I.
“Northanger Abbey” begins in a quizzical vein, with a record of Catherine Morland’s disqualifications for her post of heroine, according to the popular acceptation of the term in Jane Austen’s days.
“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard, and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two good livings, and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born, and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more, to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads, and legs, and arms enough for the number, but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin, without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features; so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boys’ plays, and greatly preferred cricket, not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, and watering a rose-bush. Indeed, she had no taste for a garden, and if she gathered flowers at all it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief, at least so it was conjectured, from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities; her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught, and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat ‘The Beggar’s Petition,’ and, after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she could. Not that Catherine was always stupid; by no means; she learned the fable of ‘The Hare and Many Friends’ as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music, and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinet, so at eight years old she began. She learned a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughter’s being accomplished in spite of incapacity and distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine’s life. Her taste for drawing was not superior, though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother, or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother. Her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character! for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny. She was, moreover, noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.”
The story agrees with the first paragraph. With the exception of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Northanger Abbey”—another of Jane Austen’s earlier novels—is the most purely humorous and satirical of the whole.
At fifteen, appearances are mending with Catherine. She begins to curl her hair, and long for balls. Her complexion improves, her features are softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gain more animation, her figure more consequence, and from fifteen to seventeen her mind is in training for a heroine. She reads—in addition to the stories which had formerly constituted all her voluntary reading—such books as Jane Austen tells us, in her merry mockery, heroines must read in order to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. Catherine studies Pope and Gray, Thomson and Shakespeare. Can Catherine’s sisters, in these days of much cramming and innumerable pursuits, bring forward even so respectable a list of authors with whom the young readers are intimately acquainted?
In drawing[19] Catherine is most wanting. Though she cannot write sonnets, she can read them; though there seems no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the piano, of her own composition, she can listen to other people’s performances with very little fatigue. But she has not even sufficient command of the pencil to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile, that she may be detected in the design. She is not so conscious of the deficiency in the meantime, since she has reached the age of seventeen without the suspicion of a lover. Her biographer accounts for the blank in that bantering tone she assumes:—“There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no, not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door; not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.”
But the perverseness of forty families cannot interfere with the destiny of a young lady who is to be a heroine: the wind will blow a hero to her.
Mr. Allen, the principal squire in Mr. Morland’s Wiltshire parish of Fullerton, is ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution; and his wife, a good-humoured woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that, if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad, invites the happy Catherine to accompany her.
Catherine was in luck, for Bath was the queen of the old watering-places; and a popular English watering-place at the close of the last century was a centre of bustle and gaiety, just as a country village was apt to be sunk in obscurity.
Before beginning Catherine’s Bath career, Jane Austen suddenly lapses into seriousness for a moment, to tell her readers—lest they should ever have doubted it—that this young Catherine, going out into the world to meet her fortune, has an affectionate heart, her disposition is cheerful and open—without conceit or affectation of any kind, her manners are just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl, her person is pleasing, and when in good looks pretty. Here the author’s not very lavish indulgence to her heroine collapses—“and her mind,” the sentence ends, is “about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.”
How old was the judge who made this sweeping, though good-humouredly disdainful estimate of the mental acquirements of her companions? Just five or six years older. Jane Austen had not quite attained the venerable age of twenty-three when she uttered this severe reflection.
Compared to some of Jane Austen’s other heroines, Catherine Morland has none of the astuteness and brilliance of Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, the delicate intuitions of Fanny Price, or the gentle, womanly wisdom of Anne Elliot. Catherine is a simple, single-hearted girl who, in her guilelessness and ignorance of the world, falls into mistakes impossible for the others. But she does not lack judgment, which one feels will ripen with her years. Above all, she is like every one of her author’s heroines, right-minded and wholesome-hearted. At the same time she is a genuinely girlish girl, as much carried away by her feelings and her imagination as the most foolish of good girls can be; but withal we always recognise in her the possibilities of a sensible as well as an amiable woman.
The witty banter on the author’s part is soon resumed. At parting, Mrs. Morland, in place of solemnly warning her daughter against the noblemen and baronets who were in the habit of cozening away young ladies to remote farm-houses, simply bids her wrap herself warm about the throat when she comes from “the Rooms” at night, and try to keep an account of what money she spends.
Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?), the sister next Catherine in age, does not exact from her a promise to write by every post, and repeat each detail that happens to her.
Mr. Morland, instead of giving Catherine an unlimited order on his banker, or even putting a hundred pounds bank bill into her hands, gives her only ten guineas, and promises her more when she wants it.
Nay, the journey to Bath provides neither tempests nor robbers (see again the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” with which Jane Austen was so familiar, to which she refers with strong and repeated commendation in this very story, which is, however, in many passages, a burlesque on the old romance). No greater alarm occurs than a fear on Mrs. Allen’s side of having once left her clogs behind her at an inn, and that fortunately turns out to be groundless.
