[In the following essay, Wiesenfarth defends the aesthetic greatness of Pride and Prejudice, arguing that its plot is a sophisticated method of erecting an ideal value system.]

Pride and Prejudice has long been considered a classic by the general reader,¹ but it no longer enjoys that distinction with many professional critics. To the latter, in the post-James and anti-plot era,² it seems too elegantly dressed in a strait jacket of form. “Exactness of symmetry,” writes Mary Lascelles, “… carries with it one danger. The novelist's subtlety of apprehension may be numbed by this other faculty of his for imposing order on what he apprehends.”³ The question, of course, is whether this is truly the case with Pride and Prejudice. Has the form of the novel been preserved at the expense of the life of the characters it presents? Miss Lascelles herself objects to Darcy's letter: “The manner is right, but not the matter: so much, and such, information would hardly be volunteered by a proud and reserved man—unless under pressure from his author, anxious to get on with the story.”⁴ But the same proud and reserved man, we remember, rather loudly refused to dance with Elizabeth at Meryton. Did he do that on his own volition or on the author's? The difficulty of answering this question suggests the impossibility of dealing satisfactorily with the problem concerning the letter. A Darcy who could say within earshot of a young lady, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men”⁵—that same Darcy could certainly write a letter to justify himself when falsely accused. But even if one were disposed to admit that Darcy is inconsistent, he could find a view of character in eighteenth-century conduct books that sees such inconsistency as natural. Lady Sarah Pennington writes that “the best men are sometimes inconsistent with themselves … they may have some oddities of behaviour, some peculiarities of temper … blemishes of this kind often shade the brightest character …”⁶ The kind of question that Darcy's letter raises is open to endless debate. It is too much involved with too many critical presuppositions to be satisfactorily answered. Miss Lascelles is troubled by it; I am not.

A problem raised by Reuben Brower—and later elaborated by Robert Liddell and Marvin Mudrick—can be more advantageously dealt with. The question of esthetic fitness that he introduces into the evaluation of Pride and Prejudice deserves serious consideration. Brower writes that “as all ambiguities are resolved and all irony is dropped, the reader feels the closing in of a structure by its necessary end, the end implied in the crude judgment of Dracy in the first ballroom scene.”⁷ It is his opinion that after the moment at Lambton, when Elizabeth admits “a real interest” in Darcy's welfare, Pride and Prejudice is “not quite the same sort of book.”⁸ “Once we have reached the scenes in which the promise of the introduction is fulfilled, the literary design both ironic and dramatic is complete.”⁹ If one admits Brower's objection to the design of Pride and Prejudice, he has to decide what he can conveniently do with the last fifteen chapters of the novel. If the promise of the introduction is fulfilled at Lambton, these last hundred pages must be considered supererogatory; and with such an excresence marring its form, Pride and Prejudice will have to be considered something less than a classic.

If we turn to the Meryton ball, however, it becomes evident that Brower's analysis of the situation is not exact. The “promise of the introduction” has to do with more than the crude judgment of Darcy at the ball, which Elizabeth rectifies by her sensitive judgment of him at Lambton. The first eligible bachelor introduced into the novel is Charles Bingley. Everything is “Mr. Bingley” until the ball; during and after it, Bingley is as much in the conversation of Hertfordshire as Darcy. The Meryton ball shows Bingley finding Jane “the most beautiful creature I ever beheld” (11) and asking her “to dance a second time” (14). Attention after the ball is as much directed to the friendly relationship between Bingley and Jane as to the fractured one between Darcy and Elizabeth. Then, after Jane is taken ill, she becomes the center of attention. While she recuperates at Netherfield Park, she and Bingley cautiously reveal their affection for each other. And because Jane is there, Elizabeth comes to visit her; this gives Darcy a chance to reconsider his refusal to dance with her at the ball. Mrs. Bennet also appears on the scene, carrying all but the marriage contract to Bingley and Jane. Unless one is ready to do without much that inspires the first twelve chapters of Pride and Prejudice, one has to admit the importance of Jane and Bingley and see them and their relationship as integral to “the promise of the introduction.” In fact, one of the main reasons that Elizabeth gives to Darcy for her refusal to marry him concerns Jane:

“… Had not my own feelings decided against you, had they been indifferent, or had they even been favourable, do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man, who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?”

(190)

Darcy remembers this statement so well that even after Lambton, when he knows that Elizabeth's feelings are favorable toward him, he sees to it that Bingley returns to Netherfield and consequently to Jane. When Elizabeth leaves Darcy at Lambton to attend to Lydia's elopement, the strand of action concerning Bingley and Jane—which was introduced into the novel before that concerning Darcy and herself—remains to be untangled. The dramatic design of Pride and Prejudice under these circumstances can hardly be thought at that point to be complete.

Another fact brings out the incompleteness quite clearly too. Before Darcy can accept Elizabeth, he has to accept her family. He has never yet entered the Bennet house at Longbourn. Also, he has still to realize that indecorum is not the specifying characteristic of the Bennets alone. The wonderful interference of the egregious Lady Catherine de Bourgh in his affairs has yet to make Darcy realize that his aunt's title is nothing more than a cover that keeps the skeleton in the family closet from rattling as loudly as the bumbling Mrs. Bennet. Darcy has yet to see completely through the personal-social equation that has been the cause of much of his hauteur. Lady Catherine has yet to clear his vision once and for all. The dramatic design of Pride and Prejudice is not complete at Lambton.

Nor is the ironic either, simply because the ironic is so completely implicated in the dramatic. Irony in Pride and Prejudice is more totally verbal in the first half of the novel than in the second. But the verbal irony is necessary to the ambiguity that enables Darcy and Elizabeth so completely to misunderstand each other. It would be rather foolish for Jane Austen to preserve such ironic ambiguity when she is trying to solve the problems caused by it. Such verbal irony in no sense controls the design of the novel. What is normative is personal development through perception, understanding, and affection. Irony is the handmaid of such a norm, not its master.

