MISS AUSTEN AND CONSERVATISM. [To TEE EDITOR OF TEE "
SPECTATOR."] SIR,—The interesting article on Miss Austen (Spectator, February 15th) truly says that she and her characters "were content with things as they found them." To speak roughly, the standard of worthy people seemed to her the " be-all " and the " end-all " of moral obligation. Nor was she troubled with doubts about the absolute stability of the British Con- stitution. This is the more remarkable as her mature life was subsequent to the French Revolution. She had no fear that the democratic epidemic might cross the Channel. She probably thought that the wholesale beheadings in Paris were due, if not to a reaction against the iron rule of Popery, at least to "the blind hysterics of the Celt." It must be remembered that she did not outlive the superficial calm which preceded our first Reform Bill. Nor would the wisest of her personae have guessed that the revolutionary deluge might end by giving fertility to the political soil. Lake used to say that Dr. Arnold was the first to impress the upper classes with the hope that the frightful catastrophe might have been overruled for good. Even my religious and philanthropic father would have denied that there could be any such overruling unless as a warning that concessions to democrats will only, as he quaintly phrased it, make them " start a new hare "; he would not have parodied Lucretius by saying, " Tantum ceditio potuit suadere bonorum." He was convinced that "democracy will be the ruin of this country," and he refused to fill up gaps in the avenue of giant oaks at Helmingham, fearing that., before the young trees ceased to be an eyesore, " property will be made hay of." Talking of Helmingham, I may add that what Lamb would have called that unsteam-tainted village (seven miles from a railway station) used to bear, and, I am told, still bears, traces of Austenian simplicity. It was there that an old game- keeper, going for the first time to the seaside and mistaking distant sailing boats for trees, was surprised that land was visible " across the sea." Also, having fallen asleep on the beach between low-water and high-water mark, he afterwards said to his master, "The sea came after me and made me wet, so I runned and I runned till I got right high up where the water couldn't catch me."
H. D. Trail! used to speak of Collins as the only character much overdrawn by Miss Austen. I should have thought that Lady Catherine de Burgh was also a caricature ; while Darcy is, as it were, a jumble of opposites. His occasional rudeness is hard to reconcile with his habitual courtesy and with what the novelist might have called his " elegance "—a word which is now out of fashion, but for which neither " good breeding," " grace," nor "refinement" is an equivalent. Such a character as Lady Catherine, in her relation to social inferiors, can hardly be portrayed without exaggeration, as may be inferred frora the similar overdrawing of Lady Cumnor by Mrs. Gaskell. Lady Catherine is no doubt a more extreme specimen of that obsolete or obsolescent type; but an interval of fifty-two years elapsed behicen the publication of "Pride and Prejudice" and that of "Wives and Daughters "; and in that interval the advance of democracy had blunted the edge of high-born insolence. On the whole, you seem to me a little hard on Mrs. Collins and her father for submitting to Lady Catherine's patronage. A like submission (expert° crede) was often practised in my youth. This may seem odd; but one fact will serve to explain it. The explanation will be thought cynical; but is not cynicism, oftener than we think, the alloy of truth Let it then be remembered that Lady Catherine was probably, at least by proxy, a dispenser of patronage. If so she would be sedulously courted by seekers of such patronage, and its flattered and flattering recipients would regard her as a sort of watch-dog in excelsis, whose bark, a terror to evildoers, might bode well to those who had learnt how to take it. Dat nummus honoree, Nummus amicitias:
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