The mention of the clogs, and the inference of the nights at the inns by the way, a necessary experience of travellers who journeyed in their own carriages, or by post as Jane Austen herself was accustomed to do, are the sole things which remind us that the little party travelling thus in the last century do not belong to our neighbours to-day.
Farther removed from us is Bath when it was the height of the fashion, and frequented by crowds of pleasure-seekers in addition to health-seekers. Its gaiety was at once systematic and exuberant, when all the company gathered regularly in the Pump-room, where the visitors not only drank their allotted draughts of water, but walked about, sat, read, gossiped, or looked at the pretty knick-nacks in what formed a kind of bazaar. The evenings were still more social; with their assemblies, held within the early hours that permitted their nightly recurrence, their parties for tea and cards, in addition to dancing, their Master of the Ceremonies to play propriety. Bath brought together old friends and strangers from the ends of the earth, who would not otherwise have had a chance of meeting. It enabled quiet, home-keeping young people to see and enjoy, for a little, society and the great world. In its use and abuse it was the scene where innumerable love affairs had their origin and marriages were made up. Its seasons had their stars, belles, and lions, like the London seasons.
A few foreign watering-places offer at present the nearest resemblance, but that in a very modified degree, to Bath in its palmy days.
Jane Austen knew Bath well, both by reading and personal experience, alike in her youth and in her mature years. She introduces it as the locality—largely or in part—of two of her novels, and has a pointed reference to it in a third.[20] The lady humourist indicates with a sharp pen, as she indicates most things, the advantages and disadvantages of the watering-places, which figured so prominently in the social life of the period. In “Northanger Abbey” the advantages rather prevail. If Bath brings Catherine some undesirable friends, it brings her also the indispensable hero—not forthcoming elsewhere.
Miss Austen had resided years in Bath, and it was common ground which had lost its illusions to her when, after she had quitted it, she brought it and its convenient round of visitors and gaieties into “Persuasion.”
I fancy I detect a different spirit in treating the subject in “Northanger Abbey.” Bath had still to the author something of the ineffable charm it must have had for Catherine Morland, in the glamour of first acquaintance, and of the introduction of a country clergyman’s young daughter into a brilliant and fascinating society—a society which was then great in courtly, gallant, distinguished figures—royal, naval, military, literary. Tunbridge had waned before Bath, which was the field of much picturesque and interesting display. Now it was a wandering prince or princess, who was to be mobbed and stared at by the well-dressed throng. Another evening, patriotic enthusiasm persecuted a brave soldier, who had served in Egypt under Abercrombie and Moore, or a gallant sailor who had nailed his colours to the mast under Nelson or Collingwood; or it might be the crowd surged to and fro to enable honestly marvelling and admiring eyes to gaze on that wonderful genius, little Miss Burney, full of self-consciousness, as she tripped through the Rooms under the wing of the great brewer’s wife, beautiful, dashing Mrs. Thrale, in the centre of a cluster of learned men and petit-maîtres.
Mrs. Allen, Catherine Morland’s chaperon, is thoroughly commonplace—except in a passion for dress, if that can be called uncommon. She believes she has done her best for Catherine in preparing her for her introduction to society, when Mrs. Allen and her maid have seen that the girl’s hair is cut (in a crop!) and dressed by the most stylish hand, and her clothes put on with care. The next thing is to take her to one of the crowded assemblies, to struggle along and get squeezed, in the rush of strangers, to reach the top of the room, and see over the heads of the spectators—who always form a large preponderance of the company—the high feathers[21] of some of the privileged ladies who are dancing. Then the struggle begins again to reach one of the tea-rooms, and finally Mrs. Allen and Catherine leave, without speaking to anybody save Mr. Allen.
But though Mrs. Allen is content to be fine, and to look at other fine people, Catherine’s wishes naturally extend a little further—to no purpose, for her companion is indolent, and does nothing more than serenely regret that they know nobody, and that the Skinners who were at Bath last year are not there again. Catherine, though by no means an unreasonable girl, feels slightly disappointed and tired of the irksomeness of an imprisonment in a crush of men and women, in full dress, with faces unknown to her, furnishing no deliverer. Her first ball—that eagerly looked-forward-to era—threatens her with the shock and mortification of proving a good deal of a failure.
At last, when the rooms are beginning to thin and patient sitters can be better seen, though nobody starts with rapturous wonder on beholding Catherine, no whisper of eager inquiry runs round the room, nor is she once called a divinity by anybody, Catherine overhears two gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl.”
“Such words had their due effect. She immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before; her humble vanity was contented; she felt more obliged to the two young men for this simple praise than a true quality heroine would have been for fifteen sonnets in celebration of her charms, and went to her chair in good humour with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.”
