by Jane Austen
Indeed passion, as such, is hardly differentiated from folly in the terms of the book. Lydia’s elopement is seen as thoughtless and foolish and selfish, rather than a grande passion; while Mr Bennet’s premature captivation by Mrs Bennet’s youth and beauty is ‘imprudence’. This is a key word. Mrs Gardiner warns Elizabeth against becoming involved with the impoverished Wickham, yet when it seems he will marry a Miss King for her money, she describes him as ‘mercenary’. As Elizabeth asks ‘what is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary motive and the prudent motive?’ Elizabeth will simply not accept Charlotte’s solution as a model of true ‘prudence’, nor will we. There must be something between that kind of prudence and her father’s imprudence. And one of the things the book sets out to do is to define a rationally based ‘mode of attachment’ – something between the exclusively sexual and the entirely mercenary. Thus words like ‘gratitude’ and ‘esteem’ are used to describe Elizabeth’s growing feeling for Darcy. She comes to feel that their union would have been ‘to the advantage of both: by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have softened, his manners improved; and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance’. A word to note there is ‘advantage’; consciousness has penetrated so far into emotions that love follows calculations and reflections. What differentiates Elizabeth’s choice from Charlotte’s is not its greater impetuosity – indeed it is Charlotte who is the more precipitate. It is the fact that it is a free choice which is not dictated by economic pressure (though Pemberley is a great attraction as she readily admits); and it is a choice which is based on more awareness, knowledge, and intelligence than Charlotte brings to her cool but instant capitulation. Elizabeth loves for the best reasons, and there are always reasons for loving in Jane Austen’s world. Consider this sentence from Tolstoy’s Resurrection. ‘Nekhludov’s offer of marriage was based on generosity and knowledge of what had happened in the past, but Simonson loved her as he found her; he loved her simply because he loved her.’ (My italics.) Tolstoy takes in a far wider world than Jane Austen, both socially and emotionally. He knew that there are feelings of such intensity, directness, and tenacity, that they reduce language to tautology when it attempts to evoke them. The kind of emotion pointed to in the remarkable clause I have italicized – not to be confused with lust, for this is far from being a purely sexual attraction – is a kind of emotion which is not conceived of, or taken into account, in Jane Austen’s world. This is not to censure Jane Austen for blinkered vision. It is, rather, to point out that in her books, and thus in the society they reflect, emotion is either rational – capable of being both conceptualized and verbalized – or it is folly.
And yet we sense that there is a capacity for depths and animations of feeling in Elizabeth which is not allowed for in the above description of the ‘rationally founded’ emotions preferred by Jane Austen. It is that extra something which dances through her words conveying an emotional as well as a semantic energy; it is what glows from her eyes and brings the blood to her cheeks so often; it is what sends her running across the fields and jumping over stiles when she hears that Jane is ill at Netherfield. After this last piece of anxious exertion she is said to look ‘almost wild’ and there in fact we have the beginning of a problem. The word ‘wild’ is applied to Elizabeth – and to Lydia, and to Wickham. In the case of the last two named, ‘wildness’ obviously has nothing to recommend it and is seen as totally and reprehensibly anti-social. Elizabeth’s special quality is more often referred to as ‘liveliness’; this is what Darcy is said to lack (his understanding – i.e. rational consciousness – is apparently impeccable), and it is the main quality that Elizabeth will bring to the marriage. It is a fine point, and not perhaps a fixed one, at which liveliness becomes wildness, yet the latter is a menace to society, while without the former society is merely dull. Elizabeth is also often described as laughing (she differentiates her state from Jane’s by saying ‘she only smiles, I laugh’) and laughter is also potentially anarchic as it can act as a negation of the principles and presuppositions, the rules and rituals, which sustain society. (Her famous declaration: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can’ puts her in the line of eighteenth-century satirists who worked to uphold certain values and principles by drawing comic attention to deviations from them. But Elizabeth’s love of laughter goes beyond the satisfactions of a satirical wit, and she admits to a love of ‘absurdities’. A sense of the absurd in life can be very undermining of a belief in society’s self-estimation.)
