INTRODUCTION
My delight in Pride and Prejudice is so manifold that I
hardly know how to begin telling it, but I am tempted
first to try with my wonder at the constantly
increasing faine of the author. Yet her fame seems the
least thing in our love of her, our joy in her subtle
and beautiful and ever adequate art. It is the dignity
and sweetness and brightness of her nature which take
us most, and our affection grows in honor of her as we
think over the modest facts of her gentle life, which
can be told in twenty lines, but never can be told
often enough in their full significance.
Unless daily sacrifice this side of martyrdom is a
fault there is nothing to blame n the story of Jane
Austen's life. Our other idols, literary idols, need
veils in their temples where we like them to hide
certain traits from us while we worship them, or at
best receive from us a piety mixed with our pity; we
cannot help knowing they were poor things, though
divine. If our human frailties, our vices, our foibles,
have a consecration in them it does not keep us from
being ashamed, or at best, sorry for them. But this
altogether admirable woman, good as she was great, we
could offer praise without such reserve, when we joined
last year in her apotheosis a century after her death.
The defects of her qualities are as few as may be in
our mortal conditioning, and they have the charm which
she knew how to impart to the faults of her most
endearing creations. But to talk of her so seems an
offence against the restrained art which knew no
excess, and it is like rather noisily boasting of the
perfectly ascertained love'iness of characters like
Anne Elliott, Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, Catherine
Morland, and above all Elizabeth Bennet, which each in
its sort derived from the character of Jane Austen; for
whether she knew it or not she always drew from
herself, and gave the creatures she loved the
loveliness of her own soul.
vi	INTRODUCTION
It seems impossible that she who is still so freshly
young and whose fame now fills the world anew was born
a hundred and forty years ago. Her father was rector of
the livings of Steventon and Dean, which adjoined each
other in the County of Hampshire, and it was at
Steventon that she came into the world, the fifth of a
good many brothers and sisters. There she grew up
through a very glad girlhood in a life rounded to its
close by the limits of pleasant countrysides in Hants
and Kent, and such now shrunken social capitals as Bath
and Southampton and Winchester, with a few liberations
of days and weeks to London for the pictures and
fashions of that faded day. Life in that faded day was
less provincial in provincial towns than now, and Jane
Austen enjoyed it to the limit of her happy
temperament. Against the background of their gayeties
and the simpler pleasures of the country, and the joys
of a family rich in the dreamings and doings of those
many brothers and sisters, with herself first in their
incentives, she painted her own portrait in the novels
she wrote for twenty years and the letters she was
always writing to the end. But in her own time, her
star shone so dimly in the literary firmament, that
only here and there a telescopic eye distinguished it
from the nebulous host and such meteoric lustres as are
always winking about the heavens of every time. The
greatest and kindest of her contemporaries knew her
excellence, and Scott's generous praise confessed her
gift finer than his own; but criticism grew slowly to
the sense of it. Now, indeed, her public is of a
consciousness so intensively pervasive that it seems as
if the literary world of her day were filled with her
alone, as if she had been really sole in it; but that
is a very mistaken idea. She was not alone even in her
sort and this renders her work not less but more
precious. If she was Shakespearean she was like
Shakespeare in being first among her peers, or if peers
is saying too much for them, then first among her kind,
as he (to whom she has been too largely likened) was
among his kind. Nobody begins of himself, and as
Shakespeare, who was of his time and of such
contemporaries as Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, Greene,
Beaumont and Fletcher, began from many forgotten
dramatists,
INTRODUCTION	vii
Jane Austen was of such contemporaries as Maria
Edgeworth, Frances Burney, Miss Ferrier, Richardson,
Mrs. Opie, and began of such masters no longer
remembered.