The norm of personal development through perception, understanding, and affection is developed by a symmetry of plot that involves a series of actions which are dramatically ironic. The plot of Pride and Prejudice builds to a statement of problems that arise through verbal ambiguity. Darcy comes to think that Elizabeth loves him whereas she could not care less for him because of the way she feels about his treatment of Jane and of Wickham. It is on these matters that she is brooding when Darcy comes to her at Hunsford. When he proposes to Elizabeth, she refuses him; and Darcy wants to know why he is not accepted. His request for an explanation is soon answered with three specific accusations, but Elizabeth first asks Darcy why he proposed to her at all since it was (as he said) “against your reason, and even against your character” (190). For Darcy to have proposed irrationally to Elizabeth and to have insinuated that marriage to her would injure his character was for him simply to have insulted her. But Elizabeth puts aside the proposal for a moment and taxes Darcy, first, with preventing Bingley from marrying Jane; second, with hindering Wickham from receiving the living which he claimed was his by right. Then she doubles back to include the nature of his proposal in a third charge that indicts his manners, which impress “me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others” (193). Then Darcy places an obstacle of his own in the way of their marrying. He reminds Elizabeth of the indecorous and reprehensible conduct of her family. Darcy had hesitated to propose to Elizabeth because of her family, and he now accuses her of being piqued because “your pride [had] been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design” (192). There is no question but that at Hunsford parsonage Darcy and Elizabeth for the first time understand each other completely and unequivocally.

The first thirty-three chapters have inevitably led to this moment of passionate clarity. The conflicts and organization of these chapters make it necessary for Elizabeth to charge Darcy with bad faith and worse manners and for Darcy to indict the manners of Elizabeth's mother and father and younger sisters. The Meryton ball, which organizes much of the action and conversation until the sixth chapter, introduces two main actions into the novel. It is at the ball that the romance between Bingley and Jane begins and that Elizabeth's first unfortunate encounter with Darcy occurs: he finds her tolerable but not tempting. Chapters 7 through 12 are organized around Jane, ill but in love at Netherfield Park. There Darcy becomes attracted to Elizabeth, who does not like him at all. There Mrs. Bennet visits her daughter and shows herself a matchmaker and an enemy of Darcy. The courtship of Collins runs sporadically through Chapters 13 to 26 (I. 13 to II. 3),¹⁰ which present Bingley's puzzling retreat to London and Wickham's reports of Darcy's injustice to him. Elizabeth becomes increasingly impatient with Darcy because she believes that he has been unfair to Wickham, whom she likes, and because she believes he has forced Bingley to leave Jane. At the same time, Darcy's attraction to Elizabeth grows stronger. Charlotte's invitation brings Elizabeth to Hunsford—Chapters 26 to 38 (II. 3 to 15)—where she sees Darcy once again, and it is at the Collinses' parsonage that they meet in the fashion described above. Quite clearly, Pride and Prejudice builds to that moment of conflict.

Only when the four problems that have been so carefully developed and then explicitly stated at Hunsford are solved can the novel come to an end. The problems are not all solved by the time Elizabeth leaves Lambton, and the dramatic irony implicit in them is not fully released until after that point in the novel. The dramatic and ironic design of the novel is not complete until Darcy comes to Longbourn and proposes to Elizabeth. By the time he does that, both he and she have matured intellectually and emotionally as individuals and are ready for the personal encounter of marriage. It is a great triumph of form that one finds in the second half of Pride and Prejudice, and it is one of the great delights of reading Pride and Prejudice to see how Jane Austen worked out the design of the novel after Chapter 34 (II. 11) in relation to the four problems presented at Hunsford. One might best begin to demonstrate this position by returning to that letter of Darcy's that Mary Lascelles so much objected to.

Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, which she receives the day following his extraordinary proposal, directs itself in detail to two of the accusations she made against him. Because Elizabeth has called into question Darcy's moral character, he does more than ask her attention to his letter: “I demand it,” he writes, “of your justice” (196).

Darcy's letter explains his role in Bingley's leaving Jane, and it explains his obligations toward Wickham as well. Elizabeth learns that Darcy thought that Jane's “look and manners were open, cheerful and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar regard” for Bingley (197); she learns that he did not think he was doing Jane a personal injury by separating Bingley from her. Moreover, Bingley was courting the danger of connecting himself with a family that Darcy taxes with a “total want of propriety” (198); Elizabeth had thought that he objected to her family's lack of connections. Darcy next turns to Wickham's conduct toward himself and Georgiana, and he offers Colonel Fitzwilliam, whom Elizabeth has found likable and charming, as a corroborating witness. So she is faced with what might be a satisfactory answer to two of her objections to Darcy, namely, his treatment of Jane and of Wickham.

Elizabeth must now decide whether her opinions of Darcy's conduct or his assertions of what his conduct has been are true. Assembling the evidence and calling memory to witness, she judges that she has been in error. “Proud and repulsive as were his manners,” Mr. Darcy could not be accused of being “unprincipled or unjust,” “irreligious or immoral” (207).

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!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one [Wickham], and offended by the neglect of the other [Darcy], on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

(208)

The psychomachy is over.¹¹ Elizabeth has done Darcy the justice he had demanded of her.¹²

Though Elizabeth exonerates Darcy's conduct in relation to Jane and Bingley and to Wickham, she cannot excuse the manner of his proposal to her. In justice, also, she is forced to recognize in that the performance of a man made ridiculous by vanity. He was vain enough to think that his social consequence made him personally desirable. Just as vanity drove reason away in Elizabeth's case, so too has it acted in Darcy's: he proposed to Elizabeth, one remembers, against his reason. So the problem of Darcy's manners remains, as does that of the Bennets' conduct. Elizabeth and Darcy can find no satisfactory personal relationship until these two problems are solved.

