Walks in Sense and Sensibility

Rice University
Change and Fixity in "Sense and Sensibility"

Author(s): Rodney S. Edgecombe
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth
Century (Summer, 2001), pp. 605-622
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1556285
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SEL 41,3 (Summer 2001) 605
ISSN 0039-3657
Change and Fixity in Sense and

Sensibility
RODNEY S. EDGECOMBE
In his introduction to Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner notes

Marianne Dashwood's relish for the language of the early Ro-
mantic poets, "a language of solitude rather than society," and
remarks that Jane Austen, too, had a special affinity with these
writers. ' In that small detail, perhaps, lies part of the novel's com-
plexity-its mandate of having, if not to kill the thing it loves,
then at least to mute it with compromise and social adjustment.
A "language of solitude" is defacto a personal discourse to which
the reader gains access as a privileged eavesdropper, and style
indirect libre, that supposed invention of the nineteenth-century
novel, was already implicit in the discursive verse of sensibility,
as witness the way, in William Cowper's Retirement, it opens a
window on a different consciousness from the speaker's:
Ye groves (the statesman at his desk exclaims,

Sick of a thousand disappointed aims,)
Beneath your shades your grey possessor hide,
Receive me languishing for that repose
The servant of the public never knows.2
Here the servant of the public has his solitude compromised by

silent public witness, as we see the dishabille of his inward
Rodney S. Edgecombe, Associate Professor of English at the University of

Cape Town, obtained his M.A. with Distinction at Rhodes and his Ph.D. at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also won the Members' English Prize
for 1978/79. He has published 9 books on authors ranging from the seven-
teenth century to the present and 143 articles on a wide range of topics
including musicology, into which discipline he has recently begun to ven-
ture.
606 Sense and Sensibility
thoughts and the discrepancy it reveals between the public and

private selves.
Just such a window opens in Sense and Sensibility, when,
taking her leave of Norland, Marianne recites a chorographic prose
poem in honor of the place. Its authorially neutral presentation
makes the tone rather difficult to gauge, though Austen has sup-
plied a clue to her position in the sentence that introduces it.
Because all three Dashwoods-the mother and both the daugh-
ters-experience grief at the severance, she clearly endorses such
strong attachments. Elinor, after all, her ideal mediatrix of sense
and sensibility ("my Elinor [emphasis mine] " she once called her)
weeps a contribution to those "many tears."3 Even so, the ques-
tion remains: is Marianne being affectionately mocked or is the
prose-ode a relatively straight utterance? The signals would seem
to be mixed:
Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieux to

a place so much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland!" said
Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on
the last evening of their being there; "when shall I cease
to regret you? when learn to feel at home elsewhere? 0
happy house! Could you know what I suffer in now view-
ing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view
you no more! and you, ye well-known trees! but you will
continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are re-
moved, nor any branch become motionless although we
can observe you no longer! No; you will continue the same;
unconscious of the pleasure or regret you occasion, and
insensible of any change in those who walk under your
shade! But who will remain to enjoy you?"4
Let us start with a detail potentially unorthodox and therefore

potentially risible: the fact that Marianne is taking a solitary
evening walk and that she wanders through the landscape on
impulse. On the one hand, Austen admitted to a "preference for
Men & Women" that inclined her "to attend more to the company
than the sight," and, on the other hand, she took frequent imagi-
native strolls with Cowper through his Bedfordshire landscapes.5
No wonder, therefore, that the attitude, as so often in Austen, is
hard to pin down. Taking Dr. Samuel Johnson and Cowper (as
the external correlatives, apparently, of sense and sensibility),
Angus Wilson remarks that her reading is "so hedged round by
Rodney S. Edgecombe 607
ironies and jests in her references that it is often difficult to know