Her own past and her present mirror themselves in the
glancing facets of her work, and her art was beyond
that of all the other writers of English fiction, with
a clear light which has steadily glowed for a hundred
years. Her style has the rare distinction of absolute
prose, which at times has the anxiety of literary
decorum and is stiffened by the formality of the
eighteenth century ideals, but is often of the
simplicity of the best talk, and always of the
naturalness which still freshly charms. It is never of
poetic quality, it is the elect speech of life
expressing itself without pretending to emotions not
felt, but finding human nature sufficient for its
highest effects. Her prose is never of rhythmical
movement; she kept her dancing for the balls she loved;
and her joy in human nature seldom went beyond it to
the nature outside of it. Now and then, but seldom and
very sparingly, she brings outdoors into her page; she
mentions a shrubbery or a plantation, or a very dirty
road; there is no parade of mountains or clouds, of
forests or meadows; even when she has a party of her
people go "exploring," she makes no dramatic use of the
scenery, and Box Hill does not share in the evolution
of character; at the furthest, as with the woods of
Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, she permits herself a
restrained topographical statement. There is convincing
proof that she is no poet in the few lines which have
survived from her very indifferent rhyming, and her
favorite poet was George Crabbe, who would have cast
his fidelity to life in prose if he could, and confided
it to verse because he must. Her admiration for his
admirable tales in verse did not stop short of a
deliciously playful pretence of passion for the poet
himself, whom she avowed her purpose of marrying,
without asking whether he had a wife or not already.
Playfulness was the note of her most delightful nature,
and in her perpetual irony it gives that prime quality
of her talent a charm which satire never has. We have
only to call it satire in order to feel its difference
from all other irony, and to find in it a sort of
protesting pity, a sort of latent will-
viii	IN PRODUCTION
ingness that the reader shall come to the rescue
against it. To be sure, almost every character in her
fiction is more or less a fool, as every one is in
life, and if there is not a tacit allowance from the
author that she shares the universal folly with the
reader, there is a sort of flattering concession that
they form together something like the only exceptions
to the rule. If he will consent to share the folly
constantly bathed in the shimmer of that electrical
irony, he cannot refuse her delight in the company of
the fools who people her page and seldom fail of some
appeal in their moments of sense or even nonsense.
There are only a few stark-foolish fools, like first of
all Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Mrs.
Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Norris in Mansfield
Park, John Thorp and General Tilney in North-anger
Abbey, Sir Walter Elliott and Mrs. Tom Musgrove in
Persuasion, John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility,
Mrs. Elton in Emma, and a few besides, are beyond
compassion because they are unkind and not because they
are foolish. Even Mrs. Bennet has a redeeming
pitiableness, even Mr. Collins entreats our tolerance
because he is a sheer donkey and born so. Otherwise the
fools are lost to mercy because they are not only
foolish but cruel, and selfish and stupid and brutal
and mean and vulgar. You cannot wish to save them from
their folly, you can only desire them more and more
abandoned to it. The worst of them are snobs, and snobs
are fools for whom there is no redemption. These stand
prominently out, and unjustly characterize the company
of the pitiable and even lovable fools whom the reader
ought to have it on his conscience to distinguish from
them. He ought to remember the kindliness of Mr.
Woodhouse and his thoughtfulness of others, the
good-will of Miss Bates in Emma, the blandness of Lady
Bertran's selfishness in Mansfield Park, the romantic
wish to love as well as to be loved of Marianne
Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, the long endeavor of
Lady Russell in Persuasion to atone for an act of
disastrous meddling, and the suffering of Anne Elliott
for yielding to her influence, the girlish
pure-heartedness of Catherine Morland in Northanger
Abbey, and others whom my memory fails of. They are
wholly or partly foolish, but they are not voluntarily
INTRODUCTION	ix
molestive or entirely ridiculous; they are of that
succession of simpletons who abound in Jane Austen's
fiction rather more than others' fiction because she
could not help seeing them in her world, where still
they did not abound more than elsewhere. She had the
fatal gift of observation, which is possibly the rarest
gift of all, and where once a foible showed under her
eye she could not help noting it to her reader; it did
not matter that she loved and honored the character
where she found it. In Pride and Prejudice the divine
Elizabeth herself, whom she values beyond any of her
creations, has moments of being quite a fool, and Darcy
himself, high-minded and pure-minded, generous and
magnanimous, as he was, and worthy of such a girl as
Elizabeth was at her best, is in certain junctures a
preposterous and all but impossible ass, a
self-satisfied meddler and cruelly insensible to the
suffering he unselfishly inflicts from respectable
motives. Probably they were both quite what their
author meant them to be, for she did nothing
ignorantly, though for what they were she seems to have
thought Elizabeth, much as she loved and admired her,
more a fool than Darcy, whom she had too much sense
herself to love or admire nearly as much. Perhaps she
did not really love or admire him at all, though upon
asking one of her most devoted readers I found that
among even the wisest young people he was held in an
impassioned awe.
