Jane Austen (10 page)

But so much is merely what one would expect to find in the

apprentice work of Jane Austen. It is the romantic episode which affords the unique interest among her works, and though the course of it is an illustration of the title and the condemnation implied by its contrast: though Marianne is openly criticized on almost every page, her story is told with so much sympathy and so much conviction that in retrospect we regard it, not as the tragic blunder it actually was, but as something with the strange, essential beauty that attaches to profound human experience.

The outlines of the story are much more boldly drawn than in any of the other five novels, and the scenes, though they in no case overstep the limits of strict probability, are conceived on a larger scale. An instance of this difference is provided by a comparison of the first meeting of Marianne and her lover with the similar encounters in the other books. Catherine Morland has a casual introduction to Mr.

Tilney at a crowded and fatiguing assembly; Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have a very unpromising first encounter at a ball; Fanny Price, as a frightened child of ten, does not distinguish Edmund Bertram among the alarming cousins to whom she is introduced on the evening of her arrival at Mansfield Park; Emma Woodhouse

would not have been able to remember that day in her childhood on which she

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became conscious of Mr. Knightley's existence; we are not told how Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth first saw each other, because they met eight years before the opening of
Persuasion
; but with Marianne we are in a different world at once. She and her younger sister had gone for a walk on the downs which, varied with hanging woods, shut in Barton valley; it was autumn, and when the girls had reached the summit and were delighting in the excitement of a

tearing wind, the clouds suddenly closed over their heads and a burst of rain made them run down the hillside to the shelter of the cottage once more. Marianne was ahead of her sister when she suddenly

tripped, and on trying to get up, found herself helpless with a sprained ankle. "A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him," saw the accident and, putting down the gun, ran to her assistance, and finding that she could not walk, picked her up in his arms and carried her down the hillside, through the gate of the cottage, and the front door which Margaret on running in had left open, and straight into the parlor, where he deposited her in a chair under the astonished eyes of Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor.

The acquaintance thus begun opens as the bud in summer's ripening breath. Marianne, though so severely handled by her creator, is lovely and interesting to a degree. Her attractions are those of a breathing creature, wild and startling with life. "Her skin was very brown, but from its transparency, her complexion was unusually brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive; and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight." It is a type particularly well illustrated in portraits of the late eighteenth century of young women in their longsleeved gowns with fichus, and hair turned loosely back

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from the face and arranged in so carefully careless a manner that it seems to be wandering at will. One of the indications that
Sense and
Sensibility
was composed fourteen years at least before its publication may be found in the incident of Willoughby's cutting off a piece of Marianne's hair, as, although they were in the parlor, she was sitting with it "all tumbled down her back." The gentleman who had raped a lock from the Grecian coiffure of 1811, would have caused his victim to cry out with Belinda:

O hadst thou, cruel, been content to seize

Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!

Nowhere in the novel is the author's unerring touch upon character better shown than in the fact that Marianne, with all her exasperating faults, was of the type which was, quite irrespective of her personal beauty, strongly attractive to the opposite sex. "Gaiety was never a part of
my
character," says Edward Ferrars. Elinor replies: "Nor do I think it a part of Marianne's. I should hardly call her a lively girl--she is very earnest, very eager in all she does--sometimes talks a great deal, and always with animation--but she is not often really merry."

But Marianne's earnest animation was bewitching, and her

"eagerness of fancy and spirits" seized on the imagination more than any frivolity, however entertaining. Nor was her charm diminished by the fact that she was quite without a sense of humor. The present age has added so many decades to the period of youth that it is a little difficult to understand the impression Jane Austen meant to make in saying that Colonel Brandon was thirty-six; but a rough calculation is sufficient for one to realize the absurdity of Marianne's remarks when she debated the possibility of the

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Colonel, old as he was, finding some woman of seven and twenty or so who might be pleased to marry him.

"'A woman of seven and twenty,' said Marianne after pausing a moment, 'can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife. In his marrying such a woman, therefore, there would be nothing unsuitable. It would be a compact of convenience, and the world would be satisfied. In my eyes it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing'"; though the full effect of this pronouncement is perhaps not appreciated until it is discovered that Marianne herself, at the age of nineteen, became the Colonel's loving and devoted wife. The wrong-headedness of

Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, in the one case leading her to hasty and altogether erroneous judgments, and in the other hurrying her favorite child to calamity, does not detract from the charm of its possessors any more than it would in real life; the opposite quality is the one dangerous to fascination; it is not that men positively admire a woman for defective powers of judgment, but that they feel

instinctively ill at ease with one of calm and acute perception. Elinor was of the latter sort, and if the portrait of her lover Edward Ferrars seems colorless and flat, one can say at least this for it: that it represents the kind of man who might reasonably be expected to fall in love with Elinor.

Marianne's firm conviction that no one who understood the meaning of love could ever feel it twice was in harmony with all her other ideas and tastes. It seems strange to us that the sensitive, gentle, melancholy Cowper should have afforded such ecstatic delight to a mind as ardent as Marianne's,

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but that does not mar our appreciation of the scene where she was obliged to listen to his verses read aloud by the well-meaning Edward. "'I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!'"

