Sarah Tytler

“ The sudden bestowal of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick on each other is one of the most genuine and delightful surprises of fiction. It is not only a triumphant testimony to how the whole destiny, not merely of one person, but of a group of persons, may be altered by what seems the simplest accident—the turning of a straw; it is one of those bits of warm, homely, human inconsistency which baffle all anticipation, are worth a hundred bloodless, laboured, logical sequences, but can only be fitly conceived and carried out in a story, by a great artist. ”

“ Jane Austen is not in favour of blindness in love. In the room of doting adoration, she makes her men and women feel the nobler, more rational, and infinitely more lasting love which sees all the faults of the person beloved, yet loves on fondly and faithfully, doing love’s best work in helping to remedy the imperfections. George Knightley is capable—not merely of finding fault with Emma, but of sharply reproving her, in his true and tender regard for her. ”

“ Knightley choosing a partner for life so inferior to him in understanding, as well as in every other desirable recommendation, then it might be that he would marry Harriet, though the vision of her as the mistress of Donwell Abbey humbles Emma for its master’s sake even more than for her own. If she had only not brought the two together; if she had but left Harriet to marry the unexceptionable young man who would have made her happy in the line of life to which she belonged—in which she ought to have remained. Mr. Knightley and Harriet Smith! It is a union to distance every wonder of the kind. ”

“ Harriet Smith is a plump, blooming, blue-eyed, sweet-tempered girl, whose beauty delights Emma’s eye, while her innocent deference and gratitude, together with her unqualified admiration for everything at Hartfield—including its young mistress—touch Emma’s heart and flatter her vanity. She determines, in modern parlance, to “cultivate” Harriet Smith, who is to a great extent friendless, to improve her, to raise her into better society, and to make a companion of her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling has been her behaviour! And if she has acted improperly by Harriet, she may have done still worse by Mr. Knightley. He had said she had been no friend to Harriet Smith. She may prove to have been his worst enemy, if it be possible that his association with Harriet can bring him to demean himself to make a girl, so inferior to him in every respect, his wife.
But Emma must not make Harriet suffer for her fault. Emma is always courageous in taking upon herself the heaviest penalty for her misdoings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elton is swelling with resentment. “I really cannot attempt—I am not at all fond of the sort of thing. I have a great deal of vivacity in my own way, but I must really be allowed to judge when to speak, and when to hold my tongue. Pass us, if you please, Mr. Churchill! pass Mr. E., Knightley, Jane, and myself. We have nothing clever to say—not one of us?”
“Yes, yes, pray pass me,” adds her husband, with a sort of sneering consciousness. “I have nothing to say that can entertain Miss Woodhouse, or any other young lady. An old married man—quite good for nothing. Shall we walk, Augusta?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ For Georgiana Darcy had to learn that a wise man will bear and relish from his wife what would be out of place and unwelcome from the sister fifteen years his junior.
Surely any man worthy of his salt would prefer to be so dealt with by the woman who in her heart of hearts dearly loves and heartily honours and obeys him, rather than receive the mawkish and fulsome—even when it is free from deliberate falsehood—flattery and submission, not of a friend and mate, but of a toy and slave. ”

“ Yet though Jane Austen tells us plainly that the real evils to which Emma is exposed consist of her having too much of her own way, and being slightly inclined to think too well of herself, she is full of tender reverence and care for her father, in deed even more than in word. All through their history she considers his well-being as the first thing, never hesitates to make sacrifices to ensure it, and caters for his entertainment with the anxious, womanly forethought of a much older and wiser person. ”

“ It would be impertinent to add a word of praise to a novel which—while it is often as penetrating and unerring in discussing the motives, and as richly humorous in dealing with the absurdities and follies of human nature as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey”—has a gentle grace and a pathetic feeling all its own, so far as Jane Austen’s novels are concerned. The last warm words of praise to the gallant profession to which two of her brothers belonged, is another testimony to her keen family sympathies, as well as to her quick, womanly response to all that was patriotic and heroic. ”

“ It would have been little short of a miracle if she could have conducted herself with such meekness, in her remote rural world, or during the visits she paid to the great English watering-place—while she was all the time laughing in her sleeve—so as not to provoke any suspicion of her satire, or any resentment at what might easily be held her presumption.
We may grant fully that Jane Austen was far too good an artist to make absolute copies from real persons to figure in the pages of her books, and too good a woman not to regard such a practice as a breach of social honour and propriety. ”