Jane Austen was not the most satirical of English
novelists; Thackeray perhaps was, and in his several
disguises was always trying for the reader's
recognition in that quality; but she was so entirely
the most ironical, that she might be said to have
invented (if any one ever invents anything) that
attitude. Her irony indeed broke into satire, into
bitter sarcasm, toward the cruel and hopeless fools of
her story; but for the others it was caressing to open
fondness. They became her joke; a joke that they would
have entered into themselves, if that could have been;
and her tender amusement at their absurdity may well
have come from the life of ingrowing family affection
which she led among the brothers and sisters, and
progressively nephews and nieces, in the home beloved
of her beyond all the other world. It is known how
x	INTRODUCTION
she lived her whole life among them, how she wrote her
wonderfully studied literature and evolved the
masterpieces of her beautiful art in the midst of them,
and yet always knew how to isolate herself in the
gayety which must have teased her so to share it.
The home of the Austens, whether in town or country,
was a kingdom of the mind, independent when they would
of all the other world, but part of it also when they
would in the high and harmless things beyond which
great capitals have nothing to offer. They were
distinctly and in the best sense gentle, tending in the
fondness of later times to gentility, but actually
without that taint of conscious superiority which is
the most perilous infection of gentle-folk. In this
kingdom the second of the two sisters was
unquestionably sovereign; her thought was always at
work, always at play, and that of the others,
especially of her older sister, was always at work and
at play with her. Indefinitely early she began to write
little stories so constantly among the rest that it
might almost be said in cooperation with them; and she
made little dramas, comedy tending to farce, which they
acted together. At last, when her twenty years were
ripe, she wrote a novel which her father thought so
good that he offered it, with her proud but somewhat
timorous consent, to the most respectable publisher he
could think of; but, though he assured the publisher of
this fact, Mr. Cadell, with the sometime fatuity of his
trade, promptly declined it. Without losing the first
post he returned the manuscript, and it was not until
seven years later that Pride and Prejudice was given to
the world by another house. In the meantime Sense and
Sensibility, "By a Lady," had appeared, and when Pride
and Prejudice followed from whatever obscurer press, it
consulted the diffidence of the writer by masking as
the work of "the Author of Sense and Sensibility."
It is not my wish to follow the succession of the other
books, of Northanger Abbey, of Emma, of Persuasion, of
Mansfield Park, because for one thing I am not sure of
it, and for another because I am impatient to talk of
the best of them, as I think Pride and Prejudice. There
I am sure the author would be in agreement with me; but
then I should not per-
INTRODUCTION
fectly agree with her about the hero and heroine.
Elizabeth Bennet one may entirely love, while one may
share her own misgivings as to her wisdom and, taste at
times, though one grows in regard for her good heart
and in respect for her sound mind, not steadily but
finally. One shares the author's con-. viction that she
is the most adorable character in her fiction; she will
not say in all fiction, but the reader need not share
her scruple, and may well challenge other readers to
name him any heroine equal to her. When I came to read
Pride and Prejudice the tenth or fifteenth time at the
close of 1917 for the purposes of this Introduction, I
found it as fresh as when I read it first in 1889,
after long shying off from it. I found it as fresh as
at any earlier reading, but I had never realized before
the open simplicity of the design, and the young
artlessness of its art; so young that every now and
then the artist lapsed to the artizan, and frankly
operated a scheme which hesitated to operate itself.
The quality of the different persons is disclosed from
the beginning; the chief personages make no secret of
their characteristics, and at their first encounter the
history of their love might have been as fitly named
Arrogance and Impertinence as Pride and Prejudice. But
arrogance was not the keynote of Darcy's character, and
impertinence was only the effect of semi-humorous
resentment in Elizabeth; if they are both merely nasty
at the first they quickly intimate their real natures,
and in the retrospect one begins very soon to guess
what they really are. Darcy indeed changes radically
from his primary mistakenness, but Elizabeth without
ceasing to be impertinent becomes more and more witty
in the irony which delights from her to the happy close
of their often tumultuous story. Her very fault, if gay
pertness is a fault in a pretty girl who is also good,
is part of her charm, and is immediately useful in
helping the author to keep the whole story within the
play of her characteristic irony. This sounds the
depths as well as lights the surfaces of the drama,
which it never allows to become utter tragedy, though
it involves the effect of the passions which conduce to
tragedy.
