Pride and Prejudice (54 page)

worth while to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our persuasion.

And he added, in a
caveat
which is important for understanding much eighteenth-century literature, ‘Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.’ Locke pointed out how, because of ‘settled habit’, often ‘we take that for the perception of our sensation which is an idea formed by our judgement’. This fairly accurately sums up Elizabeth’s earlier reactions to Darcy. She identifies her sensory perceptions as judgements, or treats impressions as insights. In her violent condemnation of Darcy and the instant credence she gives to Wickham, no matter how understanding the former and excusable the latter, Elizabeth is guilty of ‘Wrong Assent, or Error’, as Locke entitled one of his chapters. In it he gives some of the causes of man’s falling into error, and they include ‘Received hypotheses’, ‘Predominant passions or inclinations’ and ‘Authority’. These are forces and influences with which every individual consciousness has to contend if it is to make the lonely struggle towards true vision, as Elizabeth’s consciousness does;
and the fact that whole groups and societies can live in the grip of ‘Wrong Assent, or Error’, often with intolerably unjust and cruel results, only helps to ensure the continuing relevance of this happy tale of a girl who learned to change her mind.

The first title Jane Austen chose for the work which was finally called
Pride and Prejudice
was
First Impressions
and I think this provides an important clue to a central concern of the final version. We cannot know how prominently ‘first impressions’ figured in the first version since it is lost. There has, needless to say, been a great deal of scholarship done on the putative evolution of the novel, and I will here quote from Brian Southam’s
Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts
since his research in this area is well in advance of my own. He suggests that the book may have started out as another of Jane Austen’s early burlesques, though adding that little remains in the final form to indicate such an origin.

The object of the burlesque is hinted at in the title, for the phrase ‘first impressions’ comes directly from the terminology of sentimental literature, and Jane Austen would certainly have met it in
Sir Charles Grandison
, where its connotations are briefly defined. She would have known a more recent usage in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), where the heroine is told that by resisting first impressions she will ‘acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counter-balance the passions’. Here, as commonly in popular fiction, ‘first impressions’ exhibit the strength and truth of the heart’s immediate and intuitive response, usually love at first sight. Jane Austen had already attacked this concept of feeling in ‘Love’ and ‘Friendship’, and in
Sense and Sensibility
it is a deeply-founded trait of Marianne’s temperament…There is a striking reversal of this concept in
Pride and Prejudice
, yet in circumstances altogether unsentimental.

He is referring to Elizabeth’s ‘first impressions’ of Darcy’s house, Pemberley, which are, as it were, accurate and authenticated by the book. She is also right, we might add, in her first impressions of figures like Mr Collins, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. But she is wrong in her first impressions of Wickham; and her first impressions of Darcy, though to a large extent warranted by the
evidence of his deportment and tone, are an inadequate basis for the rigid judgement which she then erects upon them.
¹

Mr Southam suggests that ‘the original title may have been discarded following the publication of a
First Impressions
by Mrs Holford in 1801’, and he repeats R. W. Chapman’s original observation that the new title almost certainly came from the closing pages of Fanny Burney’s
Cecilia
. This book also concerns a very proud young man, Mortimer Delvile, who cannot bring himself to give up his family name, which is the rather perverse condition on which alone Cecilia may inherit a fortune from her uncle. The relationship between this book and Jane Austen’s novel has also been explored by other critics and it will suffice here to quote from the wise Dr Lyster’s speech near the end of the book.

‘The whole of this unfortunate business,’ said Dr Lyster, ‘has been the result of
PRIDE
and
PREJUDICE
. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature!…Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality, preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however, remember: if to
PRIDE
and
PREJUDICE
you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to
PRIDE
and
PREJUDICE
you will also owe their termination.’

But while conceding that the phrase ‘first impressions’ may be more than a glancing blow aimed at the conventions of the sentimental novel, I want to suggest a further possible implication in Jane Austen’s original title. Without for a moment suggesting that she read as much contemporary philosophy as she did fiction (though with so intelligent a woman it is scarcely impossible), I think it is worth pointing out that ‘impressions’ is one of the key words in David Hume’s philosophy, and the one to which he gives pre-eminence as the source of our knowledge. Thus from the beginning of the
Treatise on Human Nature
:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call
IMPRESSIONS
and
IDEAS
. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name
impressions
; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By
ideas
I mean the faint image of these in thinking and reasoning…There is another division of our perceptions, which it will be convenient to observe, and which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas. This division is into
SIMPLE
and
COMPLEX
…I observe that many of our complex ideas never had impressions, that corresponded to them, and that many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas. I can imagine to myself such a city as the
New Jerusalem
, whose pavement is gold and walls are rubies, tho’ I never saw any such. I have seen
Paris
; but shall I affirm that I can form such an idea of that city, as will perfectly represent all its streets and houses in their real and just proportions?

Elizabeth has a lively mind – her liveliness is indeed one of the qualities which wins Darcy to her – and her impressions are comparably lively, since the quality of the registering consciousness necessarily affects the intensity of the registered impressions. Similarly she is capable both of complex impressions and complex ideas – more of this later. Her problem, in Hume’s terms, is that her complex ideas are not always firmly based on her complex impressions obtained from the scenes before her. Here we notice that eighteenth-century suspicion of imagination, to which Jane Austen partially subscribed, since it was likely to make you believe ideas not based on impressions – to confuse the New Jerusalem and Paris. (In rebelling against eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology, Blake was to assert the primacy of the faculty which could envision the New Jerusalem and elevate it over the mere perception of Paris.)