exactly what were the final moral influences upon her even of her
'dear Doctor Johnson' or of Cowper."6 Even so, while the "exact"
extent of those influences defies our measurement, there can be
no doubting their compound nature, a negotiation of "both/and"
rather than "either/or." A. Walton Litz, indeed, has characterized
Austen's early attitude to the Picturesque as "enthusiastic par-
ticipation tempered by a sense of the absurdities in the vocabu-
lary of transport," a characterization that applies, mutatis
mutandis, to the passage in hand.7 For a start, the topos of the
solitary wanderer occurs in the poetry of sensibility and indeed
in Augustan verse as well-work that Austen almost certainly
admired. Lady Winchilsea's "Nocturnal Reverie" comes to mind,
with its owl that "directs the Wand'rer right," 8 and so does Tho-
mas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which like-
wise associates the owl with a wanderer. No hint of impropriety
here, with such distinguished (and moderate) precedents for soli-
tary night thoughts.
If Marianne's later walks at Cleveland do receive a faintly sa-
tirical treatment, it is not because she seeks out the nocturnal
sublime, but because she cultivates it at the expense of prudence-
and even then the judgment hinges on the issue of degree. After
all, even the poets of sensibility contemplate the effects of rain
from a distance, as when, in the "Ode to Evening," William Collins
takes refuge in a hut. William Gilpin, the apostle of the Pictur-
esque, likewise admits that while rain might have some aesthetic
properties, it impairs others still more central: "Even the rain
gave a gloomy grandeur to many of the scenes, by throwing a veil
of obscurity over the removed banks of the river ... Yet still it hid
greater beauties; and we could not help regretting the loss of
those broad lights."9 Marianne thus has honorable precedents
for her decision to stay indoors, a decision "sensible" in both the
archaic and modern acceptations of the word: "she had depended
on a twilight walk to the Grecian temple, and perhaps over all the
grounds, and an evening merely cold or damp would not have
deterred her from it; but a heavy and settled rain even she could
not fancy dry or pleasant weather for walking" (p. 181). The wan-
dering motif of the Norland address is also present here as a
velleity to roam "over all the grounds," and there is even perhaps
a hint of admiration for the resoluteness that would set cold and
damp at naught. In Pride and Prejudice, after all, Elizabeth's com-
parable walk to Netherfield receives implicit endorsement from
Caroline Bingley's dispraise.
Even so, Austen does imply a reservation about Marianne's

excessiveness by setting up a spectrum of behavior and locating
her at an italicized extreme ("even she"), the point at which it
shades off into absurdity. This she develops a short while later:
'Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of
her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shrubbery,
but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts
of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the
rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the long-
est and wettest, had-assisted by the still greater imprudence of
sitting in her wet shoes and stockings-given Marianne a cold so
violent" (p. 182). As before, we have gradations of imprudence,
though it would be wrong to assume that Austen necessarily
embraces dry gravel above long, wet grass. One senses that a
properly moderated imprudence (viz., changing wet shoes) would
have received her condonation, if not her approval. Dry gravel is
more properly the walking medium of John Dashwood and his
wife. And, the faint mockery of exorbitance notwithstanding ("long-
est and wettest"), there can be no doubting that Austen has passed
beyond the Augustan functionalism advanced in James
Bramston's "Man of Taste," which mocks the improver's exalta-
tion of taste above utility ("slopes shall ascend where once a green-
house stood, / And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood").'0 The
"oldest" trees are always the most arresting, arresting by virtue
of their size, and they were so long before the Picturesque found
beauty in their gnarled torsion and doddered state. Marianne's
decision to seek them out is perfectly logical, therefore.
Which brings us back, via old trees (and, for all we know, the
very walnuts that will soon fall for John Dashwood's greenhouse),
to Marianne's "ode." Not only is the time and mode of her reflec-
tion supported rather than mocked by the traditions of eighteenth-
century poetry, but so too is the intense regionalism signified by
her vocative, "Dear, dear Norland." By setting an epizeuxis (rap-
ture secured through repetition) against a prosaic place name,
Austen might at first seem to be trenching on parody, but this
kind of heightening also has respectable (as opposed to risible)
precedents. Consider, for example, such regionalist cries as Oliver
Goldsmith's in The Deserted Village: "Sweet Auburn, loveliest vil-
lage of the plain.""II The chorographic poems of the eighteenth cen-
tury are nothing if not vividly attached to the places they hymn,
and any sense of exile is likely to issue in elegiac postures such as
those of Marianne's address. Norland is Marianne's childhood home,
and her departure as much a farewell to childhood as to a place.
To that extent, the passage recalls another topographic poem