Though so many of us know the story, I might safely
tell it again in outline without dulling the interest
of those
INTRODUCTION
readers whom I am supposed to be making acquainted with
it. But I will not take this shabby chance; I will do
nothing worse than deal with the points of the story as
they have presented themselves in my own latest reading
of it, 'without trying to give the shape or sequence of
a review to my essay. Every scene is full of character
if not of incident, and the charm of Elizabeth is full
of her sweetness and archness as well as her pertness.
Every page of what is so distinctively a "novel of
manners" testifies to the fidelity and veracity of the
author's observation. The snobbishness of the local
society whether in its ruder or finer vulgarity, has
earlier recognition in Bingley's sister, who is
instinctively jealous of Elizabeth from merely seeing
her with Darcy, though their acquaintance begins in
mutual repulsion. She sits beside Darcy while he
writes, and comments on the symmetry and rapidity of
his penmanship, for in that period of social formality
he writes in the presence of the family with no more
consciousness of being in it than a person takes up a
book and begins to read, as often happens in the
fiction if not the fact of the time. It happens in
almost every novel, but I do not remember any other
case of a gentleman lying down on a sofa in the
drawing-room and going to sleep, outside of Pride and
Prejudice; though I am sure the thing may have commonly
happened, or Jane Austen would not have had Bingley's
brother-in-law do it. People talked with a stilted
formality and conversation moved with a high literary
gait much beyond the imagination of our easy-going day.
But even then it does not seem probable that two girls
talked together like Elizabeth and her friend Charlotte
Lucas, or that Charlotte should express her low views
of matrimony so deliberately as she does. This is for
the instruction of the reader, as the burlesque
priggishness of Elizabeth's sister Mary is too openly
for his diversion.
As for the colloquial or rhetorical languaging of the
dialogue throughout, I have noticed in my latest
reading of the book that the style is natural when the
matter in hand requires the expression of no grand
emotion, but that then the author mounts her high
horse, and advances at the stately pace which the
imitators of the great Doctor Johnson had
INTRODUCTION	xiii
set. She ceases to be Jane Austen, demure, ironical,
natural, and becomes Fanny Burney after Fanny Burney
has learned her lesson in the process of becoming
Madame d'Arblay. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped;
fortunately the impassioned moments, the didactic
moments, in Pride and Prejudice are few, as they are in
Jane Austen's other stories, where they tend to become
constantly fewer. We must always remember that "P. and
P." as she likes playfully to call it in the letters to
her sister Cassandra, was her first book, which she
wonderfully wrote in her twentieth year, and that she
was then willingly, almost eagerly, subordinate to the
literary mastery of the period in the intensive
expression of the first-class emotions. People had then
forgotten that passion, or impassioned conviction,
expressed itself in poetic but almost never rhetorical
terms, and authors with the rare gift of either seeing
or hearing their fellow-beings, had not yet learned to
report their looks or words as they really saw or heard
them. Things went on from bad to worse throughout the
long Georgian era, till late in the Victorian time,
when fiction had escaped the instruction of the
prepotent lexicographer (he never spoke as he wrote
himself, however) and let its heroes and heroines utter
their most intensive feelings as simply as they had
felt. Jane Austen perhaps never unlearned the mistaken
lesson which she had learned so painfully as well as
with so much pains. But I think that in each successive
novel her people employ the high horse less and less in
their great emotions and keep the levels of life afoot,
the levels which she loved beyond any other when she
could consent to be herself or let them be themselves.
I venture to think that the playful family spirit may
have forgotten itself in the office of criticism, which
again I fancy it must often have exercised upon the
fiction so mostly created in the family midst with the
family privity. But very possibly I am wrong, though I
hate to own it, for I should like to believe that the
faults of Jane Austen were always somebody else's
faults.
The procession of fools in their delightful variety
moves from the start of the story, and the types of
vulgarity distinguish themselves from one another, with
a loudness in
xiv	INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth's aunt Mrs. Phillips which is scarcely even
surpassed by that of her sister Lydia, though it
attests itself supremely only in that moment when she
flings up her window and shouts her hospitable
good-will to the militia officers and their attendant
young ladies in the street. Fool for fool it is hard to
choose between Elizabeth's mother who appears in the
earliest scene and her cousin Mr. Collins who comes on
soon after the rise of the curtain and recurs again and
again on the scene almost to the fall of the curtain.