At Pemberley, Elizabeth's objection to Darcy's manners disappears. When the Gardiners ask their niece if she would like to see Pemberley, the narrator relates that Elizabeth “was obliged to assume a disinclination for seeing it” (240). The party nevertheless enters Darcy's park, and Elizabeth's expectation is delightfully thwarted: “She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awakward taste” (245). Elizabeth had expected to find Darcy's house and park pretentious, like its owner; all that she sees, however, bespeaks nature: at Pemberley the only art is a natural art, and it configures a natural beauty unmarred by artificiality. Withindoors Elizabeth finds “less of splendor, and more real elegance” than she had anticipated (246). She meets a housekeeper “much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding” at Pemberley (246), and from her Elizabeth hears a storybook description of Fitzwilliam Darcy, whom Mrs. Reynolds had seen grow into “the best landlord, and the best master … that ever lived” (249). Elizabeth also recognizes a portrait of Darcy

with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. … [Now] as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before.

(250-251)

Almost surrealistically the words Elizabeth has heard and the colors and lines she has seen take life in the person of Darcy. He greets her with the warm regard the portrait pictured and shows the Gardiners that attentiveness beyond civility his housekeeper had attributed to him. The Darcy of art comes alive, asks an introduction to the Gardiners, invites Mr. Gardiner to fish in his streams, and asks Elizabeth's permission to introduce Georgiana to her on the following day. Darcy's manners, which were artificial and strained in Hertfordshire and Hunsford, are all naturalness at Pemberley. Elizabeth is literally charmed out of her objections to Darcy's manners by his cordial reception of herself and her aunt and uncle, and we see his acceptance of the Gardiners as proleptic of his final acceptance of the Bennet family.

Indeed, the acceptance of the Bennet family is the only obstacle of the four mentioned at Hunsford parsonage that still stands between Darcy and Elizabeth. Before Elizabeth and the Gardiners leave the Derbyshire region that obstacle becomes more formidable because Lydia elopes with Wickham, and Wickham is hardly Darcy's friend. Now for Darcy to make Elizabeth his wife, he will have to make Wickham his brother. Nevertheless, Darcy goes to London and clandestinely arranges the marriage of Lydia and Wickham, and after he learns from Lady Catherine that Elizabeth refused to promise not to marry him if she were asked, he goes to Longbourn, proposes, and is accepted. His going to Longbourn and his entering the Bennet house for the first time show that he accepts the family in spite of its faults; and sitting down to dinner with Mrs. Bennet at his side, Darcy dramatically destroys the last obstacle to his and Elizabeth's love.

This very brief analysis of the plot of Pride and Prejudice shows a structure that is at once dynamic and ordered. Darcy, who could not propose to Elizabeth in the midst of her family, seeks her out when she is a free agent. He and she meet at Hunsford, but his social consciousness and her annoyance mar the encounter. Happily, however, they are able to speak directly and unambiguously to each other. This significant change in their relationship enables Elizabeth to state her three objections to Darcy (he has ruined Jane's relation to Bingley; he has been unjust to Wickham; he is ill-mannered and no true gentleman) and he to state his objection to her (the members of the Bennet family, save Jane and herself, act indecorously and irresponsibly). The dynamics of their confused and ironic relationship in Hertfordshire are given an orderly perspective at Hunsford. Once the truth is clear, meaningful reflection and action become possible.

This meeting at Hunsford, therefore, is the watershed chapter of Pride and Prejudice. At the parsonage Elizabeth gives Darcy a cataclysmic piece of information:

“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.”

(192)

The man gently born and gently reared is told that he is not a gentleman, and this changes his life. Elizabeth's accusation hits so true that it tortures Darcy until he becomes “reasonable enough to allow” its justice (368). In Chapter 35 (II. 12) Darcy offers causes for effects when he explains Bingley's presence in London and the reason for Wickham's lies. Then, in Chapter 36 (II. 13), Elizabeth judges the causes and her attitude changes, because she comes for the first time to know herself. From Chapters 1 to 35 (I. 1 to II. 12) the action of Pride and Prejudice is for the most part founded on appearances, and these appearances give the lie to reality: Darcy's manners give the lie to his moral integrity; Jane's composure, to her feelings of love; Bingley's leaving, to his love and candor; the Bennets' ill manners, to the worth of Jane and Elizabeth. To Chapter 36 (II. 13) Pride and Prejudice is burdened with what Elizabeth calls an “incumbrance of mystery” (227), but from that point on the novel proceeds on truth. The truth that is suddenly revealed at the end of the first half of Pride and Prejudice brings personal realization through self-discovery to Darcy and Elizabeth. The second half, largely unencumbered by mystery, allows them to pursue personal realization through love and marriage. After each learns to know himself, they learn about each other, and seek happiness in the context of marriage and community.

But before there can be marriage in Jane Austen, there must be friendship; and before there can be a fitting social context for a particular marriage, there must be a general acceptance of it on a reasonable basis. Pemberley shows Darcy and Elizabeth developing a friendship that has a clearly reasonable and deeply affective foundation. Wickham's eloping with Lydia tests this new relationship of Darcy and Elizabeth and deepens it through empathy. So too does Lady Catherine de Bourgh's huff-and-puff visit to Elizabeth at Longbourn. Darcy's return with Bingley to the Hertfordshire region confirms his and Elizabeth's love and gives it a new impetus with Jane's acceptance of Bingley. And the recognition of the rightness of the Darcy-Elizabeth engagement by Mr. Bennett and Jane and Bingley is a token of its approval by all in society who are reasonable. I want now to look at these incidents and to show how each of them is an elaboration of one of the four problems stated at Hunsford and to suggest how nicely Jane Austen can turn her variations on principal into dramatic harmonies.