Fresh-hearted, girlish, young Catherine! with her innocent satisfaction in the bare information that she possesses her moderate share of God’s gift of womanly beauty. One can fancy her little feet, in their clocked stockings and shoes with buckles, tapping out on the floor of the ancient sedan-chair, in which she is borne home from her modest revelry, that dance of which she has been defrauded.
But was it not like Jane Austen to leave her heroine without a partner at her first ball? After all, may not the temporary eclipse befall a girl without any fault of hers, or of others, and cannot the example of Catherine Morland teach her fellow-sufferers good-humoured resignation? It is the arrogant, ungenerous employment of such petty terms of slighting reproach as “wallflowers,” with the exaggeration of their influence by sensitive, inexperienced girls, which often renders harmless, youthful gaieties fertile in miserable mean jealousies, despicable, ill-bred triumphs, and endless heart-burnings.
After the usual routine of shopping and sightseeing, in addition to the Pump-room, after the Allens had visited the Lower as well as the Upper Rooms with which Bath was supplied, Catherine has at last the satisfaction of finding the Master of the Ceremonies leading up to her, according to the etiquette of his office, a gentlemanlike young man named Tilney, who has desired to be presented to her, in order to ask her to be his partner in a country dance.
Catherine’s partner, whom she regards with a flush of flattered pleasure, because he has flattered her by his selection of her—an absolute stranger in the crowded assembly, is about four or five and twenty, rather tall, and has one of those pleasing countenances to which Jane Austen always gave a marked and deserved preference over mere regularity of feature or glow of colouring. As to an interesting haggardness, a charming suspicion of wickedness, she, with all other good women in their senses, could not see either interest or charm in them.
Mr. Tilney possesses another advantage which was also in special favour with the author—a very intelligent, lively eye. The languidly supercilious and stupid “swells” of the nineteenth century would have been odious to the brilliant novelist of the eighteenth, even though she could have seen them endowed with tawny beards, Greek profiles, and that comically dubious attribute, a sleepy blue eye. The reputation of these fine gentlemen as lady-killers of the first water would have struck her in the light of an unmitigated disgrace, and not a crowning honour. The flavour of vice which seems to have so irresistible an attraction for many writers and readers would have been utterly repugnant to her, as to all pure-minded, high-souled men and women.
Henry Tilney begins his acquaintance with Catherine Morland, by making kindly fun to her and of her, with great impartiality.
Catherine, sometimes seeing through his assumptions, sometimes thoroughly taken in by them, is equally pleased, in sheer willingness to be pleased.
Henry Tilney mimics successfully the stereotyped conversation of newly-introduced partners at the Rooms. For his own amusement and Catherine’s he describes the different lights in which he may figure in her journal—“‘Friday—Went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings, plain black shoes; appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense;’ or, ‘I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him; seems a most extraordinary genius; hope I may know more of him.’ That, madam, is what I wish you to say.”
He hoaxes her on the easy style of letter-writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated.
“I have sometimes thought,” says Catherine, naïvely, “whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen.”
Mr. Tilney declares letter-writing among women is faultless, save in three particulars—a general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.
We fear that ladies’ letters still come largely under Mr. Tilney’s definition.
The young fellow even chaffs Mrs. Allen, when she appears to beg Catherine to take a pin out of her sleeve. She fears a hole has been torn in the gown, which is a favourite, though it cost but nine shillings a yard.
“That is exactly what I should have guessed it, madam,” said Mr. Tilney, looking at the muslin.
“Do you understand muslins, sir?”
“Particularly well: I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a true Indian muslin.”
Mrs. Allen was quite struck by his genius. “Men commonly take so little notice of those things,” said she. “I can never get Mr. Allen to know one of my gowns from another. You must be a great comfort to your sister, sir.”
“I hope I am, madam.”
“And pray, sir, what do you think of Miss Morland’s gown?”
“It is very pretty, madam,” said he, gravely examining it; “but I do not think it will wash well. I am afraid it will fray.”
“How can you,” said Catherine, laughing, “be so——” she had almost said “strange?”
“I am quite of your opinion, sir,” replied Mrs. Allen, “and so I told Miss Morland when she bought it.”
“But then you know, madam, muslin always turns to some account or other; Miss Morland will get enough out of it for a handkerchief, or a cap, or a cloak. Muslin can never be said to be wasted. I have heard my sister say so forty times, when she has been extravagant in buying more than she wanted, or careless in cutting it to pieces.”[22]
A few inquiries satisfy Mr. Allen that young Tilney is a clergyman belonging to a very respectable family in Gloucestershire.
Catherine having found a partner, is next to secure a young lady friend. Mrs. Allen stumbles unexpectedly in the Pump-room on an old acquaintance of early days in a Mrs. Thorpe, the mother of several sons and daughters.
Isabella Thorpe, the eldest daughter, on being introduced to Catherine, surprises her by exclaiming on her resemblance to her brother, and Catherine recollects that her eldest brother had spent the last week of his college vacation with the family of a member of his college, named Thorpe.