An author who was so faithful to nature could not in
mere virtue of her youth be less loyal to convention
than have a villain begin his machinations at the
outset, but it must be owned that Wickham is very
artistically handled, and that this admirably managed
scoundrel is eclipsed only by the superior fascination
of a fool so incomparable as Mr. Collins, whom nobody
who ever knew him can have forgotten, any more than he
forgot himself; if he has a blemish it is the ideal
perfection of his folly, it is his so unfailingly
acting in character. I cannot remember any passages of
fiction more richly ridiculous than the rise and
progress of his passion for Elizabeth springing
instantly from his knowledge of her sister's probable
engagement, and then instantly turning from her
rejection of him to the comfort of her friend Charlotte
Lucas's readily responsive affection. The whole thing
is unsurpassed if not unparalleled comedy; there is no
passage descriptive or expressive of him which fails
the reader's just expectation in his spoken or written
word. One abandons oneself to a supreme delight in his
love-making, his self-appreciation as a clergyman, his
veneration for his noble patroness Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, and his deference of all his clerical
obligations to his duty to her; it is hard to determine
whether he is more characteristic as host or guest or
in what point he shines most; but if I must choose I
think (though I am not sure) that I enjoy him most
when, after Lydia's escapade, he writes to condole with
her family and after dwelling upon all the calamitous
aspects of the affair, and congratulating himself that
Elizabeth's opportune rejection of him saved him any
share in their sorrow and disgrace, he advises Lydia's
father to "console himself
INTRODUCTION	xv
as much as possible, to throw off his unworthy child
from his affection forever, and leave her to reap the
fruits of her own heinous offence." His counsel to
Elizabeth not to accept Darcy because it must be so
distasteful to his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who
has designed him for her daughter, is not wanting, and
is supported by the fact that her ladyship has
personally assured him that she will never give her
consent to the match. "I thought it my duty to give the
speediest intelligence of this to my cousin that she
and her noble admirer may be aware of what they are
about, and not run hastily into a marriage which has
not been properly sanctioned." At the same time he
declares his joy that "Lydia's sad business has been so
well hushed up," but censures her father for receiving
her and her husband after they have been married. " It
was an encouragement to vice; and had I been rector of
Longbourn I should very strenuously have opposed it.
You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but
never to admit them in your sight, or allow them to be
mentioned in your hearing."
Whatever the reader may think of the morality of this I
am sure he will agree with me that if her family had
refused to see Lydia and her husband when she came home
to them married after living with him a fortnight
unmarried, we should have missed some of the most
characteristic traits of her remarkable nature. There
is something absolute in her selfish recklessness, her
reckless pursuit of her own pleasure without the least
regard not only to others but even to herself. She is
no fool, at least not as the other fools are; after her
one object in getting a husband at any cost is achieved
she behaves with unprincipled devotion to the sole
motive of her life: to get everything for herself
without the least regret for the ways and means. She
has a passion for Wickham, but simply because he
contributes to her comfort and enables her to realize
her quite childish ideal of worldly importance as a
married woman. Otherwise she would not have cared to be
married to him; she would have gone on living with him,
molested by no regret for herself or thought of others.
She is a perfectly probable wonder of india-rubbery
unmorality which does not seem abnormal and doubt-
xvi	INTRODUCTION
less is not. If she could be ascertained scientifically
she would clarify one of the darkest problems of social
psychology.
Wickham is equally without a flaw in his make-up, and,
as a ruthless and reckless liar through his whole life,
as a predatory scoundrel in every motive and every
action, formed to win the trust of all who meet him and
then to betray it on the first occasion without remorse
for any ruin that follows, he is not the monster of
iniquity which he appears in this statement, but is
quite as normally abnormal as Lydia herself, and is
surprising in nothing so much as the perfection of his
fitness for her companionship. It must be a question
with the witness of their lives which will get the
better or the worse of the other in the career which is
perfectly studied at the outset in all its suggestions
of quite self-satisfied evil.