Just as the novel proceeds by dramatization and careful modulation to moments of self-discovery, so too does it move with care and rhythm to Darcy's second proposal and Elizabeth's acceptance. Elizabeth does not simply come to Pemberley, realize what she has denied herself, and set about redressing the error by falling in love with Darcy.¹³ Nor does Darcy simply decide to buy off Elizabeth's objection to him by saving the honor of her sister. By the time Elizabeth comes to Pemberley, both she and Darcy have learned something about each other, and at Pemberley they learn more. Elizabeth first sees a house and park that bespeak the taste of true gentility, then she hears about a true gentleman and sees the portrait of one. At the moment when nature and art have conspired to dispose her to see Darcy in a new way, he appears, and he is a new man. Pemberley turns into dramatic truth the rules for judging a gentleman's worth:

It is only from the less conspicuous scenes of life, the more retired sphere of action, from the artless tenor of domestic conduct, that the real character can, with any certainty, be drawn—these, undisguised, proclaim the man; … the best method, therefore, to avoid the deception in this case is, to lay no stress on outward appearances, which are too often fallacious, but to take the rule of judging from the simple unpolished sentiments of those, whose dependent connexions give them an undeniable certainty—who not only see, but who hourly feel, the good or bad effects of that disposition, to which they are subjected. By this, I mean, that if a man is equally respected, esteemed, and beloved by his tenants, by his dependents and domestics … you may justly conclude, he has that true good nature, that real benevolence, which delights in communicating felicity, and enjoys the satisfaction it diffuses. …¹⁴

At Pemberley, Darcy's house and park provide the more retired sphere of action, Mrs. Reynolds provides the testimony of a domestic, and Elizabeth is on hand to judge from something other than first impressions. Therefore, after Darcy takes his leave of Elizabeth at Lambton, the narrator takes occasion to comment on the course of their relationship:

If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise, if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method, in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill-success might perhaps authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.

(279)

Three months have elapsed since we saw Darcy at Hunsford; nevertheless, Elizabeth has been constantly in view. During this three-month period she has come to understand Darcy's conduct. But by showing such a change in one of her characters, Jane Austen suggests the possibility of the same kind of change in an equally intelligent counterpart. She shows Elizabeth changing, but brings Darcy forward when his change is complete. Elizabeth, whom we have seen doing Darcy the justice he demanded of her, finds that he has done her justice as well. Her visit to Pemberley shows her return to reason to be a reflection of his, for herself as well as for the reader. The reality of the change in both—which resulted from Elizabeth's dealing honestly with his letter and Darcy's dealing honestly with her refusal of him—is now dramatized by Elizabeth's admiration of Darcy's manners, which are impeccable, and by his acceptance of Elizabeth's relatives, who are equally without fault.

Moreover, Jane Austen has not forgotten either Darcy's role in separating Jane and Bingley or Elizabeth's former admiration for Wickham. That mutual love existed between Jane and Bingley we are certain, but Bingley himself was unsure of Jane's affection. Now Darcy can be seen in exactly the same position as Bingley was in then. The Gardiners put the case succinctly: “Of the lady's sensations they remained a little in doubt; but that the gentleman was overflowing with admiration was evident enough” (262). Darcy, who split apart doubting lovers, is now a lover and in doubt about being loved himself. There is more than poetic justice in Darcy's feeling along his pulses the meaning of Elizabeth's strong objection to his interference with Jane and Bingley. Darcy's position moves him from mere understanding to empathy. He feels with Elizabeth her objection to his actions, and those objections in light of his own case now mean a great deal more to him. Darcy's becomes an intelligent heart.

Before Elizabeth leaves the Pemberley region, she too comes to feel the justice of Darcy's strong objections to Wickham, whereas formerly she had understood only their reasonableness. When Lydia elopes with Wickham, Elizabeth and her family are made to experience the same disgrace that threatened Darcy's when Wickham planned to elope with Georgiana. The parallel misfortunes of their sisters suggest the creation of a community of feeling between Darcy and Elizabeth. Experiencing in her own family what Darcy had experienced with Wickham in his, Elizabeth understands Darcy better and soon expresses her affection for him:

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.

(312)

But Elizabeth sees quite clearly that, at this time when they are so drawn to each other through understanding and gratitude and empathy, she and Darcy seem more separated than before by Lydia and Wickham's coming together.

Had Lydia's marriage been concluded on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family, where to every other objection would now be added, an alliance and relationship of the nearest kind with the man whom he so justly scorned.

(311)

Fortunately, however, Darcy likens Elizabeth's sister to his own. The parallel between Lydia and Georgiana becomes complete as Darcy settles with Wickham and saves Lydia from “irremediable infamy” (335). And Elizabeth learns of Darcy's second encounter with Wickham the same way she learned of his first—by letter, this time Mrs. Gardiner's, rather than Darcy's.¹⁵

Darcy's motivation for his acts of kindness is not inconsistent with his character as it is developed in the novel. His sense of justice is clearly presented to Elizabeth in Chapter 35 (II. 12), and the chapters that treat Elizabeth's visit at Pemberley and Lambton make Darcy's love for her unmistakable. His sense of justice and his love for Elizabeth lead him to rescue Lydia, as he afterwards confesses. His acts seem completely consistent. His return to Netherfield Park is consistent too. He took Bingley from Netherfield by mistake; now he returns him by design. Bingley's return and his subsequent visit to Longbourn are salts to the faint hopes of Mrs. Bennet, who, to secure Jane a husband, rouses herself to the good health of robust impoliteness. She succeeds in spite of herself because the eminent good sense and superlative dispositions of Jane and Bingley outrun her train of contrivance. Bingley proposes, Jane accepts, Mr. Bennet approves. Elizabeth celebrates the “happiest, wisest, most reasonable end” (347). She sees every expectation for Jane and Bingley's happiness

to be rationally founded, because they had for basis the excellent understanding, and super-excellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and himself.