“ Elizabeth, with her fine eyes, brown skin, light, graceful figure, nimble feet in dancing, nimble tongue in talking, is a warm-hearted, softened, womanly edition of the father whose favourite she is. In answer to the covert reproach once addressed to her, that the wisest and best of men—nay, the wisest and best of their actions—may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke, she defends herself frankly yet earnestly, and we feel it is Jane Austen speaking for herself by the lips of Elizabeth Bennet. ”

“ For Elizabeth still holds forlornly to the last rag of the mental and moral habiliments in which she clothed him. She clings to the conviction of his high opinion of himself and his deserts. But, in spite of herself, amidst all the jumble of sensations which his appearance has excited, none is more distinct or strikes her more forcibly, than the realisation that he is heaping coals of fire on her head, by behaving to the girl who had rejected him—well-nigh with contumely—with the greatest, most sedulous courtesy that a true gentleman could show on such a trying occasion. ”

“ Jane Austen had always been a sweet-tempered, contented woman, and all that was best and noblest in her nature and her faith came out in the patience, humility, and thankfulness with which she met her last enemy. “I will only say farther,” are her loving words, in one more letter, that “my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse, has not been made ill by her exertions. As to what I owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and more.” ”

“ Indeed, Emma has always entertained the highest opinion of George Knightley’s air and looks. She has told Harriet Smith, in trying to teach her simply what a well-bred man is like, that Mr. Knightley must be put out of count, he is so very superior to other people. Emma has never seen a man on whose whole person and address “gentleman” is more legibly written—and here Emma is right.
The ball rewards the anxious cares and incessant attentions of Mrs. Weston by going off happily, as old balls in county halls and ball-rooms of market-town inns had a knack of doing. ”

“ It is to this marked restraint which Jane Austen put upon the expression of all sacred depths of feeling, whether they belonged to religion or not, quite as much as to her mental constitution, or to the formal conditions of her generation, that another result is due. While we have so much that may instruct, entertain, and delight us in her stories, we have nothing that will harrow, and not much that will move us to thoughts which lie too deep for tears. There is no end of enchanting humour; there is curiously little pathos. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Edmund Bertram’s marriage to Mary Crawford appears certain, and when Henry Crawford is wooing Fanny with manly ardour and tender consideration for her difficulties, she is in a fair way—Jane Austen does not conceal it—for transferring her gentle affections from Edmund to Henry. The author’s older women are fine, sensible creatures, capable of being useful and happy in all the relations of life. They can love, with what unselfish fidelity after hope is gone, Anne Elliot shows; but they are always mistresses of themselves, never love-sick—the poor puppets and slaves of passion. ”

“ What troubles Emma more than Frank Churchill’s early secession as a lover is Mr. Knightley’s not dancing. There he is, among the standers by, where he ought not to be. He ought to be dancing, not classing himself with the husbands, and fathers, and whist-players, who are pretending to feel an interest in the dance, till their rubbers are made up—so young as he looks, his tall, upright figure among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men. ”

“ So completely did Jane Austen realise all the softness and sweetness, and yet the staunchness—all the fragrant, white-violet-like charm of Fanny Price—so well did the author describe the pangs of wounded love in the tenderest of hearts—the meek mortification of a gentle nature which bore no grudge against its enemies—the pensive joys, the tremulous apprehensions of the situation—that Archbishop Whately went near to asserting the conviction that only a woman who had been herself crossed in love could thus fully interpret her heroine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has not only been encouraged in cherishing and displaying an attachment for Catherine, his father has in every possible way compromised his son, and bound him, in honour no less than in affection, to the young girl from whom General Tilney now seeks all at once, in the most unjust and despotic manner, to separate Henry.
It can be no matter to a young fellow who has never shared the General’s mercenary motives, and who is possessed of the sentiments of a man and a gentleman, that his father has been misled, and has committed himself to the course he has taken under an error. ”

“ Besides, Jane Austen was very young when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice,” and gentle in some respects as youth may be, it is not from it that we are warranted in expecting charity. Youth at its best—a very sweet best, but with its sweetness consisting mainly of the unbounded promise of still better things—is in its ignorance, rashness, and unshaken self-confidence, impatient of all wrong-doing, nay, of all blundering, and intolerant to the wrong-doers and blunderers. ”

“ 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? ”

“ I am fain to think such rude insolence, such an ungentlemanlike and unfatherly breach of hospitality to, and consideration for, a young girl—his invited guest, his daughter’s friend—could seldom have been perpetrated by the most irresponsible member of the old “quality”—the most selfish tyrant who ever figured in an antiquated army list. I believe General Tilney’s action on this occasion to be one of the few-and-far-between exaggerations to be found in Jane Austen’s earlier novels. ”