Miss Thorpe is a beautiful girl, four years older than Catherine, and more than four years better informed in knowledge of the world. She has no objection to bestow her superior knowledge—in discovering a flirtation between any gentleman and lady who only smile on each other, and pointing out a quiz[23]—on her companion. As for Catherine, she might have been a little afraid of such undreamt-of powers of observation, had it not been for what she readily accepted as the easy gaiety of Miss Thorpe’s manner, and for the gratitude inspired by the circumstance that her new friend was profuse in her expressions of delight over their acquaintance.
The reproach of being “gushing,” with the affectation of being destitute of natural affection, good principles, good feelings, and good manners, did not exist last century. But my readers will observe that, while Isabella Thorpe gushes to excess, Catherine, simple and natural, is in a great measure free from the offence.
Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Thorpe renew their old intimacy, and Isabella and Catherine rush into a bosom friendship. “They called each other by their Christian names, were always arm-in-arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together.”
Jane Austen takes this opportunity of writing a spirited defence of her art. “Yes, novels,” she repeats, “for I will not adopt the ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers[24] of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the ‘Spectator,’ and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogised by a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labours of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. ‘I am no novel reader;’ ‘I seldom look into novels;’ ‘Do not imagine that I often read novels;’ ‘It is really very well for a novel;’—such is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference or momentary shame. It is only ‘Cecilia,’ or ‘Camilla,’ or ‘Belinda,’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.[25] Now had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of ‘The Spectator’ instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book and told its name!”
It would be strange indeed if a young lady were now discovered reading a volume of “The Spectator.” One might as soon expect to see a modern maiden seated at a spinning-wheel, or twirling a distaff and spindle.
But what an analysis of schoolgirl friendships, occupations, and interests survives in the sixth chapter of “Northanger Abbey!” The following conversation is an example of the attachment of the friends after an acquaintance of eight or nine days, and of the “delicacy, discretion, originality of thought, and literary taste which marked the reasonableness of that attachment:”—
“They met by appointment, and as Isabella had arrived nearly five minutes before her friend, her first address naturally was, ‘My dearest creature, what can have made you so late? I have been waiting for you at least this age!’
“‘Have you, indeed? I am very sorry for it, but really I thought I was in very good time. It is but just one. I hope you have not been here long?’
“‘Oh, these ten ages, at least. I am sure I have been here this half-hour. But now let us go and sit down at the other end of the room and enjoy ourselves. I have a hundred things to say to you. In the first place, I was so afraid it would rain this morning, just as I wanted to set off: it looked very showery, and that would have thrown me into agonies! Do you know, I saw the prettiest hat you can imagine in a shop-window in Milsom Street, just now: very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons instead of green; I quite longed for it. But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself, all this morning? Have you gone on with “Udolpho?”’
“‘Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.’
“‘Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?’
“‘Oh, yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I would not be told, on any account. I know it must be a skeleton. I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton! Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you. If it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.’
“‘Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you! And when you have finished “Udolpho,” we will read “The Italian” together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.’
“‘Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?’
“‘I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book—“Castle of Wolfenbach,” “Clermont,” “Mysterious Warnings,” “Necromancer of the Black Forest,” “Midnight Bell,” “Orphan of the Rhine,” and “Horrid Mysteries.” Those will last us some time.’
“‘Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?’[26]
“‘Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can conceive. I think her as beautiful as an angel; and I am so vexed with the men for not admiring her. I scold them all amazingly about it.’
“‘My dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on your head to-night?’ asked Isabella Thorpe, a few minutes afterwards. ‘I am determined, at all events, to be dressed exactly like you. The men take notice of that sometimes, you know.’
“‘But it does not signify if they do,’ said Catherine, very innocently.
“‘Signify! Oh, Heavens! I make it a rule never to mind what they say. They are often amazingly impertinent if you do not treat them with spirit, and make them keep their distance.’
“‘Are they? Well, I never observed that. They always behave very well to me.’
“‘Oh, they give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited creatures in the world, and think themselves of so much importance! By-the-bye, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair?’
“‘I hardly know. I never much thought about it. Something between both, I think;—brown: not fair, and not very dark.’
“‘Very well, Catherine; that is exactly he. I have not forgot your description of Mr. Tilney—“a brown skin, with dark eyes and rather dark hair.” Well, my taste is different: I prefer light eyes; and as to complexion, do you know I like a sallow better than any other. You must not betray me, if you should ever meet with any one of your acquaintance answering that description.’
“‘Betray you! What do you mean?’
“‘Nay, do not distress me. I believe I have said too much. Let us drop the subject.’
“Catherine, in some amazement, complied; and after remaining a few moments silent, was on the point of reverting to what interested her, at that time, rather more than anything else in the world—Laurentina’s skeleton—when her friend prevented her, by saying, ‘For Heaven’s sake! let us move away from this end of the room. Do you know there are two odious young men who have been staring at me this half-hour. They really put me quite out of countenance. Let us go and look at the arrivals. They will hardly follow us there.’