"'He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper.'"

"'Nay, mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!'" Edward was equally deficient in a taste for the picturesque; he visited them at Barton, and when the sisters were showing him the views of the neighborhood, he said the country was beautiful but that the bottoms must be dirty in winter; to which Marianne exclaimed: "'How can you think of dirt with such objects before you?'"

"'Because,' he replied smiling, 'amongst the rest of the objects before me, I see a very dirty lane.'"

"'How strange!' said Marianne to herself as she walked on.'"

Edward gives an amusing comparison between the terminology of

the student of the picturesque and that of the ordinary observer.

When Marianne questions him eagerly as to the parts of the scenery he has most admired, he says: "'You must not inquire too far, Marianne. . . . I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. . . . It exactly answers my idea of a fine country . . . and I daresay it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories,

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grey moss and brushwood, but they are all lost on me.'" Marianne was not offended; she had too settled a conviction that she herself was right. Her sensibility was dangerous because it was so genuine; the impossibility of Elinor's task in trying to induce her to be more guarded in her attitude to Willoughby lay in the fact that Marianne thought that reserve or caution towards a man for whom she felt a mutual affection, though he had not as yet proposed to her, was not tiresome or prudish merely, but utterly ignoble. On every occasion where she might have been more comfortable by exercising self-control she regarded it as a moral obligation to herself to be as uncomfortable as possible. The day after Willoughby had left

Devonshire, albeit his return was expected almost immediately,

"Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting with Willoughby.

She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it." But at the climax of the affair, when Willoughby's desertion is made plain and announced in a manner of such startling brutality, the criticism of Marianne which is so perpetually implied is for once quite absent, and the scene is offered whole and entire in impartial conviction.

"Before the housemaid had lit their fire next day, or the sun gained any power over a cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her. In this situation, Elinor, roused from sleep by her agitation and sobs, first perceived her; and after observing her for a few moments with silent anxiety, said, in a tone of the most considerate gentleness,

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'Marianne, may I ask--' 'No, Elinor,' she replied, 'ask nothing. You will soon know all.' The sort of desperate calmness with which this was said lasted no longer than while she spoke, and was immediately followed by a return of the same excessive affliction. It was some minutes before she could go on with her letter; and the frequent bursts of grief, which still obliged her at intervals to withhold her pen, were proof enough of her feeling how more than probable it was that she was writing for the last time to Willoughby."

She spent the time till breakfast wandering about the house, avoiding everybody, and after breakfast, during which Elinor had done her best to distract the attention of Mrs. Jennings, "a letter was delivered to Marianne which she eagerly caught from the servant, and, turning of a deathlike paleness, instantly ran out of the room. Elinor, who saw as plainly by this as if she had seen the direction, that it must come from Willoughby, felt immediately such a sickness at heart as made her hardly able to hold up her head, and sat in such a general tremor as made her fear it impossible to escape Mrs. Jennings'

notice. That good lady, however, saw only that Marianne had

received a letter from Willoughby, which appeared to her a very good joke, and which she treated accordingly by hoping with a laugh that she would find it to her liking." She went on to talk of their forthcoming marriage, which had been the standing topic of

conversation at Barton for the past several months; and Elinor tried in vain to make her believe that Marianne and Willoughby were not formally engaged; Mrs. Jennings put down all these denials to

slyness, and assured her that she was not to be taken in. Elinor at length gave up the unequal struggle; "eager at all events to know what Willoughby had written, [she] hurried away to their room, where, on opening the door, she saw Marianne stretched on the bed, almost

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choked by grief, a letter in her hand, and two or three others lying by her. Elinor drew near, but without saying a word, and seating herself on the bed, took her hand and kissed her affectionately several times, and then gave way to a burst of tears which at first was scarcely less violent than Marianne's. The latter, though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness of this behavior, and after some time thus spent in joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor's hands, and then, covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony."

Allowing for the natural difficulty of one great creative artist properly to estimate another, it is not easy to understand what Charlotte Brontë meant by saying that Jane Austen's heroines have only so much acquaintance with the passions as their author would think lady-like.

After a period of distraught, oblivious misery, Marianne allowed Elinor to accept for them an invitation to go with Mrs. Jennings to the Palmers' house at Cleveland: because Marianne wanted to be at home and thought that this would be the quickest means of getting there. The Palmers were wealthy enough to have a house constructed on the rules of taste. It was "situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure grounds were tolerably extensive; and like every other place of the same importance, it had its open shrubbery and closed wood-walk; a road of smooth gravel winding round a

plantation, led to the front; the lawn was dotted over with timber; the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain ash and the acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices." Marianne, whose heart "swelled with emotion" to think that Willoughby's seat, Combe Magna, was not thirty miles distant, determined that she would make her stay endurable with the relief of