With her liveliness and laughter it is not at first clear that Elizabeth will consent to be contained within the highly structured social space available to her. There is a suggestive episode when Mrs Hurst leaves Elizabeth and joins Darcy and Miss Bingley on a walk. The path only allows three to walk abreast and Darcy is aware of the rudeness of leaving Elizabeth out in this way. He suggests they go to a wider avenue, but Elizabeth
laughingly answered – ‘No, no; stay where you are. – You are charmingly group’d, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye.’ She then ran gaily off, rejoicing as she rambled about…
Social rules, like aesthetic prescriptions, tend to fix people in groups. Elizabeth is happy to leave the group, laughing, rambling, rejoicing. It is only a passing incident, but it aptly suggests an independence and liveliness of temperament which will not readily submit to any grouping found to be unacceptably restricting. Marriage is part of the social grouping and is also a restriction. The dream aspect of Pemberley is that it presumably offers an amplitude which, while still social, is large enough to offer a maximum field for expansion of both liveliness and understanding in which they can complement rather than constrain each other, and in which liveliness need never seek to express itself as anti-social wildness.
At one point Elizabeth is said to pass beyond the ‘bounds of decorum’ and it is part of her attraction that her energy and vitality seem to keep her right on that boundary where the constrained threatens to give way to something less willingly controlled. It is, indeed, just this that attracts Darcy to her, for while the cold ‘critical eye’ which he casts on society immediately detects failures of ‘perfect symmetry in her form’, he is ‘caught’ by the ‘easy playfulness’ of her manners, and he stays caught by it. Where there is what Darcy calls ‘real superiority of mind’ he maintains that ‘pride will always be under good regulation’, and throughout his behaviour is a model of regulation. But ‘good regulation’ is not sufficient for a good society; it is what we expect from an efficient machine and the danger in the sort of society portrayed by Jane Austen is a tendency away from the organic towards the mechanical. (Thus Elizabeth finds out that the ‘civilities’ of Sir William Lucas are ‘worn out, like his information’. With his empty repetitions Sir William is a dim adumbration of some of Dickens’s more memorable automata.) In a society that is still alive there will always be some awareness of, and pull towards, those qualities which that society has had to exclude in order to maintain itself. Ralph Ellison puts the idea in its sharpest form when the narrator of the Invisible Man asserts that ‘the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.’ It would be foolish indeed to pronounce Elizabeth as a spirit of chaos with Darcy as the incarnation of pattern. (Indeed in many ways Elizabeth is the best citizen, for she brings real life to the values and principles to which too many of the other only pay lip service, or mechanically observe in a spirit of torpid conformity.) But in their gradual coming together and Darcy’s persistent desire for Elizabeth we do witness the perennial yearning of perfect symmetry for the asymmetrical, the appeal which ‘playfulness’ has for ‘regulation’, the irresistible attraction of the freely rambling individual for the rigidified upholder of the group. Indeed it could
be said that it is on the tension between playfulness and regulation that society depends, and it is the fact that they are so happily ‘united’ by the end of the book which generates the satisfaction produced by the match.
‘Uniting them’ are the last two words of the book, and we do, I suggest, witness apparently mutually exclusive qualities coming into unity during the course of the book. Elizabeth at one point, in the presence of the insupportable Mr Collins, is said to try to ‘unite truth and civility in a few short sentences’. The casual phrase is a passing reminder that civility is so often a matter of considerate lying, and another part of Elizabeth’s appeal is her determination to hold on to what she refers to as ‘the meaning of principle and integrity’. As Jane Austen shows, it is not always possible to unite civility and truth in this society, and the fact that there is often a dichotomy between the two produces that mixture of outward conformity and inner anguish experienced by her more sensitive characters. Pemberley is, once again, that dream place where such unities are possible. Given the importance of Elizabeth’s ‘playfulness’ – for Darcy, for society, for the book – there is perhaps something too abject in her self-accusing retraction and apology to Darcy near the end. Although Darcy concedes to Elizabeth that ‘By you I was properly humbled’, we may feel that she is somewhat too willing to abandon her ‘playfulness’. (For example, she redefines her ‘liveliness’ of mind as ‘impertinence’.) There is the famous moment near the end when Elizabeth is about to make an ironical remark at Darcy’s expense, ‘but she checked herself. She remembered that he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin’. One might be prompted to speculate whether Darcy will learn to laugh at himself (as the sentence half promises) or whether this is just the first of many and more serious checks and repressions which Elizabeth will be obliged to impose on herself as she takes her place in the social group.
But this is a happy book and we are not shown the wilting of playfulness under the force of regulation, but rather a felicitous ‘uniting’ of both. In 1813 Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra about Pride and Prejudice:
I had had some fits of disgust…The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade, it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté or anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style. I doubt your quite agreeing with me here. I know your starched notions.
Some critics have taken this as indicating Jane Austen’s repudiation of her own light, bright, sparkling qualities; and it is true that in going on to write about Fanny Price in Mansfield Park Jane Austen turned to a heroine, not only in a different plight, but of a very different disposition, while giving all the ‘playfulness’ to the socially unreliable and ultimately undesirable Mary Crawford. And there is no doubt that there is a diminishing of playfulness, a growing suspicion of unsocialized energy, in Jane Austen’s subsequent work. Nevertheless I do not think this letter should be taken too seriously as an omen of repression to come. It is in fact ironical at the expense of books stuffed with the sort of sententiousness which Mary Bennet delights to quote, or the meandering digressions which could be found in many of the less well formed works of the day. Jane Austen’s disparagement of playfulness is here, surely, mock-disparagement. She is herself still being ‘sparkling’, and if her later works grow more sombre in tone we may yet be glad that she gave us this one novel in which the brightness and the sparkle of the heroine’s individuality are not sacrificed to the exacting decorums or the manipulative persuasions of the social group. Elizabeth Bennet says she is humbled, but we will always remember her as laughing.
As it can be seen we are in the proximity of a major problem here, namely that of the relationship and adjustment between individual energy and social forms. If one were to make a single binary reduction about literature one could say that there are works which stress the existence of, and need for, boundaries; and works which concentrate on everything within the individual – from the sexual to the imaginative and the religious – which conspires to negate or transcend boundaries. Looking back at the terms of Charlotte Brontë’s criticisms of Pride and Prejudice quoted at the start of this introduction we notice a preponderant vocabulary of boundaries – ‘accurate’, ‘carefully fenced, highly cultivated gardens’, ‘neat borders’, ‘elegant but confined houses’. Her own impulse is towards the ‘open country’ and the boundless ‘air’ as the whole progress of her aptly named Jane Eyre reveals.11 In the eighteenth century however, the stress was on the need for, or inevitability of, boundaries. Thus Locke in the first chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
I suspected we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concerned us, while we let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension…Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things – between what is and what is not comprehensible by us – men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.
And thus Hume:
Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality…And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion…But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.
By turning the negative words in these passages into positive ones, and vice versa, one could begin to establish a basic vocabulary to describe the very different kind of epistemology posited by the whole movement we know as Romantic. ‘The vast ocean of Being’, ‘the most distant regions of the universe’, even ‘the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion’ – these were the very realms the Romantic imagination set out to explore; for it did claim for itself ‘unbounded liberty’ and refused to accept the notion that man and his mind are ‘really confined within very narrow limits’. Locke invites us, in the interests of sanity, to recognize and accept the ‘horizon’ which ‘sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things’. Blake took the word ‘horizon’, transformed it into ‘Urizen’ and made that figure the evil symbol of all that restricted and restrained man. He thus stood the Enlightenment on its head, and if it was at the cost of his sanity, then, like other Romantics, he preferred to enjoy the visionary intensities of his ‘madness’ rather than subscribe to the accepted notions of mental health. Other Romantics too have preferred to cross that horizon and boundary and explore ‘the dark parts of things’ and often they have found this sphere to be full of dazzling illuminations.
This is not the place to embark on a summary of the Romantic movement. The point is that Jane Austen was brought up on eighteenth-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition, and clear ideas which it inculcated. Yet among writers who published work the same year as Pride and Prejudice were Byron, Coleridge, Scott, and Shelley; the lyrical B
allads were already over a decade old, and Keats would publish four years later. Jane Austen was writing at a time when a major shift of sensibility was taking place, as indeed major social changes were taking place or were imminent, and to some extent she was certainly aware of this. She had depicted at least one incipient Romantic in the figure of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and her treatment is a rather ambiguous mixture of sympathy and satire. In the figure of Elizabeth Bennet she shows us energy attempting to find a valid mode of existence within society. One more quotation from Blake will enable me to conclude the point I am trying to make. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is eternal Delight.’ As I have said, I think that Jane Austen’s suspicion of energy increased in her later work. But in Pride and Prejudice she shows us energy and reason coming together, not so much as a reconciliation of opposites, but as a marriage of complementaries. She makes it seem as if it is possible for playfulness and regulation – energy and boundaries – to be united in fruitful harmony, without the one being sacrificed to the other. Since to stress one at the expense of the other can either way mean loss, both to the self and to society, the picture of achieved congruence between them offered in Pride and Prejudice is of unfading relevance. It is perhaps no wonder that it has also proved capable of giving eternal delight.
