Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells
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in "Pride and Prejudice," she recast " Sense and Sensibility " in its present shape. It is only inferior to her other novels; compared with most of the novels that had gone before hers, this least of Jane Austen's is a masterpiece; and the romantic Marianne, even more than the matter-of-fact Elinor, is a picture of girlhood touched in with tender truth, and with the caressing irony which still leaves the character pleasing.
The story is distinctively modern in giving a description of the sister heroines, which was probably an afterthought, and occurred to the author in the making over. "Miss Dashwood," she says, "had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister's, in having the advantage of height, was more striking. . . . Her skin was very brown, but from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile sweet and attractive, and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight." Marianne's mother is as romantic as the girl herself, and it is by her connivance that the girl thinks it a kind of merit to be a credulous simpleton, and to believe more in the love of the cruel scoundrel who flatters and jilts her than he openly asks her to do. When she finds herself in London, shortly after their parting in the country with all the forms of tacit devotion, on his part, and he snubs her at their first meeting in society, she owns in her shame and grief, that there has been no engagement. " ' It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never was.' Yet with a faith in his unplighted truth as absolute as the sense of her own loyalty to him, she would have been ready to seize upon him, and claim all his remembered tenderness, if her sister had not prevented her.
"'Good Heaven!' she exclaimed, 'he is there, he is there! Oh! why does he not look at me? Why cannot I speak to him?' 'Pray, pray, be composed,' cried Elinor, 'and do not betray what you feel to everyone present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.' This, however, was more than she could believe herself, and to be composed at such a moment was not only beyond the reach of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat in an agony of impatience that affected every feature. At last he turned round again, and regarded them both; she started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached, and, addressing himself rather to Elinor than Marianne, inquired in a hurried manner after Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in town. Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind by such an address. . . . The feelings of her sister were instantly expressed. . . . 'Good God, Willoughby! what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?' He could not then avoid it, but her touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment. ' I did myself the honor of calling in Berkeley Street, last Tuesday. . . . My card was not lost, I hope?' ' But have you not received my notes?' cried Marianne, in the wildest anxiety. . . . 'Tell me, Willoughby—for Heaven's sake, tell me, what is the matter?' He made no reply; his complexion changed, and all his embarrassment returned; but as if, on catching the eye of the young lady with whom he had been previously talking, he felt the necessity of instant exertion, he recovered himself again, and after saying, ' Yes, I had the pleasure of receiving the information of your arrival in town, which you were so good as to send me,' turned hastily away with a slight bow, and joined his friend. Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable to stand, sunk into her chair. . . . 'Go to him, Elinor,' she said, as soon as she could speak, ' and force him to come to me. . . . I cannot rest, I cannot have a moment's peace, till this is explained—some dreadful misapprehension or other. Oh, go to him this moment.' 'How can that be done? No, my dearest Marianne, you must wait. This is not a place for explanations ' . . . Marianne continued incessantly to give way ... in exclamations of wretchedness. In a short time Elinor saw Willoughby quit the room . . . and telling Marianne that he was gone, urged the impossibility of speaking to him again that evening."
III
In an earlier age of fiction, if not of society, the folly of Marianne would have meant her ruin; but in the wiser and milder aesthetics of Jane Austen it meant merely her present heartbreak, with her final happiness through a worthier love. Hers is a very simple nature, studied with a simpler art than such an intricate character as Emma's. She has only at all times to be herself, responsive to her mainspring of emotionality; and a girl like Emma has apparently to be different people at different times, in obedience to inconsistent and unexpected impulses. She is therefore perhaps the greatest of Jane Austen's creations, and certainly the most modern; yet even so slight and elemental a character as Marianne is handled with the security and mastery, which were sometimes greater and sometimes less in the author's work.
"Persuasion," which was the latest of her novels, is in places the poorest, and "Sense and Sensibility," which is, on the whole, the poorest, has moments of being the greatest. There is no such meanness portrayed in all fiction as John Dashwood's, and yet you are made to feel that he would like not to be mean if only he could once rise above himself. In Marianne and her mother, who are such a pair of emotional simpletons, there are traits of generosity that almost redeem their folly, and their limitations in the direction of silliness are as distinctly shown as their excesses. Willoughby himself, who lives to realize that he has never loved anyone but Marianne, and has been given to understand by the relation who leaves her money away from him, "that if he had behaved with honor towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich',' even he is not committed wholesale to unavailing regret. "That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted. . . . But that he was forever inconsolable—that he fled from society, or contracted a habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart—must not be depended upon, for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humor, nor his house always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."
It was not Jane Austen's way to do anything wholesale; she was far too well acquainted with life, and of too sensitive an artistic conscience for that; and especially in "Mansfield Park" is one aware of the hand that is held from overdoing. As in "Sense and Sensibility," and in fact all her other novels, the subordinate characters are of delightful verity and vitality. Mrs. Norris is of a meanness which in its sort may almost match with John Dashwood's, and Lady Bertram's indolent affections and principles form a personality of almost unique charm. These sisters of Mrs. Price who made an unhappy love marriage beneath her, are of the same quality as she, and their differentiation by environment is one of the subtle triumphs of the author's art.
It is by the same skill that a character so prevalently passive as that of sweet Fanny Price is made insensibly to take and gently to keep the hold of a heroine upon the reader. It would have been so easy in so many ways to overdo her. But she is never once overdone, either when as a child she meets with the cold welcome of charity in her uncle's family, where she afterwards makes herself indispensable, or in her return to her childhood home, which has forgotten her in her long absence. It is not pretended that she is treated by her cousins and her aunts with active unkindness, and she suffers none of the crueler snubbing which cheaply wins a heroine the heart of the witness. When she goes back to Portsmouth on that famous visit, after nine years at Mansfield Park, it is not concealed that she is ashamed of her home, of her weak and slattern mother, of her drinky, smoky, and sweary father, of her rude little brothers and sisters, of the whole shabby and vulgar household. None of the younger children remember her; her father and mother, from moment to moment, in their preoccupation with her brother, who comes with her to get his ship at Portsmouth (we are again among naval people), fail to remember her. All the circumstances are conducive to disgust and resentment in a girl who might reasonably have expected to be a distinguished guest for a while at least. But once more that delicately discriminating hand of Jane Austen does its work; it presently appears that the Price household is not so altogether impossible, and that a girl who wishes to be of use to others is not condemned to lasting misery and disgrace in any circumstances. Always the humorous sense of limitations comes in, but the human sense of good-will is there; the recognition of the effect of good-will is distinct but not elaborate. There is more philosophizing and satirizing than would be present in a more recent novel of equal mastery; but the characterization is as net as in the highest art of any time.
Sweet Fanny Price