The mind which could imagine his badness and not overdo
his nature in its boundless potentialities of mischief
divines the fascination he certainly has for Elizabeth
Bennet from their earliest meeting up to the time when
she reluctantly yields to the proofs given her of his
worthlessness, of his native proclivity to falsehood
and his unvarying practice of deceit. But she is only
one of those who fall a prey to his frank and winning
powers of deceiving and betraying. He invites her to
the danger of trusting her romantic prejudice against
the man who has vexed her by seeming indifferent to her
wit, to her steadfast self-respect, to her beauty and
to her resentment of his high-principled but not very
well reasoned pride which she takes for mere arrogance
and insolence. She is so simple-hearted for all her
irony, that she has no doubt of his good faith when he
begins with her by telling her of his injured past and
accusing the man whose whole family he has cruelly
betrayed in every circumstance of their love and trust,
and made their future kindness impossible. Yet
Elizabeth is not in love with Wickham, as we duly
learn, though she remains deceived by him until she
tries to do herself the greatest possible harm with the
man whom she has always, from the hour of her primal
repulsion, been drawn to by those elemental forces
which result in love and in spite of the centrifugal
chances result in the happy marriages of fiction, if
not quite so in-
INTRODUCTION	xvii
variably of fact. It must be owned that the author does
everything that can be done to make Darcy as acceptable
to the reader as he becomes to Elizabeth, after she has
succeeded in making all her friends believe she hates
if not despises him. She accumulates every virtue upon
him; there is not a noble or magnanimous action which
she does not make him do, and one can well believe that
the family circle of those Austens who assisted at his
rehabilitation long before it was made public did not
share the imaginable severity of her struggles, in
rendering him lovable to the reader. It must have been
a Titanic struggle with her to render him meek and
modest and forgiving, an eater of humble pie in
quantity unknown among heroes, and quite unexampled in
the lives of the English gentry. He not only comes to
the rescue of the loathsome Lydia, but he yields to the
rapacity of Wickham in letting him fix the conditions
of marrying her, when she is quite willing to remain
his mistress, and, so far as we are told, he never
tries to beat him down. The author makes him the
scapegoat of the situation; she accumulates on him not
the sins but the virtues of his tribe; then she drives
him not into the wilderness but into paradise. The
miracle is in time for Elizabeth, but it is too late
for the reader. So it seems to me, but again when I
sub-• mitted the case to a younger reader, I was told
that I was wrong; that Darcy is perfectly adorable and
always was,. and that if Elizabeth had not been
perverted by Wickham and infected with an all but fatal
prejudice she would have known it from the start.
Perhaps the elderly reader is not given time to recover
from the effect of Darcy's arrogant offer of his love
to Elizabeth, his acknowledgment of his contempt for
her family, his vaunting confession that he broke off
the affair between her sister and Bingley, and did
whatever else he could do to outrage her self-respect
and wound her feelings, before he begins to show
himself in a better light; to bring himself by a tour
de force to buy off Wickham from Lydia's willing
dishonor; to feel the goodness and essential refinement
of Elizabeth's uncle, who, although he is in trade, is
willing to pay Lydia's ransom from his narrow means and
at the cost of his own family; to receive him and his
xviii	INTRODUCTION
wife when they happen with Elizabeth at his country
seat; to bring his sister to call upon her, and try to
make them all his guests; to show her every proof of
his regret short of words for his past conduct; to
throw off his disguise of pride, and reveal himself in
his true character of a gentleman by nature as well as
birth, kind, considerate, and even meek at every point
where you would have him so. All this is supposed to
happen, but life is short, especially for elderly
readers, and the art of the author is long in bringing
her ends about; she brings them about by very rough
magic at times. The surrender of Darcy is effected by
main force when he first offers himself, and the
struggle is not so hard to have him renew his suit. By
that time Elizabeth had worked round to him "when he
had become unattainable" and they had reached their
common conclusion that they had each. thrown a pearl
away. Still the affair is obviously operated, and if it
had not been for Lydia's elopement and the disgrace
which Darcy was obliged to share with Elizabeth, I
could not accept the conclusion as inevitable. It is to
be allowed that they talk reasonably about the event
which shocks everybody but Lydia and Wickham, and it is
to be realized that no love affair was ever treated in
its minor aspects with so much open good sense.
We cannot refuse any means to the end; we can even
rejoice in them with the lovers, for how otherwise
could we have had that immortal scene with Lady
Catherine de Bourgh when she comes to browbeat
Elizabeth at the rumor of her engagement to Darcy, and
to bid her forbear all thoughts of it, with outrage
which scarcely passes that of his first offer to her?
