by Jane Austen
But while conceding that the phrase ‘first impressions’ may be more than a glancing blow aimed at the conventions of the sentimental novel, I want to suggest a further possible implication in Jane Austen’s original title. Without for a moment suggesting that she read as much contemporary philosophy as she did fiction (though with so intelligent a woman it is scarcely impossible), I think it is worth pointing out that ‘impressions’ is one of the key words in David Hume’s philosophy, and the one to which he gives pre-eminence as the source of our knowledge. Thus from the beginning of the Treatise on Human Nature:
All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint image of these in thinking and reasoning…There is another division of our perceptions, which it will be convenient to observe, and which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas. This division is into SIMPLE and COMPLEX…I observe that many of our complex ideas never had impressions, that corresponded to them, and that many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas. I can imagine to myself such a city as the New Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold and walls are rubies, tho’ I never saw any such. I have seen Paris; but shall I affirm that I can form such an idea of that city, as will perfectly represent all its streets and houses in their real and just proportions?
Elizabeth has a lively mind – her liveliness is indeed one of the qualities which wins Darcy to her – and her impressions are comparably lively, since the quality of the registering consciousness necessarily affects the intensity of the registered impressions. Similarly she is capable both of complex impressions and complex ideas – more of this later. Her problem, in Hume’s terms, is that her complex ideas are not always firmly based on her complex impressions obtained from the scenes before her. Here we notice that eighteenth-century suspicion of imagination, to which Jane Austen partially subscribed, since it was likely to make you believe ideas not based on impressions – to confuse the New Jerusalem and Paris. (In rebelling against eighteenth-century philosophy and psychology, Blake was to assert the primacy of the faculty which could envision the New Jerusalem and elevate it over the mere perception of Paris.)
If, says Hume, we wish to understand our ideas, we must go back to our impressions:
By what invention can we throw light upon these ideas, and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view? Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied.
That is from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals he also stresses that
the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; but that we must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood.
And ‘a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection’. Impressions beget inclinations, and those inclinations may then come under the consideration of reason. But
Reason being cool and disengaged, is not motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.
One further quotation:
In every situation or incident, there are many particular and seemingly minute circumstances, which the man of greatest talent is, at first, apt to overlook, though on them the justness of his conclusions, and consequently the prudence of his conduct, entirely depend…The truth is, an unexperienced reasoner could be no reasoner at all, were he absolutely unexperienced.
Without experience, no reason; without impressions, no experience. This suggests the particular importance of ‘first impressions’ because, although they may well need subsequent correction, amplification, supplementation etc., they constitute the beginning of experience. All the above quotations from Hume seem to me to apply very aptly to Pride and Prejudice and I do not think this aptness needs spelling out. For Jane Austen, as for Hume, man, and woman, needed to be both an experiencer and a reasoner: the former without the latter is error-prone, the latter without the former is useless if not impossible (as exemplified by Mary Bennet’s sententious comments; she is all ‘cool and disengaged’ reason, and thus no reasoner at all). Both experience and reason depend upon impressions, and first impressions thus become our first steps into full human life. To overstress this may become a matter suitable for burlesque, but as a general proposition it is not inherently so.
To add to this proposition the reminder that first impressions, indeed all impressions, may need subsequent revision is only to say that full human life is a complex affair, and Jane Austen makes us well aware of this complexity. From the problematical irony of the opening assertion – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ – there are constant reminders of the shiftingness of what people take to be ‘truth’; for what is ‘universally acknowledged’ can change not only from society to society but from person to person, and indeed within the same person over a period of time. There is in the book a whole vocabulary connected with the process of decisions, opinion, conviction, stressing or suggesting how various and unstable are people’s ideas, judgements, accounts and versions of situations and people. After one evening of seeing Darcy ‘His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world’; Elizabeth asks Wickham about Lady Catherine and ‘allowed that he had given a very rational account’; she also believes his account of his treatment by Darcy and it is left to Jane to suggest that ‘interested people have perhaps misrepresented each to the other’. Jane, however, has her own myopia, for in her desire to think well of the whole world, she sees Miss Bingley’s treatment of her as agreeable while Elizabeth more accurately discerns it as supercilious. However Elizabeth is too confident, as when she asserts to her more tentative sister ‘I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.’ She is ‘resolved’ against Darcy and for a while takes pleasure in Wickham who is, temporarily, ‘universally liked’. She questions Darcy whether he has never allowed himself ‘to be blinded by prejudice’, without thinking that she may at that very moment be guilty of prejudging with its resulting screening of vision. Opinions are constantly changing as people’s behaviour appears in a different light. Elizabeth ‘represents’ a person or a situation in one way, while Jane adheres to her own ‘idea’ of things. It is Jane who, when Darcy is condemned by everybody else as ‘the worst of men’, ‘pleaded for allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakes’. Of course it is not long before opinion shifts against Wickham. ‘Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world’, just as everybody’s opinion quickly reverses itself towards the Bennet family. ‘The Bennets were speedily pronounced to be the luckiest family in the world, though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had first run away, they had been generally proved to be marked out for misfortune.’ (My italics.) The fallibility of our ‘proofs’ and the prematurity of all too many of our ‘pronouncements’ are amply demonstrated in this novel. The ‘anxious interpretation’ which is made necessary on social occasions is examined, and the ‘interest’ which lies behind this or that reading of things is alluded to. When Mrs Gardiner ‘recollected having heard Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud, ill-natured boy’ she takes it, temporarily, as knowledge. (My italics.)
It is of course Elizabeth who most importantly comes to ‘wish that her former opinions had been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate’. As opposed to Jane whom she calls ‘honestly blind’, Elizabeth has more
‘quickness of observation’. But in Darcy’s case her observation proves to be too quick. Not that we can or wish to count her wrong in her ‘first impressions’ of Darcy, for his manner is proud, patronizing, and, in his famous proposal, insulting and unworthy of a gentleman – as Elizabeth very properly points out to our great delight. But she had formed a fixed ‘idea’ of the whole Darcy on insufficient data, and in believing Wickham’s account of the man – a purely verbal fabrication – she is putting too much confidence in unverified and, as it turns out, completely false, evidence. (The ability of language to make ‘Black appear White’ – and vice versa – was a crucial truth of which Jane Austen was particularly aware. In a society which relied so much on conversation it is a constant danger. But it is not a danger which is restricted to a highly verbal culture. It is, for instance, King Lear’s basic error in believing Goneril’s and Regan’s inflated rhetoric of love, and failing to recognize the actual thing itself wordlessly incorporate in Cordelia. Elizabeth’s error is not of the same order, of course, but it is of the same kind.)
However, it is important to note that her éclaircissement first comes through language as well – in the form of Darcy’s letter. The passages describing her changing reaction to that letter are among the most important in the book. In effect she is having to choose between two opposed and mutually exclusive versions – Wickham’s and Darcy’s. ‘On both sides it was only assertion.’ She had at first been taken in by Wickham’s plausible physical manner, but she gradually comes to put more trust in Darcy’s authoritative writing manner – she is discriminating between styles at this point. (Note that she immediately judges that Mr Collins is not a sensible man from the pompous style of his letter-writing – in this case, first impressions are validated.) She realizes that ‘the affair…was capable of a turn which must make him (Darcy) entirely blameless throughout the whole’. The affair was capable of a turn – there in essence is the whole problem which forever confronts the interpreting human consciousness which can turn things now this way now that way as it plays, seriously or sportively, with the varying versions of reality which it is capable of proliferating: one concrete world – many partial mental pictures of it. But if it is the problem of consciousness, it can also be its salvation, for it enables a person to change his version or interpretation of things. Just how tenacious a man can be of a fixed version, and how disastrous that tenacity can be when it is a wrong version, is indeed the very subject of King Lear. Elizabeth thinks for a time that her wrong version has cost her a perfect mate and a great house, crucial things for a young lady in that society.
She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her…It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both…But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.
But of course she does not have to undergo Lear’s tribulations. By an intelligent and just reading of Darcy’s letter she not only changes her mind about him; she comes to a moment of intense realization about herself. ‘How differently did everything now appear in which he was concerned!…She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd. “How despicably have I acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment!…Till this moment I never knew myself.”’ This may seem somewhat excessive – it is part of Darcy’s improvement that he comes to acknowledge the justness of much of what she has said about his behaviour and manner. The important thing is that in perceiving her own pride and prejudice – notice she uses both words of herself – Elizabeth can now begin to be free of them. There can be few more important moments in the evolution of a human consciousness than such an act of recognition. There is much in our literature as well as our experience to suggest that the person who never comes to the point of saying ‘I never knew myself’ will indeed remain forever cut off from any self-knowledge – what possible effect there is on his vision and conduct need not here be spelt out. If we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know our world.
It is not surprising that after wandering alone for two hours ‘giving way to every variety of thought – re-considering events, determining probabilities’, as Elizabeth does after receiving Darcy’s letter, she experiences ‘fatigue’. For she has indeed been through an ordeal and engaged in a critical effort of rearranging her mental furniture. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: ‘I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks.’ That there are internal expenditures of energy quite as exhausting as any bout of external action is a truth which Jane Austen, with her restricted position in a fairly immobile society, was peculiarly able to appreciate. Elizabeth’s particular ordeal is indeed a very ancient one, for she has been confronting for the first time the problematical discrepancies between appearances and reality, and the unsuspected limits of cognition. It is a theme as old as Oedipus Rex, and even if all that is involved is recognizing a rake and a gentleman respectively for what they really are, in Elizabeth’s society, no less than in ancient Greece, such acts of recognition are decisive in the procuring of happiness or misery.
The constant need to be alert to the difference between appearance and reality is made clear from the start. Compared with Bingley and Darcy, Mr Hurst ‘merely looked the gentleman’. Since Mr Hurst alternates between playing cards and sleeping, he is hardly a problematical character. Wickham of course is more so. ‘His appearance was greatly in his favour’ and he has a ‘very pleasing address’. He is ‘beyond’ all the officers of his regiment ‘in person, countenance, air, and walk’. Elizabeth does not have it ‘in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham’. He ‘must always be her model of the amiable and the pleasing’. It is only after reading Darcy’s letter that she has to start changing that model. As the above-quoted words make clear (none of them have pronounced ethical connotations), Elizabeth has hitherto responded to Wickham’s manner, or that part of the self which is visible on social occasions. After the letter she thinks back.
As to his real character had information been in her power, she had never felt a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner had established him at once in the possession of every virtue. She tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished trait of integrity or benevolence…but she could remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the neighbourhood.
She has now started to think about ‘substance’ as being distinct from ‘appearance’ and from this point on Darcy’s character will continue to rise in her estimation as Wickham’s falls, until she can complain to Jane ‘There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of these two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.’ Poor Jane, so reluctant to believe in the existence of human duplicity and evil scheming, would like to believe in the goodness of both men, but Elizabeth with her more rigorous mind points out that there is ‘but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Mr Darcy’s.’ Even here, as we can see, Elizabeth’s sense of humour has not deserted her; and it enables her to disconcert Wickham with a nice irony. On her return from Rosings Wickham asks if Darcy’s ‘ordinary style’ has improved, adding, ‘For I dare not hope that he is improved in essentials.’ Elizabeth, by now convinced of the essential goodness of Darcy can thus reply meaningfully. ‘Oh, no!…In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was.’ Wickham makes a rather agitated retreat, adding with weak insolence ‘I must rejoice that he is wise enough to assume even the appearance of what is right.’ The italics are Jane Austen’s and the word occurs again later in the chapter, again italicized, as if to stress that Elizabeth is now fully awakened to the possible disparities between appearance and substance.
Ju
st what constitutes a person’s ‘real character’ is one of the concerns of the book: the phrase occurs more than once, usually with the added idea that it is something that can be ‘exposed’ (and thus, by the same token, concealed). In particular, Darcy in his letter writes that whatever Elizabeth may feel about Wickham it ‘shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character’, just as later in the letter he narrates Wickham’s attempt to seduce Georgiana, ‘a circumstance…which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being’. Cordelia’s last words before being banished are:
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides
Who covers faults, at last shame them derides.
‘Unfolding’ a hidden reality is of course replacing mere appearance with substance. The fact that reality can get folded up and hidden away – because we are so built that we are forced to work from first impressions which can be cynically manipulated – means that it is very important to be careful about what we regard as convincing evidence. It is the mistake of both Lear and Othello that they ask for the wrong kind of evidence, thus making themselves vulnerable to those who are willing to fabricate a set of false appearances. But in Shakespearean tragedy, as also in Pride and Prejudice, the ‘real character’ of both the good and the bad – of Cordelia and Iago, of Darcy and Wickham – is ‘unfolded’. The cost and process of the unfolding are of course very different in each case. But the perennial theme is common to both.