“Away they walked to the book; and while Isabella examined the names, it was Catherine’s employment to watch the proceedings of these alarming young men.
“‘They are not coming this way, are they? I hope they are not so impertinent as to follow us. Pray let me know if they are coming: I am determined I will not look up.’
“In a few moments, Catherine, with unaffected pleasure, assured her that she need not be longer uneasy, as the gentlemen had just left the Pump-room.
“‘And which way are they gone?’ said Isabella, turning hastily round. ‘One was a very good-looking young man.’
“‘They went towards the churchyard.’
“‘Well, I am amazingly glad I have got rid of them; and now what say you to going to Edgar’s Buildings with me, and looking at my new hat? You said you should like to see it.’
“Catherine readily agreed. ‘Only,’ she added, ‘perhaps we may overtake the two young men.’
“‘Oh, never mind that. If we make haste, we shall pass by them presently, and I am dying to show you my hat.’
“‘But if we only wait a few minutes, there will be no danger of our seeing them at all.’
“‘I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.’
“Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning, and therefore, to show the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling the sex, they set off immediately, as fast as they could walk, in pursuit of the two young men.”
II.
As the girls are crossing a street, they are stopped by the approach of a gig, driven along on bad pavement, by a most knowing-looking coachman, with all the vehemence that could most fully endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his horse.
“Oh! these odious gigs,” cries Isabella, “how I detest them!”
But the detestation—though so just, is of short duration, for she looks again and exclaims, “Delightful! Mr. Morland and my brother!”
James Morland, a steady, amiable young man, had fallen a victim to Isabella’s charms. Two results which had followed his subjection were his own forced alliance with Isabella’s brother, John, and Isabella’s violent friendship with James’s sister, Catherine.
James and Catherine Morland, an affectionate brother and sister, are very happy to meet each other—quite unexpectedly on Catherine’s part. But little leisure is left for fraternal greetings, since the bright eyes of Miss Thorpe are incessantly challenging Mr. Morland’s notice.
John Thorpe, who has only slightly and carelessly touched his sister’s hand, is sufficiently impressed by Catherine to grant her a whole scrape, and half a short bow.
John Thorpe is one of Jane Austen’s finished and unsurpassable portraits. He is the “buck” of the period, the slangy, horsey, blustering, bragging young fellow of all time.
“He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.”
I am not able to afford space for much of his highly characteristic talk, but here is a specimen. “He took out his watch. ‘How long do you think we have been running it from Tetbury, Miss Morland?’
“‘I do not know the distance.’
“Her brother told her that it was twenty-three miles.
“‘Three-and-twenty!’ cried Thorpe; ‘five-and-twenty, if it is an inch.’
“Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, inn-keepers and mile-stones; but his friend disregarded them all; he had a sure test of distance. ‘I know it must be five-and-twenty,’ said he, ‘by the time we have been doing it. It is now half after one; we drove out of the inn-yard at Tetbury as the town-clock struck eleven; and I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness; that makes it exactly twenty-five.’
“‘You have lost an hour,’ said Morland; ‘it was only ten o’clock when we came from Tetbury.’
“‘Ten o’clock! it was eleven, upon my soul! I counted every stroke. This brother of yours would persuade me out of my senses, Miss Morland; do but look at my horse, did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life?’
“Catherine remarked the horse did look very hot.
“‘Hot! he had not turned a hair till we came to Walcot Church; but look at his forehead; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour; tie his legs, and he will get on. What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland? A neat one, is it not? Well hung; town-built;’” and so on, ringing endless changes on John Thorpe’s possessions, their super-excellence, and his cleverness in securing them.
John Thorpe pronounces his criticism on the novels of the day, in a slashing, manly style, which still survives here and there. Poor Catherine, tired of his bets, and his short, sharp praise or condemnation of every woman’s face they pass, ventures to introduce the subject uppermost in her thoughts, “Have you ever read ‘Udolpho,’ Mr. Thorpe?”
“‘Udolpho!’ Oh! Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologise for her question; but he prevented her.
“Novels are all so full of stuff and nonsense,” he said, with more to the same purpose, winding up by the assertion of novels in general that “they are the stupidest things in creation.”
“I think you must like ‘Udolpho,’ if you were to read it,” Catherine pleads wistfully for her favourite, “it is so very interesting.”
“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”
“‘Udolpho’ was written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
“No, sure; was it? Ay, I remember; so it was. I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they made such a fuss about; she who married the French emigrant.”
John Thorpe’s manners do not please Catherine, inexperienced though she is; but he is James’s friend, and Isabella’s brother. Besides, Catherine is told by Isabella that John finds her the most charming girl in the world, and John himself engages her for one of the dances at the evening’s assembly. Jane Austen points out—and here she has a gentle explanation of a girlish weakness—that, had Catherine been older and vainer, such attacks might have done little; but where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world, and of being so very early engaged as a partner.
