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  venerable in darkness, Kent thinned the foremost ranks, and left but so many detached and scattered trees as softened the approach of gloom and blended the chequered light with the thus lengthened shadows of the

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  remaining columns." The dramatic contrast of light and shade, chiaroscuro, was an inseparable adjunct to the picturesque.

  The best known of the improvers of estates, "Capability" Brown, so called because he was accustomed to say: "I perceive that your estate has great capabilities," was noted for his abhorrence of a straight line. Avenues of chestnut, oak and beech, under whose branches their owners had ridden off to the Civil Wars, caused Capability to shake his head. He thinned them out, until they became clumps of trees, irregularly disposed, and he aimed at the illusion of a sweep of grass coming from the horizon up to the windows of the dining

  room. For the paling, which had hitherto divided the garden from the park, he substituted a ditch, invisible till one was almost in it, and called a ha-ha! from the exclamations of surprise it so frequently provoked. The flower beds beloved of the Elizabethans, their red and white rose-bushes and beds of lavender, the tulips whose parti-colored, glossy ranks the seventeenth century had delighted to rear, were banished from a tasteful scheme and relegated to a rose garden hidden in yew hedges or a walled enclosure for cut flowers,

  vegetables and fruit. In the case of one client, Capability Brown was able to realize his highest conception of the improver's art; he was permitted to excavate a deep depression and to sink in it the stables and all the offices, so that no excrescence marred the outline of the house amidst its verdure. Brown and his successor Repton were of course principally called in to improve a seat already in existence, but when a new mansion was built, care was taken that where

  possible it should crown rising ground, so as to command the finest view available.

  The enthusiasm for picturesque beauty, as it implied a rearranging of one's own landscape, was of course confined

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  to land-owners, but appreciation of picturesque scenery as a pleasure for the private person was both crystallized and further stimulated by the works of Thomas Gilpin, a clergyman whose taste and capacity made him a leader of one of the most fashionable passions of the day, and who spent everything he made by his writings on this select subject, on improving the conditions of the poor in his parish.

  Between 1792 and 1798 he published five works, Observations on five separate districts of the western part of England, including the coastal scenery of Hampshire, "chiefly relative to Picturesque Beauty." Within the same period he produced shorter works on similar topics, such as Picturesque Beauty, Picturesque Landscape and Sketching Landscape. When Henry Austen referred to Gilpin on the Picturesque, he may have meant a collection of extracts of which the sources only have survived, or it may have been his way of mentioning the subject of Gilpin's works as a whole, but one passage of Gilpin's at least seems ascribable as the origin of a remark in the History of England. Gilpin said: "England exceeds most countries in the Variety of its picturesque beauty," for the following reasons: the prevalence of hedgerows, the predominance of oaks, the frequency of parks, its vaporous atmosphere, and the large number of its Gothic ruins; as the perpetrator of which, said the History, Henry VIII had been of great use to the English landscape.

  Gilpin's observations on Forest Scenery are plainly glanced at in Sense and Sensibility. "How many forests have we, wherein you shall have for one living tree, two evilthriving rotten and dying trees.

  What rottenness! What hollowness! What dead arms! Withered tops!

  Curtailed trunks! What loads of moss! Dropping boughs and dying branches shall you see everywhere!" But in the student of the picturesque such a spectacle would arouse not feelings

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  of chagrin at the sight of fine timber going to waste, but the romantic agitation of a mind attuned to sensibility. "When the dreary heath is spread before the eye, and ideas of wildness and desolation are required, what more suitable accompaniment can be imagined than the blasted oak, ragged, scathed and leafless, shooting its peeled white branches athwart the gathering blackness of some rising

  storm?"

  There was actually in the Austens' neighborhood a feature which would have delighted a connoisseur of the picturesque, but it is mentioned, not by Gilpin, but by Gilbert White. He speaks of "two rocky, hollow lanes, the one to Alton, the other to the forest. . . .

  These roads . . . are by the traffic of ages and the fretting of water, worn down through the first stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second; so that they look more like watercourses than roads; and are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet below the level of the fields: and after floods and in frosts exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata and from the torrents rushing down their broken sides; and especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, hanging in all the fanciful shapes of frostwork. These rugged, gloomy scenes

  affright the ladies when they peep down into them from the paths above and make timid horsemen shudder while they ride along

  them."

  The fervent enthusiasm for picturesque beauty might no doubt be ascribed to the reaction against the unyielding canons of aesthetic propriety and common sense which governed the century as a whole, and this reaction showed itself again in the cultivation of Sensibility.

  The maintenance of feeling at a high pitch as a matter of duty to oneself often outran the genuine emotion, but the genuine emotion was

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  often there. When "Perdita" Robinson wrote an account of her seduction and subsequent desertion by the Prince Regent, she

  appealed to that Being "Who formed my sensitive and perpetually aching heart." One does not doubt that her heart ached sorely, but, then, nothing was more fashionable than a heartache.

