Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells

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and afterwards dined here? . . . You might have talked to me more.' 'A man who felt less might.' 'How unlucky you should have a reasonable answer to give, and I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you would have gone on if you had been left to yourself?' 'Lady Catharine's unjustifiable endeavors to separate us were the means of removing all my doubts. . . . My aunt's intelligence had given me hope, and I was determined at once to know everything.' "

      The aunt whom Darcy means is Lady Catharine de Burgh, as great a fool as Mrs. Bennet or Lydia, and much more offensive. She has all Darcy's arrogance, without a ray of the good sense and good heart which enlighten and control it, and when she hears a rumor of his engagement to Elizabeth, she comes to question the girl. Their encounter is perhaps the supreme moment of objective drama in the book, and is a bit of very amusing comedy, which is the more interesting to the modern spectator because it expresses the beginning of that revolt against aristocratic pretension characteristic of the best English fiction of our century. Its spirit seems to have worked in the clear intelligence of the young girl to more than one effect of laughing satire, and one feels that Elizabeth Bennet is speaking Jane Austen's mind, and perhaps avenging her for patronage and impertinence otherwise suffered in silence, when she gives Lady de Burgh her famous setting-down.

      " Lady Catharine very resolutely, and not very politely, declined eating anything, and then, rising up, said to Elizabeth: 'Miss Bennet, there seems to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favor me with your company.' . . . Elizabeth obeyed, and running into her own room for her parasol, attended her noble guest down-stairs. ... As soon as they reached the copse. Lady Catharine began in the following manner: ' You cannot be at a loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my visit hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I came.' Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment. 'Indeed, you are mistaken, madam; I have not been at all able to account for the honor of seeing you here.' 'Miss Bennet,' replied her ladyship in an angry tone, ' you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere you may choose to be, you shall not find me so. ... A report of a most alarming nature reached me two days ago. I was told . . . that you, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all likelihood, be soon afterwards united to my nephew, to my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I knew it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you.' ' If you believed it impossible to be true,' said Elizabeth, coloring with astonishment and disdain, ' I wonder you took the trouble of coming so far. What could your ladyship propose by it?' ' This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist upon being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew made you an offer of marriage?' 'Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible.' 'It must be so while he retains the use of his reason. But your allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in.' 'If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it. ' ' Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this. . . . This match, to which you have the presumption to aspire, can never take place. . . . Because honor, decorum, precedence, nay interest forbid it. Yes, Miss Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or friends. . . . Your alliance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned by any of us. . . . Let us sit down. You are to understand, Miss Bennet, that I came here with the determined resolution of carrying my purpose. . . . . I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.' 'That will make your ladyship's situation at present more pitiable; but it will have no effect on me.' 'I will not be interrupted! ... If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you have been brought up.' 'In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal. ' ' True, you are a gentleman's daughter. But what was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts?' . . . 'Whatever my connections may be,' said Elizabeth, 'if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you.' 'Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?' Though Elizabeth would not for the mere purpose of obliging Lady Catharine, she could not but say, after a moment's deliberation,' I am not. ' Lady Catharine seemed pleased. ' And will you promise me never to enter into such an engagement?' ' I will make no promise of the kind. . . . How far your nephew might approve of your interference in his affairs, I cannot tell; but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in mine. I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no further on the subject. . . . You have insulted me in every possible method. I must beg to return to the house.' And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catharine rose also and they turned back. Her ladyship was highly incensed. ' And this ... is your final resolve! Very well, I shall know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you reasonable; but depend upon it, I shall carry my point.' In this manner Lady Catharine talked on till they were at the door of the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added, 'I take no leave of you. Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.' Elizabeth made no answer; and without attempting to persuade her ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself."

      In all this the heroine easily gets the better of her antagonist not only in the mere article of sauce, to which it must be owned her lively wit occasionally tends, but in the more valuable qualities of personal dignity. She is much more a lady than her ladyship, as the author means she shall be; but her superiority is not invented for the crisis; it springs from her temperament and character, cool, humorous, intelligent and just: a combination of attributes which renders Elizabeth Bennet one of the most admirable and attractive girls in the world of fiction. It is impossible, however, not to feel that her triumph over Lady de Burgh is something more than personal: it is a protest, it is an insurrection, though probably the discreet, the amiable author would have been the last to recognize or to acknowledge the fact. An indignant sense of the value of humanity as against the pretensions of rank, such as had not been felt in English fiction before, stirs throughout the story, and reveals itself in such crucial tests as dear " little Burney", for instance, would never have imagined. For when Miss Burney introduces city people, it is to let them display their cockney vulgarity; but though Jane Austen shows the people whom the Bennets' gentility frays off into on the mother's side vulgar and ridiculous, they are not shown necessarily so because they are in trade or the law; and on the father's side it is apparent that their social inferiority is not incompatible with gentle natures, cultivated minds, and pleasing manners.

      JANE AUSTEN'S ANNE ELIOT AND CATHARINE MORLAND

      THAT protest already noted, that revolt against the arrogance of rank, which makes itself felt more or less in all the novels of Jane Austen, might have been something that she inhaled with the stormy air of the time, and respired again with the unconsciousness of breathing. But whether she knew it or not, this quiet little woman, who wrote her novels in the bosom of her clerical family; who was herself so contentedly of the established English order; who believed in inequality and its implications as of divine ordinance; who loved the delights of fine society, and rejoiced as few girls have in balls and parties, was in her way asserting the Rights of Man as unmistakably as the French revolutionists whose volcanic activity was of about the same compass of time as her literary industry. In her books the snob, not yet named or classified, is fully ascertained for the first time. Lady Catharine de Burgh in " Pride and Prejudice," John Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility," Mr. Elton in "Emma," General Tilney in "Northanger Abbey," and above all Sir Walter Eliot in "Persuasion," are immortal types of insolence or meanness which foreshadow the kindred shapes of Thackeray's vaster snob-world, and fix the date when they began to be recognized and detested. But their recognition and detestation were only an incident of the larger circumstance studied in the different stories; and in " Persuasion " the snobbishness of Sir Walter has little to do with the fortunes of his daughter Anne after the first unhappy moment of her broken engagement.

      I

      People will prefer Anne Eliot to Elizabeth Bennet according as they enjoy a gentle sufferance in women more than a lively rebellion; and it would not be profitable to try converting the worshippers of the one to the cult

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