The young Morlands and Thorpes, with the good-natured concurrence of Mr. and Mrs. Allen, form many morning and evening engagements together. In the course of these engagements, Catherine likes John Thorpe less and less, in spite of his boisterous professions of admiration. She even begins to have painful doubts of the perfect amiability and good taste of her bosom friend and future sister—a prospective relationship which Catherine hailed with delight in the beginning.
Indeed, Isabella behaves with all the rampant selfishness, reckless disregard of appearances, and insatiable appetite for admiration with which a vain, coarse-minded, heartless Isabella Thorpe can behave. Her loud, insincere professions, which her practice contradicts so glaringly, could not have deceived Catherine even so long as they did, had it not been that the younger girl, brought up in the worthy clergyman’s upright, kind-hearted household, is unsuspicious of evil, and guileless as a dove.
In broad contrast to the two wilful, wild Thorpes, are Henry Tilney and his sister, a sensible, good, pretty, and well-bred girl, who is young and attractive, and can enjoy herself at a ball, without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her, and without exaggerated feelings of ecstatic delight or inconceivable vexation on every little trifling occurrence.
In these blasé, nil admirari days, when many young people find nothing worth the trouble of being excited about, when enthusiasm is dead, and even moderate interest seems fast expiring, it may be thought that such warnings as are conveyed in the praise of Eleanor Tilney are not required. But I suspect it is a case of scratch the Russian, and you will find the Tartar. It is the fashion to appear indifferent and cynical, and so our very children—held up to us in the mirror of “Punch”—babble weariness with the world, and misanthropy. But the languor and scorn—happily for humanity—form a mere accidental crust, beneath which, more or less visible, are the old ardour and impetuosity, which need to be tutored to temperance and prudence, and charged never to forget their Christian baptism of generous self-forgetfulness and chivalrous magnanimity, in a peaceful drawing-room as well as on a stricken battle-field.
The Tilneys, to whom Catherine is so strongly attracted, though perfectly civil in any encounter with the Thorpes, instinctively recoil from them. The different qualities of the young people, no less than the different sets in which they move, prevent amalgamation.
Many capital scenes in “Northanger Abbey” exhibit young Catherine Morland’s puzzled distress at the clashing social elements among which she finds herself, with her own decided preference for the Tilneys, opposed to what she conceives is her allegiance, alike of friendship and sisterly fidelity, to the Thorpes.
The best and most comical of the sketches are those in which Catherine is twice entrapped into driving with John Thorpe in the watering-place fashion of the time, making one of a party which is completed by James Morland and Isabella Thorpe in another open carriage.
“‘You will not be frightened, Miss Morland,’ said Thorpe as he handed her in, ‘if my horse should dance about a little at first setting off. He will most likely give a plunge or two, and perhaps take the reins for a minute; but he will soon know his master. He is full of spirits, playful as can be, but there is no vice in him.’
“Catherine did not think the portrait a very inviting one, but it was too late to retreat, and she was too young to own herself frightened; so resigning herself to her fate, and trusting to the animal’s boasted knowledge of its owner, she sat peaceably down and saw Thorpe sit down by her. Everything being then arranged, the servant who stood at the horse’s head was bid, in an important voice, ‘to let him go,’ and off they went in the quietest manner imaginable, without a plunge or a caper, or anything like one.
“Catherine, delighted at so happy an escape, spoke her pleasure aloud with grateful surprise; and her companion immediately made the matter perfectly simple by assuring her that it was entirely owing to the peculiarly judicious manner in which he had then held the reins and the singular discernment and dexterity with which he had directed his whip.
“‘Old Allen is as rich as a Jew, is not he?’ said Thorpe, breaking a silence. Catherine did not understand him, and he repeated his question, adding in explanation, ‘Old Allen, the man you are with?’
“‘Oh, Mr. Allen you mean. Yes. I believe he is very rich.’
“‘And no children at all?’
“‘No, not any.’
“‘A famous thing for his next heirs. He is your godfather, is not he?’
“‘My godfather! No.’
“‘But you are always very much with them?’
“‘Yes, very much.’
“‘Ay, that is what I meant. He seems a good kind of old fellow enough, and has lived very well in his time, I dare say; he is not gouty for nothing. Does he drink his bottle a day now?’
“‘His bottle a day! No. Why should you think such a thing? He is a very temperate man, and you could not fancy him in liquor last night?’
“‘Lord help you! You women are always thinking of men’s being in liquor. Why, you do not suppose a man is overset by a bottle?’”
Modest as Catherine is in her unsophisticatedness, she betrays unconsciously her admiration of Henry Tilney, both to the gentleman and his sister. Fortunately, Catherine has fallen into good hands. Eleanor Tilney only likes her friend the better for liking her brother. With regard to the effect on the hero, of the girl’s tribute to his merits, Jane Austen has made a few pungent observations.
