
_This Swiftian quality appears in the present novel as it appears
nowhere else in the character of the immortal, the ineffable Mr.
Collins. Mr. Collins is really_ great; _far greater than anything Addison
ever did, almost great enough for Fielding or for Swift himself. It has
been said that no one ever was like him. But in the first place,_ he
_was like him; he is there--alive, imperishable, more real than hundreds
of prime ministers and archbishops, of “metals, semi-metals, and
distinguished philosophers.” In the second place, it is rash, I think,
to conclude that an actual Mr. Collins was impossible or non-existent at
the end of the eighteenth century. It is very interesting that we
possess, in this same gallery, what may be called a spoiled first
draught, or an unsuccessful study of him, in John Dashwood. The
formality, the under-breeding, the meanness, are there; but the portrait
is only half alive, and is felt to be even a little unnatural. Mr.
Collins is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive. In fact, for all the
“miniature,” there is something gigantic in the way in which a certain
side, and more than one, of humanity, and especially eighteenth-century
humanity, its Philistinism, its well-meaning but hide-bound morality,
its formal pettiness, its grovelling respect for rank, its materialism,
its selfishness, receives exhibition. I will not admit that one speech
or one action of this inestimable man is incapable of being reconciled
with reality, and I should not wonder if many of these words and actions
are historically true._
_But the greatness of Mr. Collins could not have been so satisfactorily
exhibited if his creatress had not adjusted so artfully to him the
figures of Mr. Bennet and of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The latter, like
Mr. Collins himself, has been charged with exaggeration. There is,
perhaps, a very faint shade of colour for the charge; but it seems to me
very faint indeed. Even now I do not think that it would be impossible
to find persons, especially female persons, not necessarily of noble
birth, as overbearing, as self-centred, as neglectful of good manners,
as Lady Catherine. A hundred years ago, an earl’s daughter, the Lady
Powerful (if not exactly Bountiful) of an out-of-the-way country parish,
rich, long out of marital authority, and so forth, had opportunities of
developing these agreeable characteristics which seldom present
themselves now. As for Mr. Bennet, Miss Austen, and Mr. Darcy, and even
Miss Elizabeth herself, were, I am inclined to think, rather hard on him
for the “impropriety” of his conduct. His wife was evidently, and must
always have been, a quite irreclaimable fool; and unless he had shot her
or himself there was no way out of it for a man of sense and spirit but
the ironic. From no other point of view is he open to any reproach,
except for an excusable and not unnatural helplessness at the crisis of
the elopement, and his utterances are the most acutely delightful in the
consciously humorous kind--in the kind that we laugh with, not at--that
even Miss Austen has put into the mouth of any of her characters. It is
difficult to know whether he is most agreeable when talking to his wife,
or when putting Mr. Collins through his paces; but the general sense of
the world has probably been right in preferring to the first rank his
consolation to the former when she maunders over the entail, “My dear,
do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things.
Let us flatter ourselves that_ I _may be the survivor;” and his inquiry
to his colossal cousin as to the compliments which Mr. Collins has just
related as made by himself to Lady Catherine, “May I ask whether these
pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the
result of previous study?” These are the things which give Miss Austen’s
readers the pleasant shocks, the delightful thrills, which are felt by
the readers of Swift, of Fielding, and we may here add, of Thackeray, as
they are felt by the readers of no other English author of fiction
outside of these four._
_The goodness of the minor characters in_ Pride and Prejudice _has been
already alluded to, and it makes a detailed dwelling on their beauties
difficult in any space, and impossible in this. Mrs. Bennet we have
glanced at, and it is not easy to say whether she is more exquisitely
amusing or more horribly true. Much the same may be said of Kitty and
Lydia; but it is not every author, even of genius, who would have
differentiated with such unerring skill the effects of folly and
vulgarity of intellect and disposition working upon the common
weaknesses of woman at such different ages. With Mary, Miss Austen has
taken rather less pains, though she has been even more unkind to her;
not merely in the text, but, as we learn from those interesting
traditional appendices which Mr. Austen Leigh has given us, in dooming
her privately to marry “one of Mr. Philips’s clerks.” The habits of
first copying and then retailing moral sentiments, of playing and
singing too long in public, are, no doubt, grievous and criminal; but
perhaps poor Mary was rather the scapegoat of the sins of blue stockings
in that Fordyce-belectured generation. It is at any rate difficult not
to extend to her a share of the respect and affection (affection and
respect of a peculiar kind; doubtless), with which one regards Mr.
Collins, when she draws the moral of Lydia’s fall. I sometimes wish
that the exigencies of the story had permitted Miss Austen to unite
these personages, and thus at once achieve a notable mating and soothe
poor Mrs. Bennet’s anguish over the entail._
_The Bingleys and the Gardiners and the Lucases, Miss Darcy and Miss de
Bourgh, Jane, Wickham, and the rest, must pass without special comment,
further than the remark that Charlotte Lucas (her egregious papa, though
delightful, is just a little on the thither side of the line between
comedy and farce) is a wonderfully clever study in drab of one kind, and
that Wickham (though something of Miss Austen’s hesitation of touch in
dealing with young men appears) is a not much less notable sketch in
drab of another. Only genius could have made Charlotte what she is, yet
not disagreeable; Wickham what he is, without investing him either with
a cheap Don Juanish attractiveness or a disgusting rascality.