of the eighteenth century, Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of
Eton College," where the landscape's continuity through time
brings with it an apparent abolition of time, and so a conver-
gence of temporal and spatial prospects-'To breathe a second
spring."'2 The poet furthermore addresses Windsor Castle with
archaic second-person pronouns and sets up an apparent collo-
quy between the buildings that witness to the past and himself,
who has participated in that past. This is precisely the effect of
Marianne's vocatives, "O happy house" and "Ye well-known trees,"
but, at that point, the novel and the poem diverge, since Gray is
conscious above all of the mutability of human affairs and of the
gulf that separates him from the current generation of Etonians.
Marianne, on the other hand, projects a landscape of impervious
fixtures. It is here (I think) that Austen's tone begins to wobble,
and an element of mockery supervenes upon an otherwise gen-
erous record of her character's sensibility. Marianne's ostensible
purpose is to project the sublime indifference of the natural cycle
to human affairs, but her way of expressing it falls short of that
end. She confronts us with a tableau of improbable fixity, as if
the realization of the deciduous cycle depended on human ob-
servers (a passage that almost certainly is intended to recall the
Berkeleyan crux of the tree that falls unnoticed in the forest);
and, if Austen intends this to parody the habits of Picturesque
thought, then, as Jill Heydt has pointed out apropos of Pride and
Prejudice, she targets those habits in their most debased form-
a mindless, reflexive version of the aesthetic "where its practice
is not an aid, but an impediment, to lively, fresh observation."'3
And just such "fresh observation," according to Uvedale Price,
figured among the aims of a movement that sought to give "play
to the mind, loosening those iron bonds, with which astonish-
ment chains up its faculties."'4
By contrast, Marianne wishes to reverse the magical flores-
cence of pastoral hyperbole familiar from Alexander Pope's "Sum-
mer" ('Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade"'5), to revoke
the proto-Romantic animism of Gray's "Bard," where oaks threat-
eningly wave "their hundred arms,"'16 to overturn the fanciful-
ness of George Lyttelton's monody on the death of his first wife
("To the Memory of the Same Lady"), where groves are depicted
not only as having seen but also as having heard the lamented
wife, being instinct with the eyes and ears of wood nymphs: "Oft
would the Dryads of these woods rejoice / To hear her heavenly
voice."'17 All these conventions, which posit a nature responsive
to human joy or grief, Marianne throws to the wind, stressing

instead the idea that the trees will not mournfully wither in the
absence of those who properly appreciated them. This sober and
commonsensical assumption founders, however, on the ambigu-
ity of her syntax, which also implies that, without sympathetic
observation, the trees will remain perpetually unchanged-rather
like the marble foliage on John Keats's Grecian Urn, which this
passage curiously pre-echoes. Unconsciously, by Freudian para-
praxis, Marianne has betrayed a weakness in her vision of na-
ture, which she conceives as a series of tableaux vivants rather
than as a changing complex of forces. Because she is not there to
see them (she unconsciously implies) the leaves will not decay-
eternized at the moment of parting by the sentimental fixative of
memory.
One thinks in this regard of some telling couplets by Thomas
Tickell:
Vain care of parts, if impotent of soul,

Th' industrious workman fails to warm the whole!
Each theft betrays the marble whence it came,
And a cold statue stiffens in the frame.'8
Marianne's sensibility, both here and elsewhere, is very much a

fragmented care of parts, a marmorealizing (as much as a memo-
rializing) of process and change. It extends even into her concep-
tion of human conduct, where she hypostatizes emotions (as in
the eighteenth-century theory of the ruling passion) and has them
stand in for the fluctuating reality of human sentience. To that
extent, I would part company with John Halperin when he brack-
ets the epistemology of Northanger Abbey with that of Sense and
Sensibility: "Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and
Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey also get into trouble be-
cause they find themselves at the mercy of a romantic imagina-
tion, a way of perceiving things that is a function of fancy rather
than discriminating judgement."'9 As a general statement, this
holds water, but the kinds of imaginative misprision are very dif-
ferent. Marianne does not misread Willoughby's behavior in the
way that Catherine misreads General Tilney's (his subsequent
explanation to Elinor makes it plain that he was infatuated with
her); but she goes astray in committing to the present moment at
the expense of context (a formal engagement), in failing to take
cognizance of larger, encompassing motives.
This weakness, indeed, is apparent throughout the novel.