It may be that the world has grown a little wiser as well as older during the last hundred years. Certainly sensible, good young girls—however young and simple—have learnt, for the most part, to put more outward restraint, we would fain hope, in the course of some improvement on their education, on their inner sentiments. Girls have acquired a degree of the subtlety of the serpent in addition to the artlessness of the dove.
The Catherine Morland of the past is always frank, sweet, and dutiful. We can never, we are thankful, doubt her reverence and uprightness. We need never fear scandalous defiance of the laws of God and man from her. But drawn as she is, by the masterly pen of Jane Austen, Catherine is often exasperatingly foolish, and especially so in falling deeply in love, on the very slightest provocation, so far as any symptom of reciprocity of feeling on Henry Tilney’s side is made plain to the readers of “Northanger Abbey.”
Indeed, Jane Austen expressly states, with her usual dauntless candour, that the love begins on Catherine’s side, and that the agreeable—let us hope grateful—sense of the regard he has unwittingly inspired, is the spark which kindles a responsive flame in the young man’s breast.
But what would have become of Catherine had Henry Tilney been—not pre-engaged, we do not suspect him of unworthy concealment in such circumstances; of course he would have smiled the smile, bowed the bow, and danced the dance of a man whose heart and hand were bespoken;—but had he only been less complacent, less gracious, less honourable?—she must have wasted her young love, and smarted under the sense of having given it unasked and in vain. Surely Catherine, inexperienced as she was, might have had the mother-wit to anticipate such a probability, and guard against the catastrophe, by being a little more dignified and reserved in allowing scope to her imagination and inclination? I hope that at least so much forethought may be looked for from sensible girls,—I say nothing of silly ones,—in the present generation. I am free to own that if a modern girl permitted her affections to be so easily entangled, with the entanglement so transparently displayed, as was true of Catherine Morland, I for one should at once set her down as a very impulsive, heedless young woman, from whom little self-respect and discretion could be looked for, at any time.
I do not take it upon me to say, whether a young girl’s chance of winning kindred regard might or might not be imperilled, in proportion to her capacity for practising womanly reticence. For the honour of men, I must hope it would.[27]
It is with diffidence that I presume to differ so far from such a close and accurate reader of human nature as Jane Austen was. But while I look at the different standards of different generations, I say that it would cast a serious reflection on the judgment and disinterestedness of all heroes, real or imaginary, if Jane Austen were in earnest and were right in her inference. This, at least, I entirely believe—that whether or not a girl may more readily gain or lose love by her reserve, without it she will never win respect, either from man or woman, and love without respect is like food without salt, destitute of permanent relish and endurance.
Catherine is eager to go to the cotillon ball, at which she is aware beforehand the Tilneys will be present. “What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion become her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her grand-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before, and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and tamboured muslin, and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. This would have been an error in judgment, great, though not uncommon, from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire, how little it is biassed by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jaconet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.”
I have quoted this paragraph because it ought to be studied by the women of the present day. Alas! for the higher intelligence and refinement in fashion, when even the over-elaboration and extravagance of an earlier generation strike a later, as meagre shabbiness. Would that the young girls who now “walk in silk attire,” and crêpe de Chine, and only condescend to tulle over satin, in a variety of evening dresses, could return to the spotted and sprigged muslins which were new when they were clean![28] For old people who remember the grandmothers of modern belles, persist in saying that the faces now set in silver hair and puckered with wrinkles, the figures shrunk and bent, were “fairer,” more graceful far—“lang syne.”
Catherine has engaged herself with the greatest alacrity to walk with the two Tilneys among the beautiful environs of Bath the morning after the ball. The weather proves rainy—but Catherine, after alternations of hope and despondency, fruitless solicitations of Mrs. Allen’s opinion, and equally fruitless wishes that they had such weather as was to be found in “Udolpho” the night that poor St. Aubyn died, for instance—has the great joy of seeing the sky clear. She is still waiting for her friends, when the two Thorpes and James Morland arrive in the greatest hurry to claim her for an excursion to Bristol.
Catherine excuses herself from accompanying the others, on the plea of her pre-engagement to walk with the Tilneys.
The Thorpes loudly exclaim at such an objection as not worth mentioning, and will take no denial—the truth being that Isabella, free and easy as she is, cannot well accompany the two gentlemen, for the rest of the day, unless she is countenanced by another lady. The casual mention of Blaize Castle, as certain to be visited in the course of the excursion, shakes even Catherine’s fidelity to the Tilneys. Is it really a castle, an old castle such as they read of?
John Thorpe, with his forward unscrupulous assurance, is ready to pledge himself that it is the oldest castle in the kingdom, with towers and long galleries by dozens.
The wavering Catherine admits she should like to see it, but she cannot give up her walk with the Tilneys. She is sure they will be in Pulteney Street soon.