  So widespread among the cultivated portion of society was this mania for Sensibility, that when Hannah More wrote her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a view of the principles and conduct among women of rank and fortune, she devoted a long chapter to this quality and its dangerous abuse.

  Speaking of girls who were enthusiastic by nature, she said:

  "Through this natural warmth which they have been justly told is so pleasing, but which perhaps they have not been told will be

  continually exposing them to peril and to suffering, their joys and sorrows are excessive. Of this extreme irritability . . . the uneducated learn to boast, as if it were a decided indication of superiority of soul, instead of laboring to restrain it. . . . It is misfortune enough to be born more liable to suffer and to sin, from this conformity of mind; it is too much to nourish the evil by unrestrained indulgence, it is still worse to be proud of so misleading a quality." The Strictures, which had reached nine editions by 1801, did not come before they were needed. As early as 1775 the evil had been noticed, and it ran through every walk of feminine society, from the impertinent Lydia Languish who had sent to the circulating library for The Tears of Sensibility to the girl whose epitaph in Dorchester Abbey says that:

  "When nerves were too delicately spun to bear the Rude Shakes and Jostlings which we meet with in this transitory world, Nature gave way; she sank and died a martyr to Excessive Sensibility."

  In the brilliant lines of Sheridan no less than in the

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  solemn harangues of Hannah More, we can only regard fashionable sensibility as something with the preserved appeal to our interests of an object in a museum. It is in Sense and Sensibility that we understand what it meant to a person in real life.

  There is a peculiar loveliness in Sense and Sensibility. The book's shortcomings are obvious; the language is often stilted, and of the two heroines, the author's confessed favorite is not likely to be the favorite of anybody else. Even today it gives some surprise that Elinor Dashwood, who is meant to
be not only admirable but

  charming, should be so constantly finding fault with her delightful mother and telling her what she ought to do; but these blemishes do not affect the romantic beauty of the work. With its too rational heroine and the immature stiffness of some of its expression, it is like a blossoming landscape under a hoar frost. The heart of the book, the core of light by which the rest is illuminated, is the calamitous love affair of a selfish loose-liver and a girl of seventeen, ardent, inexperienced, and trained to believe that caution or even common discretion are an offense against true feeling. The

  characters of Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby are in one sense among the most deeply interesting Jane Austen ever produced; they show a mingling of more serious evil with good than she afterwards attempted in any full length character study. Marianne is more disastrously mistaken in her attitude to life than any of the other heroines, yet her essential, her passionate virtue, is one of the endearing things about her, and Willoughby, who for two-thirds of the book arouses the reader's detestation as a brutal scoundrel, is shown by a wonderful transition, whose suddenness is equalled only by its complete convincingness, to be actually an object of

  sympathy. It is, if one may adopt the language of the picturesque,

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  a moral chiaroscuro, unique among her works and carried through with a ruthless logic, an unwavering pursuit of probability, even to the point of Marianne's ultimate happy marriage with Colonel

  Brandon, who had fallen in love with her at first sight, but whom she had declared to be, as a man of thirty-six, too far removed from youth, the period of acute feeling, to inspire any emotion but a respectful sympathy.

  To turn for a moment to those parts of the book immediately

  recognizable as characteristic of Jane Austen, we find them,

  naturally enough, in the comic relief. The serious conversations in Sense and Sensibility, however excellent in matter, are frequently more suggestive of a particularly well written letter than actual speech, but the conversation of any character, comic, disagreeable or odd, is astounding. One aspect of her work is shown as truly in the comic portions of the early Sense and Sensibility as in whichever of the other novels may be the reader's favorite; it is the capacity to work up conversation to a pitch of comedy bordering nearly upon farce, and yet to sacrifice almost nothing--sometimes nothing at all--

  to photographic realism. We laugh at Mrs. Malaprop as at an

  excellent joke; we laugh at Mrs. Palmer and Robert Ferrars and Nancy Steele with the pleasure, and it is altogether different from the pleasure usually derived from humorous authors, that we get from something irresistibly funny in daily life. The perception that cuts out a self-portrait in conversation, as with a razor edge, was perhaps never better shown than in the celebrated second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, in which John Dashwood, the half-brother of Elinor and Marianne, and present owner of the family estate, has a

  discussion with his wife on the subject of how he is to carry out the promise made to his dying father, of taking care of the widowed Mrs. Dashwood

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  and her daughters. To give an adequate idea of how the grasping and callous nature of the wife influences that of the superficially amiable husband who is at heart as selfish as she, but more anxious to view himself in a respectable light, it would be necessary to quote the greater part of the chapter in its entirety. By stages, exquisitely graduated yet rapid enough to maintain the stimulus of comedy, John Dashwood is brought to change his original idea of giving each of his half-sisters a thousand pounds, to that of helping them to move their things when they find a new house and sending them presents of fish and game when in season: and to think it a generous one.

  The style, even in the serious passages, has a constant subdued sparkle, like that of a dark but quartz-shot stone; in the lighter narrative portions, apart even from the achievements in character and episode, it scintillates with every turn.

