of wits
should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and
the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come
in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The
plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps,
than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes
gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_. It is even rather artfully
worked out--the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to
superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part
_twice_ in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient
description and scenery--the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff
prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc.
But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind
of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply
wonderful, especially in the women--though the men lack nothing. John
Thorpe has been glanced at--there had been nothing like him before, save
in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists.
General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but
only by people who do not know what "harbitrary gents" fathers of
families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but
military men, could be in the eighteenth century--and perhaps a little
later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's _jeunes
premiers_, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a
great deal of subdued individuality, and it _had_ to be subdued, because
it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James
Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than "walking
gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law.
But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer
to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and
Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the
eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she
chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she
could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps--as she ought to
be--the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the
new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:
and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary