What renders Eleanor Tilney’s happiness more complete is, that it is the prosperous end of a course of true love which had not formerly run smooth; the lover having only recently and unexpectedly come into the title and fortune which so recommended the match to the General, that he had never “loved his daughter so well in all her hours of companionship, utility, and patient endurance, as when he first hailed her ‘your ladyship.’”
Jane Austen adds with joy for Eleanor’s sake, that “her husband was really deserving of her, independent of his peerage, his wealth, and his attachment, being to a precision the most charming young man in the world.”
I must here point out another instance of Miss Austen’s thorough independence of precedent, and of the popular verdict in fiction. I think it is also a sign how true-hearted and unworldly she was herself in the main, under the class prejudices which she undoubtedly held, that she should, in the reasonableness which she so insisted upon, indicate how lightly within certain well-defined limits she valued the accidental advantages of rank and riches, in comparison with mutual affection, and mutual and moral affinity. To her, certainly,
when she makes her heroine, whom she loves dearly, while she laughs at her from first to last, marry with all her will a simple country clergyman and younger son, while a secondary character in the story carries off the peer and charming fellow in one.[43]
I desire to call attention to this significant treatment of her heroine because, in dealing with General Tilney’s hectoring, grasping misdemeanours, though we are perfectly sensible that Jane Austen cordially despises the man, we are also conscious that his rank and position are made to throw a respectable cloak over his infirmities. Catherine is not caused to shrink from association with such a father-in-law, as she would have been represented shrinking from him, had he happened to be a vulgar nobody, yet at the same time not more domineering, purse-proud, and mean than the well-born, well-educated General, with his oppressively artificial fine manners. Jane Austen was a born aristocrat, as she shows in many instances, but she was great enough to rise habitually above class weakness and narrowness.
The influence of the Viscount and Viscountess with General Tilney on the proscribed pair’s behalf is assisted by that right understanding of Mr. Morland’s circumstances which, as soon as the General will allow himself to be informed, they are qualified to give. “It taught him that he had been scarcely more misled by Thorpe’s first boast of the family wealth than by his subsequent malicious overthrow of it; that in no sense of the word were they necessitous or poor; and that Catherine would have three thousand pounds.”
This is a comfort, and so is the private intelligence which the calculating match-maker secures, that the Fullerton estate is at the disposal of the present proprietor, and therefore open to greedy speculation.
Accordingly, General Tilney permits his son to return to Northanger, “and thence made him the bearer of his consent, very courteously worded, in a page full of empty professions to Mr. Morland. The event which it authorised soon followed: Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled; and as this took place within a twelvemonth from the first day of their meeting, it will not appear, after all the dreadful delays occasioned by the General’s cruelty, that they were essentially hurt by it.”
Jane Austen ends “Northanger Abbey,” as she began it, with a little paradoxical mocking comment, fitted to bewilder stupid people.
“To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well; and professing myself, moreover, convinced that the General’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny or reward filial disobedience.”[44]
Among the last things which Miss Austen did was to flatter the great public—unless, indeed, one considers that she paid it the highest compliment of all—by assuming it was a clever public, and must enjoy being made game of, to its face. A stupid public was not, and has never been, Jane Austen’s public. On such her fine sense and abounding humour, pervaded by the true refinement in which neither the woman nor the gentlewoman is for a moment forgotten, fall absolutely flat. I cannot conceive such a public, which is ordinarily fond of coarse, crude mental stimulants, as appreciating and enjoying Jane Austen, though her consummate art as a story-teller may beguile it into dozing over her pages, or hurrying through them. But there is such a thing as having a good taste cultivated and not perverted, and budding intelligence may be drawn out, not stultified.
To those who are not by mental constitution impelled altogether into the abnormal school of fiction—to those who can read between the lines—reading Jane Austen will always be studying under a wise teacher, and keenly relishing an exquisite treat.
In some respects “Northanger Abbey” is among the author’s masterpieces. It contains two or three of her most finished portraits. Nowhere is her writing more incisive, her epigrams neater, her wit at once drier and more sparkling.
But “Northanger Abbey” has also blemishes which are absent from other works by the same novelist. It lacks unity; it does not grow out of itself in close sequence, like “Emma.” Its different parts are so far inconsistent with each other, for strong realism and airy burlesque do not match quite well together. There are considerable improbabilities in “Northanger Abbey”—above all, there is not a trace of the lurking pathos and pensive charm which blend with and relieve the humour of “Persuasion.”
On the contrary, the almost incessant banter of “Northanger Abbey,” excellent as it is in its way, has a certain hardness in it—perhaps, in this instance, the result of the unripe youth of the author—and possesses a tendency to fatigue and vex the reader who wishes to be serious for a moment—who regards the best of life and art as that which, in one fashion or another, reflects both life and art as serious and earnest.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Written in 1798. “Read Dickens’s ‘Hard Times,’ and another book of ‘Pliny’s Letters;’ read ‘Northanger Abbey,’ worth all Dickens and Pliny together, yet it was the work of a girl.”—Macaulay.
[19] Jane Austen may have had in her mind Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines; to whom sketching from nature seems to have come by nature—who were all, as a matter of course, accomplished artists.
[20] Weymouth and Ramsgate, among sea-bathing places, seemed to rise most readily before her mind, though she alluded also to Southend and Cromer—not to say described Lyme—which she made her own.
[21] The fashion was a little absurd in its stateliness. Ladies were wont to wear nodding plumes of ostrich feathers, as at the Queen’s drawing-rooms, standing upright on the head, till they added a foot, at least, to the fair amazons’ height.
[22] Let us echo Henry Tilney’s praise of muslin. Will its simple, elegant, once wide reign never return? The prevalence of calico balls is a poor substitute for its sway.
[23] The old-fashioned term “quiz” was freely applied last century. It was originally associated with the first specimen of eye-glass, through which the short-sighted were supposed to quiz their neighbours. I should suppose Jane Austen must have been called a quiz in her day. The accusation was half coveted, half dreaded, according to the temper of the individual who incurred it.
[24] The remonstrance is still needed.
[25] Since these words were written we have had the whole of the “Waverley Novels,” not to mention more modern gains added to our wealth of excellent English works of fiction.
[26] There is this to be said for the sensational horrors which enchanted the girls of the last century, that these horrors, when founded on the model of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, were well principled, and free from inherent moral coarseness and license of tone.
[27] Perhaps the number of jilts in the last century have to do with spontaneous combustion where hearts were concerned.
[28] Some of the beautiful portraits of the last century (one, if I recollect rightly, which represents Mrs. Sheridan and her sister) give an idea how daintily becoming, how perfectly elegant, these muslin costumes could be.
[29] Wood and water always figure largely in Jane Austen’s landscapes.
[30] The furor about the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” in its day, was, indeed, not confined to school-girls. It extended over the whole reading world. It was European, as well as English.
[31] Such was the style of travelling en grand seigneur last century.
[32] What a quaint, pretty picture the young man in his coachman’s great-coat, the girl in her riding-habit and straw bonnet, which she is soon so anxious to protect from the rain, would make, taken as she stepped in or stepped out of Henry’s “curricle!”
[33] Even a good clergyman measured his duties differently last century.
[34] Mrs. Radcliffe, who appears to have been unable to stand a joke on her romances, even from their admirers, and who was much hurt by a laughing reference of Sir Walter Scott’s in “Waverley,” would have looked aghast at this levity.
[35] Revived mediævalism in æsthetics has changed all this, and gone far to banish again the garish light of day from “modern antique” houses.
[36] My impression is that Jane Austen began “Northanger Abbey” with the simple intention of executing, in accordance with an early amusement of hers, a gay parody on romances in general, and on one romance in particular. But her genius proved too much for her; and though she never entirely lost sight of her original design, she departed so far from it, by prolonging the Bath portion of the tale, as to destroy its unity, and make somewhat of a jumble of the whole book. On the other hand, the exercise of her great gifts, in their proper field of real life and character-drawing, has produced for us, instead of a clever burlesque for the amusement of contemporaries, a disjointed work of genius for the edification and enjoyment of succeeding generations.
[37] What a candid admission from a heroine, or from any girl! But to love flowers was not obligatory last century.
[38] Withal, one must be struck by Catherine’s unworldly disinterestedness. She has given her love to a son of the house; but in place of taking the opportunity to ascertain and exult over the Tilneys’ wealth and position, she is occupied with foolish romancing on her own account.
[39] I am able to conjecture, by the help of my own early studies, that Jane Austen is not foreseeing, and casting mockery on some modern sensational novels in this passage. She is simply borrowing from, and holding up to ridicule, a leading incident in the once popular romance of “The Children of the Abbey,” by Elizabeth Helme.
[40] If Jane Austen be right—and she was a great judge of human nature—in the implication that an eager, enthusiastic young reader is impelled to reproduce in personal experience what he or she reads, and if modern sensational novels come to be lived by our young men and women, where shall we look—how shall we answer for the wrong done by our idiotic, noxious, light literature?
[41] A period of time which would now suffice to take a traveller from London to Brussels with ease.
[42] The Morlands were “gentlefolks,” but that did not prevent all the fine stitching required by the family being done as a matter of course by the ladies.
[43] Concerning this gentleman, Jane Austen says, with one of her merry gibes, “I have only to add (aware that the rules of composition forbid the introduction of a character not connected with my fable) that this was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing bills, resulting from a long visit to Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures.”
[44] But “Northanger Abbey” has another moral—a warning against romance run mad.