  The principal comic relief of the book is supplied by a figure who is not, for the purposes of comedy, seen from one angle only, but whom we begin by ridiculing, despising and disliking, and end, as is so often the case in real life, by coming really to know and

  consequently to value with warmth and respect. Mrs. Jennings, the mother-in-law of the Dashwoods' Devonshire relation, Sir John

  Middleton, appears in the first volume of the book practically intolerable; her coarse good humor finds its most usual vent in joking about the supposed love affairs of everybody in her

  neighborhood, and as both Elinor and Marianne are, from different causes, very susceptible to impertinent comment, the reader's view of Mrs. Jennings is naturally colored by theirs. No less offensive is her blundering, unfeeling, remorseless curiosity with regard to some particularly painful private business of Colonel Brandon's; even her harmless conversation puts

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  her in a contemptible light; as when she brings her second daughter, the pretty, stupid little Mrs. Palmer, to call on the Dashwoods. Mrs.

  Jennings said that she wished her daughter had not travelled so fast because it might have done her harm, as she was expecting a baby; she made this communication "leaning towards Elinor, and speaking in a low voice as if she meant to be heard by no one else, though they were seated on different sides of the room. . . ."

  It is in the second volume, when Marianne, knowing Willoughby to be in London, accepts Mrs. Jennings' invitation to spend some weeks at her town house, that Mrs. Jennings' character begins to develop itself. Elinor had at first declined the invitation, supposing that in doing so she was consulting Marianne's wishes even more than her own; but Marianne, thinking of nothing but Willoughby, said that if Elinor were frightened away by her dislike of Mrs. Jennings, at least she had no such scruples, adding: "'I am sure I could put up with every unpleasantness of that sort with very little effort.'"

  "Elinor could not help smiling at this display of indifference towards the manners of a person to whom she had often had difficulty in persuading Marianne to behave with tolerable politeness, and

  resolved within herself that if her sister persisted in going, she would go likewise, as she did not think it proper that Marianne should be left to the sole guidance of her own judgment or that Mrs. Jennings should be abandoned to the mercy of Marianne for all the comfort of her domestic hours."

  The visit thus embarked upon, with its immediate exploding of the mine which had been already laid for Marianne's happiness, brings out the essential qualities of Mrs. Jennings, of which--and herein lies the art of the portrayal--we were unconscious before, but which, when brought before

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  us, we at once realize to have been latent in the character as previously described. Her extraordinary kindness to the girls, her good-tempered, humble recognition of herself as a silly old woman of "odd ways," her comically expressed but most genuine friendship for poor Colonel Brandon, and her instinctive condemnation of all the people whose falseness and cold hearts add so much to Elinor's unhappiness, make her by the end of the book appear as one of the pleasantest people in it.

  But so much is merely what one would expect to find in the

  apprentice work of Jane Austen. It is the romantic episode which affords the unique interest among her works, and though the course of it is an illustration of the title and the condemnation implied by its contrast: though Marianne is openly criticized on almost every page, her story is told with so much sympathy and so much conviction that in retrospect we regard it, not as the tragic blunder it actually was, but as something with the strange, essential beauty that attaches to profound human experience.

  The outlines of the story are much more boldly drawn than in any of the other five novels, and the scenes, though they in no case overstep the limits of strict probability, are conceived on a larger scale. An instance of this difference is provided by a comparison of the first meeting of Marianne and her lover with the similar encounters in the other books. Catherine Morland
has a casual introduction to Mr.

  Tilney at a crowded and fatiguing assembly; Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have a very unpromising first encounter at a ball; Fanny Price, as a frightened child of ten, does not distinguish Edmund Bertram among the alarming cousins to whom she is introduced on the evening of her arrival at Mansfield Park; Emma Woodhouse

  would not have been able to remember that day in her childhood on which she

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  became conscious of Mr. Knightley's existence; we are not told how Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth first saw each other, because they met eight years before the opening of Persuasion; but with Marianne we are in a different world at once. She and her younger sister had gone for a walk on the downs which, varied with hanging woods, shut in Barton valley; it was autumn, and when the girls had reached the summit and were delighting in the excitement of a

  tearing wind, the clouds suddenly closed over their heads and a burst of rain made them run down the hillside to the shelter of the cottage once more. Marianne was ahead of her sister when she suddenly

  tripped, and on trying to get up, found herself helpless with a sprained ankle. "A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him," saw the accident and, putting down the gun, ran to her assistance, and finding that she could not walk, picked her up in his arms and carried her down the hillside, through the gate of the cottage, and the front door which Margaret on running in had left open, and straight into the parlor, where he deposited her in a chair under the astonished eyes of Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor.

  The acquaintance thus begun opens as the bud in summer's ripening breath. Marianne, though so severely handled by her creator, is lovely and interesting to a degree. Her attractions are those of a breathing creature, wild and startling with life. "Her skin was very brown, but from its transparency, her complexion was unusually brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was 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." It is a type particularly well illustrated in portraits of the late eighteenth century of young women in their longsleeved gowns with fichus, and hair turned loosely back