It is a scene which in her ladyship's defeat gives the
utmost comfort to the younger reader and compensates
the suffering sage for all his doubts. If it is not
true to fact it is true to life, and it is triumphantly
true to Elizabeth and her inborn ability upon occasion
to rout Lady Catherine and every like of her. Better
yet it clothes her with final authority to make peace
between Darcy and his aunt and to urge his forgiveness
when marriage has put her in possession of the field.
It is the supreme histrionic scene of the story, but
there is another scene more consoI.-
INTRODUCTION	xix
ing to the experienced reader for the sacrifice he is
obliged to make in allowing the author to effect the
accepted conclusion. Without their engagement and
imminent marriage, how could it be that "Elizabeth's
spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted
Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love
with her. 'How could you begin?' said she. 'I can
comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once
made a beginning, but what could set you off in the
first place? . . . My beauty you had early withstood;
and as for my manners, my behavior to you was always at
least bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to
you without rather wishing to give you pain than not.
Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?
. . . You may as well call it impertinence at once. . .
. In spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself
your feelings were always noble and just. . . . There,
I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it; and
really, all things considered, I begin to think it
perfectly reasonable. To be sure you knew no actual
good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in
love.'"
The rapture of true lovers when they are newly
betrothed and they seek each other out in the earliest
and least stirring of it in their hearts, is of
universal experience, but the wonder is not so much
that it here seems recognized for the first time in the
history of the passion, as that fiction seems never to
have recurred to it. But perhaps it has recurred often
and often, and it is only the superlative charm of it
in this passage that wins us from other knowledge of
it. It is the very heart of Elizabeth Bennet which
opens itself in the lively episode, that is to say the
heart of Jane Austen, who is almost one with her, and
was always writing herself into her, in her irony, her
playfulness, her final dignity of heart and mind. The
denouement is so unhurried that the reader has as much
time as he wants for his pleasure in her character
after her rejection of Mr. Collins to Charlotte Lucas's
precipitate acceptance of him, but he does not at once
reconcile himself to Elizabeth's visiting her friend in
fulfillment of a rash promise and an obligation of the
author's to bring about her second meeting with Darcy,
with his offer
xx	INTRODUCTION
to her and her enlightenment with regard to Wickham,
and all the events that roughly contribute to smooth
the course of their true love. Her language is never
more unnaturally rhetorical than when she rejects
Darcy, or her behavior more truly natural than when she
breaks down and cries as soon as he leaves her. Without
this rather forced series of events we should never
have had Lady Catherine de Bourgh, so increasingly
precious to the end, with her ideal of herself as a
great lady empowered to meddle with everybody's affairs
and her goodness to her tenants whom, when she found
them hungry and unhappy, she "scolded into harmony and
plenty." Elizabeth's self-analysis is always good, and
it is a just tribute to her character as she reveals it
when Darcy tells her of Wickham's attempted elopement
with his innocent young sister when he wishes to make
her understand perfectly how mistaken she has been. It
is the greatest sacrifice of himself that he can offer,
and is far beyond his gentlemanly instinct in bringing
the young girl to call upon Elizabeth after their
accidental meeting at Pemberley. That is something he
owes to himself as a gentleman, but the other is
something he owes to her. I can scarcely think of any
point where she fails in her claim on our affection,
our respect, though she is often mistaken and sometimes
absurd. It is no wonder that the author loves her, and
cannot think of her but as the finest creature in that
world of imagination where she mostly had her own
being. There are little incidents which are related to
her through her kindly charm, as when the children of
her Uncle Gardiner wait for her on the stair when she
first comes to his house, and her gratitude to him and
her aunt for not being as vulgar as Darcy thinks all
her kindred is pathetic. Not everything is so simply
contrived, but the things that must be inevitably gain
worth at her hands from their necessity, like her
telling Darcy of Lydia's elopement, and again her
owning her knowledge of his goodness in paying Wickham
the price of saving her family from the shame that
Lydia would never feel.