(347-348)

These reflections of Elizabeth on the natural and reasonable foundations for the happiness of the new couple are the anti-thesis of Mrs. Bennet's comment to Jane: “I was sure you could not be so beautiful for nothing!” (348). Jane's own reaction terminates in a wish that Elizabeth may enjoy equal happiness, to which the younger sister replies, “Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness” (350). It is interesting to note that Jane's goodness stands here as Elizabeth's model just as her candor did when Elizabeth suffered through her revaluation of Darcy after she read his letter. Jane, who appears so early in the novel and in the important role of beloved sister, has to be attended to before Elizabeth herself can find her place at Darcy's side. Jane represents an ideal that Elizabeth respects and loves so much that her reaction to other people is frequently conditioned by their reaction to Jane. This has been a pattern in Pride and Prejudice. The most serious charge that Elizabeth brought against Darcy was his interference with Jane's happiness. Now that happiness is complete. Darcy not only brought Bingley back but encouraged his proposal as well. It remains for Darcy to marry Elizabeth to lay to rest the last ghost of prejudice that haunts their relationship. But not without the help of his aunt.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh travels to Longbourn to claim a hereditary right to stupidity. Mrs. Bennet's obvious maneuvers are but pallid challenges to the vulgarity of an aunt who arrives with “chaise and four” to secure the marriage of her daughter to her nephew. Lady Catherine comes to Elizabeth in the name of “honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest” (355) to order her not to marry Darcy.

It is highly amusing not only to listen to Lady Catherine argue the reasonableness of her demands but also to hear in turn Elizabeth's logical analysis demonstrate that both the premise under which Lady Catherine made her trip—if Elizabeth refused to marry Darcy, he would marry her daughter—and the arguments used to support that premise are ludicrous. Lady Catherine offends Elizabeth's good sense with rhetorical nonsense:

“I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended on the maternal side, from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancient, though untitled families. Their fortune on both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them? The upstart pretentions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere, in which you have been brought up.”

(356)

There is no mention here of compatibility of mind and disposition, no word about attraction or affection. Lady Catherine, like Mrs. Bennet, does not look upon marriage as a proposition of nature, but as one of stereotyped convention. Both women have daughters to marry: whether there is reason or love in the marriage made is a matter of no importance so long as a marriage takes place. Each recalls to mind a sentence of Dr. Johnson's:

The miseries, indeed, which many ladies suffer under conjugal vexations are to be considered with great pity, because their husbands are often not taken by them as objects of affection, but forced upon them by authority and violence or by persuasion and importunity, equally resistless when urged by those whom they have been accustomed to reverence and obey; and it very seldom appears that those who are thus despotic in the disposal of their children pay any regard to their domestic and personal felicity, or think it so much to be inquired whether they will be happy, as whether they will be rich.¹⁶

Marriage is something other than the ludicrous and tragic yoking of unsuitable partners. Those who would marry, Johnson cautions, should be aware that

marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship; that there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and that he must expect to be wretched who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness, that regard which only virtue and piety can claim.¹⁷

This natural and reasonable basis for marriage, which Johnson delineates to extol, has no place in the system of a Lady Catherine or a Mrs. Bennet, because to them marriage is simply part of a system utterly divorced from nature itself. Lady Catherine does no more than describe the mechanism of the system when she details family, fortune, cradle engagements, connections, and family expectations. She dresses out in the vulgarity of irresponsible obligation what Dr. Johnson described generically as “friendship” based on “virtue and piety.” She is the victim of an error that Johnson elsewhere warned against: a man ought to endeavor “to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right from that which is right because it is established.”¹⁸ To the reasonable person, to one who respects nature, Lady Catherine—who holds that a thing is right only because it is established—can only be unreasonable, and Elizabeth tells her as much:

“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude,” replied Elizabeth, “have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either, would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern—and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.”

(358)

Thus beaten on her own terms, Lady Catherine travels to London to report the insolence of Elizabeth to her nephew before she returns to Rosings. But Lady Catherine again fails because Darcy finds her to be the insolent one. His aunt, in fact, makes Mrs. Bennet a bit easier for Darcy to accept as a mother-in-law.

I have dwelt at some length on Lady Catherine's visit to Longbourn because it shows her utter vulgarity and the depersonalizing pattern of life it represents. Lady Catherine shows the danger of money and position supporting a weak mind. Because Mrs. Bennet is fortunately less wealthy, she is also less a threat to the personal order of value. And Darcy realizes this. He also realizes that when he proposed to Elizabeth at Hunsford, there was something of the de Bourgh in him:

He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.

(189)

When Darcy proposes a second time he takes a different tack because he is a different Darcy:

“The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;—though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”

(367-368)

Darcy is capable of sympathizing with Elizabeth's rejection of his proposal and of her rejection of Lady Catherine's interference in her personal affairs because he himself was once what his aunt still is. Jane Austen again establishes a relation of sympathetic feeling between Darcy and Elizabeth and ironically forces him to realize that the objection he brought against Elizabeth's family at Hunsford applies as forcefully to his own.

The events from Lydia's elopement to Darcy's proposal clearly show that Jane Austen is still working out her novel in relation to the four problems introduced by Darcy's first proposal. Elizabeth accused Darcy of separating Bingley and Jane, of being unjust to Wickham, of acting generally in an ungentlemanly way. Darcy, in turn, indicted her family's lack of sense and decorum. Once stated, the problems are gradually solved. Darcy's letter to Elizabeth exonerates him of his conduct to Jane and Bingley and toward Wickham. At Pemberley Elizabeth sees Darcy's change in manners by his cordial reception of herself and the Gardiners, and his acceptance of her family is hinted at. But Jane Austen does not let go of her problems with these solutions. Each of them must not only be solved by reason but also dissolved in love. Darcy does not merely right the wrongs he was more or less guilty of, but he rights them to fault. Darcy's love of Elizabeth is dramatically revealed by his settling a sum of money on Wickham. The problem of Darcy's doing justice to Wickham is thus reintroduced and irrevocably solved. So, too, his interference in the love of Bingley and Jane is exonerated when he returns Bingley to Longbourn, and Bingley proposes. Lady Catherine's visit to Elizabeth makes Darcy feel how relatively unimportant his objection to the Bennets is, just as Mrs. Bennet's treatment of Darcy, when he visits Longbourn with Bingley, reminds Elizabeth of what there was of justice in Darcy's former objection to her family. At any rate, Darcy's visit shows how resilient to change are the good manners—the gentlemanly conduct—Elizabeth met at Pemberley. Darcy clearly comes to an unimproved Bennet family, but he comes willingly. He comes to pluck a flower among the thorns quite conscious that he is going to be pricked. This is all to his credit and shows that he has come to understand that the slight consequence of Elizabeth's family in no way diminishes her desirability; therefore, he comes to Elizabeth as a man to a woman on the basis of reason and affection. Elizabeth's expression of gratitude for his goodness to Lydia allows Darcy to tell her that “the wish of giving happiness to you” added “force to other inducements which led me on” (366). This conversation almost immediately turns into Darcy's second proposal, which shows him accepting the Bennets and bringing to a happy solution the last of the problems raised at Hunsford. The second half of Pride and Prejudice clearly shows Darcy and Elizabeth, who have already achieved self-knowledge, moving toward marriage on the bases of reason and gratitude, empathy and love.