“‘Not they, indeed,’ cries John Thorpe with decision; ‘for as we turned into Broad Street I saw them. Does he not drive a phaeton with bright chestnuts?’
“‘I do not know, indeed.’
“‘Yes, I know he does; I saw him. You are talking of the man you danced with last night, are not you?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Well, I saw him at that moment turn up the Lansdowne Road, driving a smart-looking girl.’
“‘Did you, indeed?’
“‘Did, upon my soul, knew him again directly; and he seemed to have got some very pretty cattle too.’
“‘It is very odd. But I suppose they thought it would be too dirty for a walk.’
“‘And well they might, for I never saw so much dirt in my life.’”
Catherine gives way. She starts in an unsettled frame of mind, divided between sorrow for the loss of her walk and still greater vexation at the thought that the Tilneys have not acted well by her, and delight at exploring an edifice like “Udolpho”—as her fancy represents Blaize Castle to be—which John Thorpe freely promises she shall explore in every hole and corner.
Are there left in England half-a-dozen romantic girls to whom the opportunity of visiting an old castle would be so great a treat?
But unfortunately for what peace of mind is left to Catherine, as she and John Thorpe rattle along, his question “Who was that girl who looked at you so hard as she went by?” calls her attention to the right-hand pavement, where, to her mingled delight and dismay, she recognises Miss Tilney on her brother’s arm, walking slowly down the street. Catherine sees them both looking back at her.
“‘Stop, stop, Mr. Thorpe!’ she impatiently cried, ‘it is Miss Tilney, it is indeed. How could you tell me they were gone? Stop, stop! I will get out this moment and go to them.’
“But to what purpose did she speak? Thorpe only lashed his horse into a brisker trot; the Tilneys, who had soon ceased to look after her, were in a moment out of sight round the corner of Laura Place, and in another moment she was herself whisked into the Market Place. Still, however, and during the length of another street, she entreated him to stop. ‘Pray, pray stop, Mr. Thorpe. I cannot go on, I will not go on; I must go back to Miss Tilney.’
“But Mr. Thorpe only laughed, smacked his whip, encouraged his horse, made odd noises, and drove on; and Catherine, angry and vexed as she was, having no power of getting away, was obliged to give up the point, and submit. Her reproaches, however, were not spared.
“‘How could you deceive me so, Mr. Thorpe? How could you say that you saw them driving up the Lansdowne Road? I would not have had it happen so for the world. They must think it so strange, so rude of me, to go by them, too, without saying a word! You do not know how vexed I am. I shall have no pleasure at Clifton, nor in anything else. I had rather, ten thousand times rather, get out now and walk back to them. How could you say you saw them driving out in a phaeton?’
“Thorpe defended himself very stoutly, declared he had never seen two men so much alike in his life, and would hardly give up the point of its having been Tilney himself.”
It is unnecessary to dwell on Catherine’s distress when even her unassuming, good-natured civility fails her. Her single comfort is Blaize Castle, but Blaize Castle she is not destined to see. It is too late in the day, the horses are not equal to the expedition, and the party have to turn back to Bath.
Catherine ventures to call on Miss Tilney, to explain why she has not kept her appointment. She is not admitted at the house in Milsom Street, though she has a wretched conviction that Miss Tilney is at home—a conviction confirmed by seeing her in a few moments afterwards go out with her father, General Tilney.
Catherine is punished—even, she thinks, too severely—but she is too miserable to be angry.
Catherine next sees the Tilneys at the theatre. Henry Tilney bows, but with a changed countenance; still, he comes round to the Allens’ box to pay his respects to Mrs. Allen, and there Catherine, like the impetuous, humble-minded young girl she is, overwhelms him with the breathlessness and earnestness of her apologies. “Oh! Mr. Tilney, I have been quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You must have thought me so rude; but, indeed, it was not my own fault. Was it, Mrs. Allen? Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a phaeton together? And then, what could I do? But I had ten thousand times rather have been with you. Now, had not I, Mrs. Allen?”
The words bring a more cordial, more natural smile to the gentleman’s lips, though he suggests a little sarcastically that he and his sister were at least much obliged to her for wishing them a pleasant walk. She had looked back on purpose.
After all, the lingering air of being piqued, which Henry Tilney cannot conceal, is the best evidence of Catherine’s dawning influence.
But the stupid girl takes his words literally. “Indeed, I did not wish you a pleasant walk; I never thought of such a thing; but I begged Mr. Thorpe so earnestly to stop; I called out to him as soon as ever I saw you. Now, Mrs. Allen, did not——Oh! you were not there. But indeed I did; and if Mr. Thorpe would only have stopped, I would have jumped out and run after you.”
“Is there a Henry in the world,” exclaims Jane Austen, “who could be insensible to such a declaration?” Perhaps not. Yet we are tempted to wonder if Jane Austen had ever listened to the sarcastic old song—