Engliterarium

The range of Jane Austen’s characters is rather narrow. She selects her characters from among the landed gentry in the countryside. Sir Walter Scott very accurately describes this range:

Jane Austen confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society … and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard.

She omits the servants and the labourers. They appear wherever they are needed but they are usually not heard. Aristocracy also is hardly touched and if taken, it is only to satirize. Lady Catherine in “Pride and Prejudice” is arrogant, pretentious, stupid and vulgar. Austen finds herself at home only with the country gentry and their usual domestic interests.

In spite of such a limited range, Austen never repeats her characters. Lord David Cecil says:

In her six books, she ever repeats a single character … There is all the difference in the world between the vulgarity of Mrs. Bennet and the vulgarity of Mrs. Jennings.

Though these characters are so highly individualized, yet they have a touch of universality. Thus Marianne becomes the representative of all romantic lovers while Wickham represents all pleasant-looking but selfish and unprincipled flirts.

Austen usually presents her characters dramatically through their conversation, actions and letters. Darcy and Wickham, Lydia and Caroline are much revealed through their actions, while Collins and Lydia are revealed through their letters. A direct comment is sometimes added. The mean understanding of Mrs. Bennet and the sarcastic humour of Mr. Bennet have already been revealed in their dialogues before the direct comment of the novelist. Similarly before she tells us about Mr. Collins, we have already become aware from his letter that he is not a sensible man.

Though Jane Austen does not conceive her characters in pairs yet her characters are revealed through comparison and contrast with others. Lady Catherine and Mrs. Bennet balance each other in their vulgarity and match-making drills. Wickham serves a contrast to Darcy while Bingley is a foil to him. Elizabeth’s is compared and contrasted with Jane and Caroline Bingley.

Austen builds character through piling an infinite succession of minute details about them. In “Pride and Prejudice”, the Elizabeth-Darcy relationship is traced through minute details, details which look trivial and insignificant in the first instance but whose significance is realized only after reading the novel. Sir Walter Scott makes a fine comment:

Austen is a great realist in art. Her characters are creatures of flesh and blood, pulsating with vitality. She studies her characters kindly but objectively. Regarding their appearance, she treats them quite generally, fixing them with a few bold strokes. She is constant in providing details about their outlook, attitude, manner and accomplishments. Lord Cecil says:

Her lucid knife-edged mind was always at work penetrating beneath such impressions to disown their cause, discover the principles … that go to make up his individuality.

Austen’s characters are neither embodiment of virtue nor pure villains but real human beings both pleasant and disgusting. Elizabeth is perceptive but her perception is sullied by her initial prejudices. In contrast Wickham has so much charm that it is rather difficult to detest him. Austen often mingles knavishness with folly making villainous characters a source of rich comedy.

Jane Austen’s minor figures are flat. They do not grow and are fully developed when we first meet them. As the action progresses our first impressions of them get confirmed. Mrs. Bennet seems to be stupefied and vulgar right from the first scene. Her appearance at the Netherfield Park or her reaction to Lydia’s elopement confirms her stupidity and vulgarity. This is true of almost all of her minor figures.

But her major characters are ever changing, ever growing. Usually self-deceived in initial stages, they are capable of understanding, growth and maturity. They are complex, dynamic and intricate. Her heroines, blinded by ego, vanity or over-confidence, commit gross errors and suffer bitter reverses. But by virtue of their insight they are gradually disillusioned and, thus, grow.

Minor or major all characters created by Jane Austen may be described as round inasmuch as they are all three-dimensional. E. M. Forster brings out this point quite admirably:

All her characters are round or capable of rotundity … They have all their proper places and fill other several stations with great credit … All of them are organically related to their environment and to each other.

Dull characters are made interesting. An eminent critic, describing Jane as a prose Shakespeare remarks:

What, in other hands, would be flat, insipid … becomes at her bidding, a sprightly versatile, never-flagging chapter of realities.

Thus touched by the magic wand of Jane Austen’s art, even the fool and bore of real life became amusing figures. The pompous stupidity of Mrs. Collins and the absurdity and vulgarity of Mrs. Bennet should in real life, prove as irritating to us as to Elizabeth and Darcy. But even these characters become such a rich source of mirth and entertainment.

Still there are a few characters that do not look enough life-like or relevant. Mary Bennet fails to impress, nor is she even vital to the story. Jane Fairfax in “Emma” is shadowy. Margaret is “Sense and Sensibility” never comes to life. But these minor failures do not detract much from her reputation as one of the greatest delineators of characters.

Irony is the very soul of Jane Austen’s novels and “Pride and Prejudice” is steeped in irony of theme, situation, character and narration. Irony is the contrast between appearance and reality.

tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

“Let Wickham be your man. He is pleasant fellow and would jilt you creditable …”

Jane Austen is not a proclaimed moralist. Unlike Fielding, her aim is not to propagate the morality. She believes in art for the sake of art. She is the pioneer of the novels. Therefore, her plots are well-knit. Her main interest lies in irony and there is a hidden significance of morality as we come across her moral vision in her novels through irony.

... tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me.

How despicable have I acted! I, who have pride myself on my discernment! – I who have valued myself on my abilities.

There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us already that we are to be the happiest couple in the world.

My reasons for marriage are, I think it right thing for every clergy (like me) in easy circumstances to set the example of matrimony in parish …

I am not romantic, you know, I never was. I ask only for a comfortable home.

… my good opinion once lost is lost forever

He walked here and he walked there, fancying so very great.

... tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me.

…Darcy was exactly the man, who in disposition and talents; would suit for her.

She is the most forthright moralist in English.

Wel koude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe
That no drope ne fille upon hir brest.

 “Amor Vincit Omnia” i.e. “Love conquers everything”.

An outridere, that lovede venerie,

A love knot in the gretter end there was

For thogh a wydwe hadde noght a sho,
So plesaunt was his In principio
Yet wolde he have a ferthyng, er he wente;

Of his visage children were aferd.

The yonge girles of the diocise,
And knew hir conseil, and was al hir reed.

He hadde a croys of latoun, ful of stones,
And in a glas he hadde pigges bones.

A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a povre persoun of a toun;

A bettre preest I trowe that nowher noon ys;

A clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde longe ygo.

Truth sometimes means reality, while reality is usually not beautiful at all. Reality can be disappointing or cruel or ugly. By choosing beauty to believe in as the total truth, we can surpass the ugly part of reality the same way we surpass the fear of death by believing in God. From here, we can even understand the poet's eagerness to make the living as happy as possible in stanza 3, by repeating 6 times "happy". He is rather decided to see beauty, which is connected with happiness and away from sorrow. He has made up his mind to choose beauty as his only truth at that time (or even earlier). It is why he uses the urn's tone to make his statement, as if the urn, a steady and still ancient thing, is saying that "why do not you believe in me? This is all you need to know on earth."

If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense--it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker's meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is "for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit" and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity--when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burning forehead," and a "parching tongue." His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the "little town") and a destination (the "green altar"). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say--once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth eternity." If human life is a succession of "hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.