The rhythm and modulation of the human events that lead Darcy and Elizabeth to the altar suggest that their marriage is an ideal. They achieve that friendship based on confidence and integrity that Johnson extolled in The Rambler, no. 18, as the foundation of true love and happy marriage. It is important in this connection to note how little emphasis is put on the marriage and how much on the courtship. Getting married is not just an end, a standing at the altar; rather, it is a going to the altar. The movement toward marriage in Pride and Prejudice is a ritual of human development. In this novel those who just want to get to the altar, no matter what, are different from those who get there in a distinctly human way. Therefore, the marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth compares favorably with that of the Bingleys and of the Gardiners; but it contrasts sharply with the Collinses' marriage, the Wickhams' marriage, and the Bennets' marriage. Their carefully developed love shows Darcy and Elizabeth to be truly human and completely ready to make of their marriage the meaningful union it can be within the limits of the society Jane Austen creates in her novel.

Marriage itself has a social extension in Jane Austen's novels that one must always expect to appear. Marriage is never a matter of personal recognition of individual worth only, important and indispensable as that is. One can presume that the “promise of the introduction” of any Jane Austen novel takes in the assimilation of the couple into a larger context. Jane Austen sees man, “not as a solitary being completed in himself, but only as completed in society.”¹⁹ Elizabeth by having her marriage accepted by others sees to it that her personal judgment of Darcy effectively replaces the crude judgments of him that temporarily prevail. As soon as Jane and Mr. Bennet understand that Elizabeth loves Darcy and is marrying him because she loves him, not because he is rich, they rejoice in her engagement. Elizabeth's mother, however, knows nothing about love's relation to respect, reason, and affection. Mrs. Bennet is the poor man's Lady Catherine. Marriage is good because every girl needs a husband to support her; it is the custom. Marriage to a rich man, since it implies indescribable wile, shows the greatest respect for custom.

“Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr. Darcy! Who would have thought it! And is it really true? Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane's is nothing to it—nothing at all. I am so pleased—so happy. Such a charming man!—so handsome! so tall!—Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh, Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.”

(378)

One is hard-put to find any one paragraph in all of Jane Austen where so many exclamation marks are used. To Mrs. Bennet, as her speech reveals, Elizabeth's performance of her duty to marry is superior to anything a mother's heart has known. To Mrs. Bennet's thinking, certainly, her daughter has snatched a grace beyond the reach of a mother's art.

At the end of Pride and Prejudice it is clear that Mrs. Bennet is as crass and as stupid as she was at the beginning of the novel. Elizabeth has changed considerably, however. The vain and prejudiced girl has grown into the reasonable and loving woman. It is significant that physical movements correlate with her development. Indeed, Mrs. Bennet's stasis and Elizabeth's dynamism give the novel a total esthetic fitness. It is notable that Mrs. Bennet never leaves Hertfordshire, and for the most part stays in Longbourn. All her world is there. Darcy and Elizabeth first meet in Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth's family alienates Darcy's feelings. At Hunsford, Elizabeth and Darcy meet on more neutral ground. Elizabeth is there as a person to be valued for herself and separated from her family. There Darcy and she come face to face with each others' faults and virtues. Elizabeth is next at Pemberley. At Darcy's Derbyshire estate, she sees him in a new perspective, that of his home. There he is a new man and she a new woman. Lastly, she sees Darcy come to Longbourn, her own home, face her family, and ask her hand. From Hertfordshire, to Hunsford, to Pemberley, to Longbourn: the journey has been for Darcy and Elizabeth as much a journey of the spirit as of the body. The roads of the English countryside have been the way of man between meeting and marriage. By having the principal episodes of Pride and Prejudice occur at significant places, Jane Austen carefully coordinates physical and social events with spiritual experiences. The art of travel in Jane Austen is the art of putting people in the right place at the right time. Fielding and Smollett give way to Jane Austen, who places her people in parks and parsonages and who creates excitement in her novels through the movement of the mind and the affections. Her homo viator is a man on a more spiritual path than the heroes who trod the road in the novels of her dusty and muddy predecessors. Characteristically, then, the total configuration of events in the plot of the novel shows that in Pride and Prejudice the journey from Hertfordshire back to Hertfordshire becomes for Darcy and Elizabeth a movement from pride and prejudice to love.

Now what does it mean to read Pride and Prejudice in this way? It means, I think, that one comes to recognize that the plot of the novel expresses the values of the novel. Pride and Prejudice dramatizes the possibility of an ordered world in which people are frustrated when they cannot see or when they refuse to recognize what is real in the world about them. Conversely, in this ordered world people who see reality and act reasonably in relation to it find fulfillment and happiness.

In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet makes a mistake that she finally rectifies. She misjudges Darcy because her prejudice against him leads her to misunderstand a series of incidents in which they are both involved. But by refusing to marry Darcy the first time he proposes, she does not irrevocably create a destiny for herself. Rather her destiny is created for her by his letter, by their accidental meeting at Pemberley, by her sister Lydia's elopement, by Lady Catherine's visit, and by Darcy's generosity. The mistake of one day does not press upon Elizabeth for the rest of her life because the world Jane Austen creates is benign to the degree that one is reasonable and virtuous. Therefore, the mistake of one day brings Elizabeth directly in the middle of Pride and Prejudice to a realization of her personal faults, to an understanding of her life, and to an awareness of her character in relation to a reasonable norm according to which men are good or bad. By the time the plot of the novel has reached its midpoint, its heroine is realized as a total and integral human being. After this moment of realization Elizabeth has to be patient and suffer not because of herself, but because of others. The consequences of her first rejection of Darcy are temporary and beneficial. The rejection brings both of them to a realization of their true humanity. Just as the realization overpowers Elizabeth's prejudice, it overpowers Darcy's pride. A series of incidents over which Elizabeth has no control reunites them on the bases of understanding, empathy, gratitude, and love. The novel, then, ends not only with the total individual development of each character but also with his total social development, because personal love is satisfied in marriage and harmonized with society. The most divergent elements come to recognize the reasonableness of the marriage and give it their blessing. Darcy and Elizabeth are assumed into their social order and become exemplars of it in their reasonable and loving marriage. Under these circumstances, therefore, if Pride and Prejudice develops four problems and solves them—as I submit it does—it could have ended no sooner than it did.

As a novel that presents a society that has reason for its ideal for action, and marriage as its symbol for personal and societal fulfillment, Pride and Prejudice has a plot that controls the presentation of these values. It is so constructed that the characters confront situations that force to our attention those human values that are held to be most important. Through a complex series of interwoven incidents Elizabeth and Darcy are shown acting irrationally, coming to an awareness of their defection from reasonable conduct, experiencing events that enable them to empathize with each other, strengthening their friendship, falling in love, and marrying.

[The] marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy resolves not only their personal differences but the conflicts they have represented, with the result that the novel provides a final pleasure unique in Jane Austen's fiction, a sense of complete fulfillment analogous to that which marks the end of some musical compositions.²⁰

If this reading of Pride and Prejudice is valid, a radical reassessment of the significance of plot is needed, for the plot emphasizes an ideal pattern of conduct that shows Jane Austen sounding the classic note:

If the poet can portray something superior to contemporary practice, it is not in the way of anticipating some later, and quite different code of behaviour, but by an insight into what the conduct of his own people at his own time might be, at its best.²¹

Only in relation to such an ideal does irony—so much emphasized in recent criticism—make sense, because irony demands such an ideal: “Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical,” writes C. S. Lewis, “there can be no true irony in the work. ‘Total irony'—irony about everything—frustrates itself and becomes insipid.”²² Also, only in relation to such an ideal does money find its place in Jane Austen's created world. Therefore the notion that the form of the novel develops through a vocabulary of mercantile metaphor, which Mark Schorer and Dorothy Van Ghent²³ have proposed, needs rethinking. The plot clearly suggests the true value of money by subjugating it to personal dignity and love in the relationship of Darcy and Elizabeth, and its false value by dramatizing its first importance in the lives of Lady Catherine, Mrs. Bennet, and Charlotte Lucas, none of whom is admirable. In short, in Pride and Prejudice the incidents and design of the plot expose an ideal of human conduct and fulfillment that Jane Austen treats neither ironically nor cynically. Rather, she disposes the incidents of the plot in such a way that they shape meaning, direct irony, control diction, and present themselves as an esthetic fact. Consequently, Jane Austen makes plot more than an arrangement of incidents in Pride and Prejudice: she makes it a mold of values. And from that mold she strikes a novel of classical delicacy and strength.

Notes

1. “I have called Miss Austen's earliest work, Pride and Prejudice, her masterpiece; and though some of her votaries have preferred to it Emma, or, as did the Prince Regent, Mansfield Park, the suffrage of the general reader has always been strong for Pride and Prejudice,” H. W. Garrod, “Jane Austen: A Depreciation” in Discussions of Jane Austen, ed. William Heath (Boston, 1961), p. 35.

2. “Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a ‘subject,’ certainly of a setting, were to need to be super-added,” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York, 1953), p. 42. James substituted the word “action” for the more nefarious “plot.” For the more than nominal difference between “plot” and “action” as the terms achieve concrete realization in novels, see Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Henry James: Action and the Art of Life,” Four Quarters, XV (1966), 18-26, an article which compares The Portrait of a Lady with Pride and Prejudice.

3. Jane Austen and Her Art, p. 163.

4. Ibid., p. 162.

5. The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (3rd ed.), Vol. II: Pride and Prejudice (London, 1959), p. 12. All subsequent page references to this text will appear in parentheses following quotations from it.

6. “An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to Her Absent Daughters,” reprinted in part in Appendix II of Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Successors (Cambridge, 1966), p. 152.

7. Reuben Brower, The Fields of Light (New York, 1962), p. 179.

8. Ibid., p. 180.

9. Ibid.

10. For sake of convenience I have given the chapter numbers from editions of Pride and Prejudice that are numbered consecutively and in parentheses the volume and chapter numbers of the standard three-volume edition.

11. I use the word psychomachy to describe, in relation to Elizabeth, a condition of mind and emotions that was well explained by an anonymous critic for the North British Review, LXXII (April 1870), 129-152. “Again, she contemplates virtues, not as fixed quantities, or as definable qualities, but as continual struggles and conquests, as progressive states of mind, advancing by repulsing their contraries, or losing ground by being overcome. Hence again the individual mind can only be represented by her as a battle-field where contending hosts are marshalled, and where victory inclines now to one side and now to another,” quoted in Lionel Trilling, “Introduction,” Emma (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. xxii.

12. The presence here of a value like justice raises a problem. Dorothy Van Ghent has written that the “general directions of reference taken by Jane Austen's language … are clearly materialistic” (The English Novel: Form and Function [New York, 1961], p. 110). When a rich man sees a marriageable daughter, Mrs. Van Ghent writes, there is “no doubt he will buy, that is to say, ‘fall in love'” (p. 102). “Categories” such as “‘trade,’ ‘arithmetic,’ ‘money,’ ‘material possessions’ … indicate that kind of language Jane Austen inherited from her culture and to which she was confined …” (p. 109). Elsewhere, Mrs. Van Ghent affirms that “the moral life … will be equated with delicacy and integrity of feeling” (p. 103). But it is a logical necessity that one either eat his cake or have it: either one or the other, but not both. If Jane Austen's society allowed her a materialistic vocabulary only, then she could not express non-materialistic values like “delicacy and integrity of feeling” because she had no words to do so. Indeed, if “to fall in love” is no more than “to buy,” one wonders how delicacy of feeling and integrity of moral life can be spoken of at all. There is no such dilemma if one discards the theory of “dead metaphor.” Important and characteristic words like “ashamed,” “think,” “feeling,” “prejudiced,” “despicably,” “prided,” “discernment,” “detained,” “generous,” “vanity,” blameable,” “humiliating,” “just,” “humiliation,” “love” (all words taken from the two paragraphs quoted from p. 208) abound in Pride and Prejudice. These words suggest, as C. S. Lewis has written, that the “great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used” by Jane Austen (“A Note on Jane Austen” in Jane Austen: A Collection, p. 28). And with the nouns there are verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to carry serious moral judgments. To remain alive, a theory of dead metaphor has to discount not only the literal meaning of these words and those like them but also the structure of a plot wherein the human development of the characters depends on a literal reading of the diction.

13. It seems hardly necessary to make such a bland statement of facts; however, Geoffrey Gorer proves that it is. He writes, “Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, does, it is true, marry young Mr. Darcy, but has anybody, even the author, been convinced that she loved him, or that she entertained any feelings warmer than respect or gratitude? Surely her own remark, that she must date her affection ‘from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley’ (ch. 59), represents the psychological truth” (“The Myth in Jane Austen” in Five Approaches to Literary Criticism, ed. Wilbur Scott [New York, 1962], p. 94).

14. Lady Sarah Pennington in Bradbrook, 151ff.

15. This episode of Lydia's elopement with Wickham has not been to the liking of many critics. Brower, Mudrick, and Liddell, for instance, feel a drop in Jane Austen's imaginative power, a loss of irony, and a lack of dramatic coordination in it. There is, however, a structural coordination with the plot, as I have shown in my text. Besides, three other points may be made in reference to irony. First, the episode is ironic in its own way: Wickham, who has been angling throughout the novel, makes the poorest catch in Lydia. Also, Elizabeth now reacts to Wickham in a manner for which she once condemned Darcy for reacting to Wickham. Again, the money Darcy once refused Wickham is now given him. Perhaps the irony is more attenuated than, and functionally different from what, it was previously, but irony nevertheless does function in this episode.

    Another point that I cannot admit is that irony is the norm in the novel. An episode does not really have to be ironic to justify its presence in Pride and Prejudice. But Mudrick seems to argue that it does (Irony, pp. 111-115). In this episode, for instance, he maintains that Elizabeth is inconsistent because she does not react ironically to Lydia's elopement. Lydia, he argues, as a simple character is incapable of free choice; therefore, she is not susceptible to Elizabeth's moral indignation. Besides, Elizabeth's conventional moral reaction is atypical of her. But one need accept neither of these premises when evaluating the elopement. Elizabeth reacts in a straightforward manner to the faults of her mother, her sisters, Lady Catherine, Bingley, and occasionally even of Collins (all simple characters in Mudrick's opinion), and this suggests responsibility on their part and consistency on Elizabeth's when she reacts to Lydia. The “fogbank of bourgeois morality” that Mudrick feels conceals Jane Austen seems rather to be an acceptance on her part of a principle that holds fornication to be wrong. The principle may be conventional, but that does not discredit it. Neither Jane Austen nor Elizabeth needs to invoke irony here to discriminate good from bad. “Critics have seen [irony],” writes Donald J. Greene, “… as the mechanism of a refusal to make moral judgments about the world or to become emotionally involved with it. … This seems to me a fundamentally mistaken line of approach to any supremely great artist like Jane Austen” (“Jane Austen and the Peerage” in Jane Austen: A Collection p. 164).

16. The Rambler, no. 39.

17. The Rambler, no. 18.

18. The Rambler, no. 156.

19. North British Review, LXXII (April 1870), quoted in Trilling, “Introduction,” Emma (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. xxii.

20. A. Walton Litz, Artistic Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 102. In a similar vein, Joseph M. Duffy remarks, “Her vision might almost be reduced to the assertion that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the sublime, the miraculous, and the ever possible human achievement is the love of two people for each other and the proliferation of that love in the family” (“Moral Integrity in Mansfield Park,” ELH, XXIII [1956], 82).

21. T. S. Eliot, “What is a Classic?” reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1961), p. 63.

22. “A Note on Jane Austen” in Jane Austen: A Collection, p. 3. One ought certainly to add to Lewis' remarks those of Alan D. McKillop: “… The social comedy can never be separated from a basic system of moral judgments; the release of free and humorous criticism or irony, as it is now fashionable to call it, is never irresponsible though it may well be lighthearted; as an aspect of the art of the novelist it stands in vital relationship to a plot structure which embodies a social structure.” (Early Masters, p. 96).

23. For Dorothy Van Ghent, see note 12 above. Schorer first proposed the theory of dead metaphor in an essay “Fiction and the ‘Analogical Matrix'” (Kenyon Review, XI [1949], 541-560), in which he discussed Persuasion. More recently, he affirmed the applicability of his theory to Pride and Prejudice: see “Introduction,” Pride and Prejudice (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. xv-xvi.

Works Cited

Litz, A. Walton. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

McKillop, Alan Dugald. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956.

Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952.