Jane Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins Page B

door--or her doubt--her dread--perhaps her despair?--and of what she had to tell ?--with such knowledge it was impossible to be calm. . . . The bustle in the vestibule as she passed along an inner lobby, assured her that they were already in the house. She rushed forward towards the drawing-room--she
    entered it--and saw only Willoughby."
    The dramatic surprise of this entry is sustained by the unexpected but convincing fashion in which Willoughby explains his conduct, though he cannot explain it away. His account of what led him to appear a scoundrel is not one of the arresting psychological studies, such as are furnished by the comic or satirical episodes; but it is perhaps, with the conversation of the second chapter, the soundest, most searching
    - 83 -
    analysis of motive in the book. There are portions of the novel which one imagines may be the fruit of revision; when, for instance, Elinor disclosed to Marianne that Edward had for two years been entangled in an engagement with Lucy Steele, Marianne considered Lucy "so totally unamiable, so absolutely incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she could not be persuaded at first to believe, and
    afterwards to pardon, any former affection of Edward for her. She would not even admit it to have been natural; and Elinor left her to be convinced that it was so, by that which only could convince her, a better knowledge of mankind." One does not know whether that last sentence was written by Jane Austen at twenty-two or Jane Austen at thirty-six; but the conduct of Willoughby is so integral a part of the story that it must have been conceived, with all its understanding of a weak, vicious yet fascinating character, at the time of the story's origin. The episode of Marianne and Willoughby is indeed
    condemned from its outset; it brings out the worst characteristics in each, and Marianne at least recovers from it as if from some painful disease; yet it is a thing of beauty, and it sounds a note Jane Austen never repeated, when Willoughby says to Elinor in asking her to tell Marianne of his confession: "You tell me she has forgiven me already. Let me be able to fancy that a better knowledge of my heart, and of my present feelings, will draw from her a more spontaneous, more natural, more gentle, less dignified forgiveness."
    Even in this early work, Jane Austen's achievement suffers great injustice from an attempt to discuss it in parts, to illustrate it by detached quotations; for her very first novel shows a capacity for construction, and for making all her characters act upon each other amazing in a writer who was so young that one would have expected the book to be a

    - 84 -
    series of passages, brilliant in themselves but not making each one an indispensable contribution to the whole. Art lies in concealing art, and it is true that the framework of Sense and Sensibility is obvious; that, in a sense, is why it is so remarkable; beneath the enthusiastic delight in creating character, the conscious preoccupation with some favorite ideas about conduct and common sense, the light and shade of romantic passion, and the itch that besets us all, to make a personal comment upon the trends and fashions of the day, is the instinctive, faultless sense of balance, the intellectual attack upon form, which matured into that unique quality of hers, the power to impose a shape upon her material without sacrificing anything to probability.

    - 85 -

7
    JANE AUSTEN'S existence was apparently without incident; the
    answer to such a comment lies in six works of art, and one cannot avoid the question of how much actual experience of character and scene she incorporated into her novels in recognizable form. Of trivial details there are not many, but there are some; perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some knowledge of her daily life enables one to guess, here and there, with some degree of
    confidence, that she is at least modelling her creation on experience, especially, one believes,