The goodness of her own nature comes out in all she
says and does to her beloved sister Jane, whose
goodness shows the dearer in the flickering irony which
Elizabeth cannot
INTRODUCTION	xxi
spare her. That most lovable creature always reached a
merciful conclusion in any question through her angelic
reasonableness; the greatest difficulty she seems ever
to have had, after being persuaded to think ill of
Darcy by Elizabeth, was learning from her to think well
enough of him to believe in her love for him. To be
sure, she had undergone much in being taught to believe
Wickham a villain; and the changes were almost too
great for her constant nature. The affection of these
sisters is one of the sweetest things in all fiction,
and the art, the truth, of the author in always
guarding the soul of Jane from insipidity is
miraculous. She is allowed to think and say all the
good of everybody without lapsing into fatuous optimism
or doubting the keener wisdom of Elizabeth, who loves
her even beyond their father. He is always Elizabeth's
great friend, her good comrade, whose sarcasm saves her
from the silliness of her mother and flatters her with
a not too great sense of her equality with himself, but
whose foibles she recognizes in the terrible hour when
she has to confess the truth of Darcy's cruel
arraignment of her family for its vulgarity. It is
pathetic to have him own that he has not been all a
father should to his varied girls, that he owed
something more than he has done even for Lydia, and has
not at least tried to keep her from being a worse fool
than her mother. We never have enough of him; he is not
staled by our foreknowledge of how he will take
anything about to happen, but is as freshly delightful
at the last when he calls Elizabeth to him to know what
right Darcy has to ask for her hand, and to confess
that he has already granted it, Darcy being the sort of
man he would not think of denying anything he asks.
Lydia being married and Jane engaged, and Elizabeth
given away, it is with her own joy in him that we hear
him charge her to send him any other young men who may
be wanting to marry Kitty or Mary, for now he is quite
at leisure to see them. We really cannot get enough of
his saying that of all his sons-in-law Wickham is his
favorite or not want him to keep on saying it always.
Of the younger daughters who remain to him the pedantic
Mary is too gross and mere a caricature, such as we do
not
xxii	INTRODUCTION
remember the author otherwise indulging herself in.
Mary must remain what she is, but the hope of the
petulant Kitty's becoming less silly under the
influence of Jane and Elizabeth does not seem
unreasonable. There is no such hope for her mother, but
we would not have Mrs. Bennet less perfect a fool than
she is to the last. What is most wonderful in her is
the perennial youthfulness of her folly. She is never
any older than the youngest of her daughters, but it is
to be owned for her rapture in Lydia's marriage that it
is not greater than in that of Jane and of Elizabeth,
though in her mounting satisfaction with their
successively mounting wealth and station she tries not
to distinguish among them. I am not quite sure that I
like her being somewhat quelled by Darcy; but it is
inevitable, and it is to be considered that she remains
equal to her affectionate and familiar delight in
Bingley and Jane; and I think it to Bingley's credit
that he does not and could not do anything to snub her
overwhelming fondness. This, if there were no other
proof of his goodness, would be quite enough. Jane is
equal to the even greater task of loving his unkind
sisters, though I doubt if Elizabeth ever admitted Miss
Bingley's overtures to her friendship after she was
married to Darcy. I think there must always have been
some flashes of her irony to light up the forgiveness
of the friend who meant him for herself, and tried for
him through every discouragement.
We must take leave of the whole company of comedians
who have been kept from that bleakness of tragedy which
is not very common off the stage, though the dramatists
would like us to think differently, and are so often
asking us to share their tears for it. There is trouble
enough in real life, but it is mostly annulled by the
use of common sense and patience and kindness even by
people who have tried to do themselves mischief.
Perhaps something like the oversoul helps the good
ending and leaves us quite comfortable if not perfectly
contented. We might have wished Wickham punished to the
limit of his deserts, but we can manage with the quiet
scorn Elizabeth makes him feel when she spares him, and
it is her sufficient condemnation of Lydia to have her
say that "Lydia is Lydia still."
INTRODUCTION
In her letters the author frankly avowed her doting
fondness for Elizabeth, whom with her usual ironical
reserves she thought the most adorable creature in the
world, and she tenderly preferred Pride and Prejudice
to her other books. She meant once to call it First
Impressions but she must have always been glad that she
called it Pride and Prejudice because that was a far
fitter name, and because in her letters to her sister
Cassendra she could talk of it, with affectionate
mocking, as "P. and P." I take leave to take leave of
it as "P. and P.," and I shall like my readers the
better if they will thus initialize it in their
associations with it. 1 do not believe that Jane Austen
would resent the familiarity if she were still alive,
as indeed she is, apparently more and more as the years
grow into the centuries. I wish we were all worthier
her tolerance, but it is my hopeful remembrance of her
kindness to others that it is never apportioned among
the deserving alone but is bestowed on many as little
deserving as ourselves, both in and out of her books.
Wiurtem DEAN Howmas.
January. 1918.