Sense and Sensibility is the
story of sisterly contrast. The Austen mark is pleasantly conspicuous in the fact that the two sisters contrasted in this
novel are both virtuous and affectionate women; they differ only in the degree in which they permit judgment to control feeling.
The conduct of the novel is careful and successful, though far from blameless. Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, expecting offers of marriage from two
young men, are forsaken by their lovers without declaration or explanation in the first half of the book.
Elinor Dashwood learns that Edward Ferrars, who has made tacit love to her, is bound by an early and secret engagement to a young woman of inferior breeding called Lucy Steele. The secret is divulged; the young man is promptly disinherited by his vindictive and grasping mother; and he prepares by marrying the girl to try how far the fulfilment of duty can console its victim for a blighted love and a vanished income. John Willoughby Leaves Marianne Dashwood without making the offer to which his whole behavior has served as prelude and promise. Marianne follows him to London. Another suitor has been provided for Marianne in the person of an amiable and melancholy Colonel, twice her age and the object, at his first introduction, of her untiring and unsparing raillery.
The two stories, as the outline shows, are essentially distinct; they are bound together after a fashion, however, by the intimacy of the two sisters who scarcely leave each other's sides.
I pass to an estimate of the characters. Elinor Dashwood is the personification of
good sense and right feeling, and the instructress by precept and example of her impetuous and incautious mother and sister. Elinor, moreover, has strong affections and even keen sensibilities, though, like captive princesses, the most they can do is to flutter a signal or drop a rose through the gratings of the tower in which her judgment has confined them. Possibly another help is her practical helplessness in many cases. Her temper is less rigid than her ideal, or what we may venture to call her own version of her temper. She seems, at first sight, a bureau, an official headquarters, to which all questions are automatically referred for instant and final adjudication. But, however rigid, her judgment, her conduct abounds in compliances. Marianne is not quite so good as her vocation. She is imagined strongly, but thinly and brokenly as it were. She suffers from that glaze of formality which in Miss Austen's work overlays the really formal and the really informal characters alike.
Edward Ferrars is placed in direct contrast to Willoughby. Willoughby is gloss without substance; Edward is substance without gloss. The difficulty with Edward is that the absence of plumage is so much more demonstrable than the presence of marrow. Edward has the ill luck to be compelled always to carry a shyness which needs no nursing into situations which supply it with the most liberal encouragement. He is inactive and largely invisible; his chief aim is to conceal his mind from the friends to whom he has been obliged to expose his person.
Colonel Brandon is the last of the three men in the story to whom the office of lover and suitor is committed. He is hampered in this function by an accumulation of years which exposes him to the contempt of romantic young women of eighteen. Colonel Brandon is thirty-five, and the touch of rheumatism is felt in Colonel Brandon's gait throughout the story. He is a very good, indeed a very eacient, man, if the only sound test, the test of deeds, be a applied to his character, but we feel always that he is bandaged. He is the most recurrent, yet the most unobtrusive, of characters, and the reader starts at the perception of his arrival as he might at the discovery of the nearness of some quiet person who had entered the room on tiptoe. Even at the very end of the tale he can hardly be said to have laid aside his muffler; we knowhe facts, but we do not know the man. It is natural that he should be drawn to Marianne rather than to Elinor, between whom and himself is the obvious bond and the impalpable barrier of a precise conformity of tastes and principles. It is not so easy to understand his final conquest of Marianne even with the aid of a proviso that Marianne accepts him in the first instance on the unromantic basis of grateful friendship and esteem. To return to the handling of the story,the volume of the two plots is small, the incessant meetings and partings, the fuss and bustle, which mark the London section of the novel will be puzzled to relate this superAux of exertion to this shortage of Accomplishment. The truth is that Miss Austen's main end is the exhibition of life and character for their own sake, and her specialty is the excellent way in which she brings out the normal social occasion. The multiplying of these occasions without too rigid a scrutiny of their actual contribution to the outcome has resulted in a feebler story and a better novel.