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- pride-and-prejudice
- text
- 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. But the
hero and the heroine are not tints to be dismissed._
_Darcy has always seemed to me by far the best and most interesting of
Miss Austen’s heroes; the only possible competitor being Henry Tilney,
whose part is so slight and simple that it hardly enters into
comparison. It has sometimes, I believe, been urged that his pride is
unnatural at first in its expression and later in its yielding, while
his falling in love at all is not extremely probable. Here again I
cannot go with the objectors. Darcy’s own account of the way in which
his pride had been pampered, is perfectly rational and sufficient; and
nothing could be, psychologically speaking, a_ causa verior _for its
sudden restoration to healthy conditions than the shock of Elizabeth’s
scornful refusal acting on a nature_ ex hypothesi _generous. Nothing in
even our author is finer and more delicately touched than the change of
his demeanour at the sudden meeting in the grounds of Pemberley. Had he
been a bad prig or a bad coxcomb, he might have been still smarting
under his rejection, or suspicious that the girl had come
husband-hunting. His being neither is exactly consistent with the
probable feelings of a man spoilt in the common sense, but not really
injured in disposition, and thoroughly in love. As for his being in
love, Elizabeth has given as just an exposition of the causes of that
phenomenon as Darcy has of the conditions of his unregenerate state,
only she has of course not counted in what was due to her own personal
charm._
_The secret of that charm many men and not a few women, from Miss Austen
herself downwards, have felt, and like most charms it is a thing rather
to be felt than to be explained. Elizabeth of course belongs to the_
allegro _or_ allegra _division of the army of Venus. Miss Austen was
always provokingly chary of description in regard to her beauties; and
except the fine eyes, and a hint or two that she had at any rate
sometimes a bright complexion, and was not very tall, we hear nothing
about her looks. But her chief difference from other heroines of the
lively type seems to lie first in her being distinctly clever--almost
strong-minded, in the better sense of that objectionable word--and
secondly in her being entirely destitute of ill-nature for all her
propensity to tease and the sharpness of her tongue. Elizabeth can give
at least as good as she gets when she is attacked; but she never
“scratches,” and she never attacks first. Some of the merest
obsoletenesses of phrase and manner give one or two of her early
speeches a slight pertness, but that is nothing, and when she comes to
serious business, as in the great proposal scene with Darcy (which is,
as it should be, the climax of the interest of the book), and in the
final ladies’ battle with Lady Catherine, she is unexceptionable. Then
too she is a perfectly natural girl. She does not disguise from herself
or anybody that she resents Darcy’s first ill-mannered personality with
as personal a feeling. (By the way, the reproach that the ill-manners of
this speech are overdone is certainly unjust; for things of the same
kind, expressed no doubt less stiltedly but more coarsely, might have
been heard in more than one ball-room during this very year from persons
who ought to have been no worse bred than Darcy.) And she lets the
injury done to Jane and the contempt shown to the rest of her family
aggravate this resentment in the healthiest way in the world._
_Still, all this does not explain her charm, which, taking beauty as a
common form of all heroines, may perhaps consist in the addition to her
playfulness, her wit, her affectionate and natural disposition, of a
certain fearlessness very uncommon in heroines of her type and age.
Nearly all of them would have been in speechless awe of the magnificent
Darcy; nearly all of them would have palpitated and fluttered at the
idea of proposals, even naughty ones, from the fascinating Wickham.
Elizabeth, with nothing offensive, nothing_ viraginous, _nothing of the
“New Woman” about her, has by nature what the best modern (not “new”)
women have by education and experience, a perfect freedom from the idea
that all men may bully her if they choose, and that most will away with
her if they can. Though not in the least “impudent and mannish grown,”
she has no mere sensibility, no nasty niceness about her. The form of
passion common and likely to seem natural in Miss Austen’s day was so
invariably connected with the display of one or the other, or both of
these qualities, that she has not made Elizabeth outwardly passionate.
But I, at least, have not the slightest doubt that she would have
married Darcy just as willingly without Pemberley as with it, and
anybody who can read between lines will not find the lovers’
conversations in the final chapters so frigid as they might have looked
to the Della Cruscans of their own day, and perhaps do look to the Della
Cruscans of this._
_And, after all, what is the good of seeking for the reason of
charm?--it is there. There were better sense in the sad mechanic
exercise of determining the reason of its absence where it is not. In
the novels of the last hundred years there are vast numbers of young
ladies with whom it might be a pleasure to fall in love; there are at
least five with whom, as it seems to me, no man of taste and spirit can
help doing so. Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth
Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara
Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I
should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana
and Barbara. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one
of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth._
_GEORGE SAINTSBURY._
[Illustration: List of Illustrations.]
PAGE
Frontispiece iv
Title-page v
Dedication vii
Heading to Preface ix
Heading to List of Illustrations xxv
Heading to Chapter I. 1
“He came down to see the place” 2
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet 5
“I hope Mr. Bingley will like it” 6
“I’m the tallest” 9
“He rode a black horse” 10
“When the party entered” 12
“She is tolerable” 15
Heading to Chapter IV. 18
Heading to Chapter V. 22
“Without once opening his lips” 24
Tailpiece to Chapter V.