If, says Hume, we wish to understand our ideas, we must go back to our impressions:

By what invention can we throw light upon these ideas, and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view? Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied.

That is from
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
. In the
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
he also stresses that

the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; but that we must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper
criteria
of truth and falsehood.

And ‘a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection’. Impressions beget inclinations, and those inclinations may then come under the consideration of reason. But

Reason being cool and disengaged, is not motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.

One further quotation:

In every situation or incident, there are many particular and seemingly minute circumstances, which the man of greatest talent is, at first, apt to overlook, though on them the justness of his conclusions, and consequently the prudence of his conduct, entirely depend…The truth is, an unexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely unexperienced.

Without experience, no reason; without impressions, no experience. This suggests the particular importance of ‘first impressions’ because, although they may well need subsequent correction, amplification, supplementation etc., they constitute the beginning of experience. All the above quotations from Hume seem to me to apply very aptly to
Pride and Prejudice
and I do not think this aptness needs spelling out. For Jane Austen, as for Hume, man, and woman, needed to be
both
an experiencer
and
a reasoner: the former without the latter is error-prone, the latter without the former is useless if not impossible (as exemplified by Mary Bennet’s sententious comments; she is
all
‘cool and disengaged’ reason, and thus no reasoner at all). Both experience and reason depend upon impressions, and first impressions thus become our first steps into full human life. To overstress this may become a matter suitable for burlesque, but as a general proposition it is not inherently so.

To add to this proposition the reminder that first impressions, indeed all impressions, may need subsequent revision is only to say that full human life is a complex affair, and Jane Austen makes us well aware of this complexity. From the problematical irony of the opening assertion – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ – there are constant reminders of the shiftingness of what people take to be ‘truth’; for what is ‘universally acknowledged’ can change not only from society to society but from person to person, and indeed within the same person over a period of time. There is in the book a whole vocabulary connected with the process of decisions, opinion, conviction, stressing or suggesting how various and unstable are people’s ideas, judgements, accounts and versions of situations and people. After one evening of seeing Darcy ‘His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world’; Elizabeth asks Wickham about Lady Catherine and ‘allowed that he had given a very rational account’; she also believes his account of his treatment by Darcy and it is left to Jane to suggest that ‘interested people have perhaps misrepresented each to the other’. Jane, however, has her own myopia, for in her desire to think well of the whole world, she sees Miss Bingley’s treatment of her as agreeable while Elizabeth more accurately discerns it as supercilious. However Elizabeth is too confident, as when she asserts to her more tentative sister ‘I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.’ She is ‘resolved’ against Darcy and for a while takes pleasure in Wickham who is, temporarily, ‘universally liked’. She questions Darcy whether he has never allowed
himself ‘to be blinded by prejudice’, without thinking that she may at that very moment be guilty of prejudging with its resulting screening of vision. Opinions are constantly changing as people’s behaviour appears in a different light. Elizabeth ‘represents’ a person or a situation in one way, while Jane adheres to her own ‘idea’ of things. It is Jane who, when Darcy is condemned by everybody else as ‘the worst of men’, ‘pleaded for allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes’. Of course it is not long before opinion shifts against Wickham. ‘Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world’, just as everybody’s opinion quickly reverses itself towards the Bennet family. ‘The Bennets were
speedily pronounced
to be the luckiest family in the world, though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had first run away, they had been
generally proved
to be marked out for misfortune.’ (My italics.) The fallibility of our ‘proofs’ and the prematurity of all too many of our ‘pronouncements’ are amply demonstrated in this novel. The ‘anxious interpretation’ which is made necessary on social occasions is examined, and the ‘interest’ which lies behind this or that reading of things is alluded to. When Mrs Gardiner ‘
recollected having heard
Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy
formerly spoken of
as a very proud, ill-natured boy’ she takes it, temporarily, as knowledge. (My italics.)

It is of course Elizabeth who most importantly comes to ‘wish that her former opinions had been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate’. As opposed to Jane whom she calls ‘honestly blind’, Elizabeth has more ‘quickness of observation’. But in Darcy’s case her observation proves to be too quick. Not that we can or wish to count her wrong in her ‘first impressions’ of Darcy, for his manner is proud, patronizing, and, in his famous proposal, insulting and unworthy of a gentleman – as Elizabeth very properly points out to our great delight. But she had formed a fixed ‘idea’ of the whole Darcy on insufficient data, and in believing Wickham’s account of the man – a purely verbal fabrication – she is putting too much confidence in unverified and, as it turns out, completely false, evidence. (The ability of language to make ‘Black appear White’ – and vice versa – was a crucial truth of which Jane Austen was particularly aware.
In a society which relied so much on conversation it is a constant danger. But it is not a danger which is restricted to a highly verbal culture. It is, for instance, King Lear’s basic error in believing Goneril’s and Regan’s inflated rhetoric of love, and failing to recognize the actual thing itself wordlessly incorporate in Cordelia. Elizabeth’s error is not of the same order, of course, but it is of the same kind.)