Marianne even comes close to treating her sister like the trees of
Norland, addressing her with the same impassioned epizeuNis
and assuming the same kind of natural indifference (on her part)
to the soarings and plummetings of passion: "Happy, happy Elinor,
you cannot have an idea of what I suffer" (p. 109). Equally imma-
ture is her sense that Colonel Brandon, at thirty-five, has fallen
from a zenith of feeling into vacancy-"and she was reasonable
enough to allow that a man of five-and-thirty might well have
outlived all acuteness of feeling and every exquisite power of feel-
ing"-where the irony of "reasonable" receives additional honing
from the unreasonable, exclusionary cast of her language ("all,"
"every") (p. 109). The perspective that Elinor brings to bear on
Edward's infatuation with Lucy Steele differs from her sister's in
being based on a dynamic conception of human nature: "As for
Lucy Steele, she considered her so totally unamiable, so abso-
lutely incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she [Mariannel
could not be persuaded at first to believe, and afterwards to par-
don, any former affection of Edward for her. She would not even
admit it to have been natural; and Elinor left her to be convinced
that it was so by that which only could convince her, a better
knowledge of mankind" (p. 155). Marianne's unreal inflexibility,
given to such intemperate adverbs as "totally" and "absolutely,"
leads Elinor to talk of bewitchment, a state fantastical rather
than real, and to drive this home with a mock incantation (three
times intoned) of the donnees of human nature: "And after all,
Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and
constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness
depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant-it
is not fit-it is not possible that it should be so" (p. 156).
For this tendency to immobilize, for this habit of thinking in
tableaux, Marianne's cult of the Picturesque is partly to blame,
since, in its popular form at least, that aesthetic is nothing if not
the collation of freeze frames, freeze frames that the viewer privi-
leges above such instances of dynamic evolution as the move-
ment of a river, or the change of seasons: "Every view on a river,
thus circumstanced, is composed of four grand parts; the area,
which is the river itself, the two side-screens, which are the op-
posite banks, and mark the perspective, and the front-screen,
which points out the winding of the river."20 To circumstance a
view is, as the verb's etymology implies, to flank it in, to stand
things around it. Marianne's way of imagining the trees' continu-
ity in her absence owes a great deal to Gilpin, a kind of imagina-
tion that is deficient because it is wrong. Nature's indifference to

human enterprise (the just assumption of such landscape poems
as Windsor-Forest) becomes confused in her mind with the idea
of a merely decorative immobility. Marianne's "You will continue
the same" blurs into "You will continue in sameness."
Although Isobel Armstrong has claimed that the Picturesque
was concerned "with the temporal process, with the effects of
change and decay," that is to give an altogether dynamic cast to a
theory concerned, above all, in William Galperin's words, with
reorganizing the landscape "according to certain aesthetic
desiderata," or, in other words, a formulary checklist.21 Ruin, for
Gilpin, is not the sublime indicator of the passage of time we find
in John Dyer's "Grongar Hill"
(Yet Time has seen, that lifts the low,

And level lays the lofty Brow,
Has seen this broken Pile compleat22),
but rather a static texture, measurable by the litmus of the Pic-

turesque: "In many places indeed these works are too much ru-
ined, even for picturesque use."23 The same misprision informs
Marianne's ode to the trees. Not only are they (justly) viewed as
being insensible to change in those who regard them, but, failing
to signal the displacement of Marianne by Mrs. John Dashwood
(as they would have in some fanciful, pre-Romantic poems), they
become ludicrously insensible to change tout court-impervious
to all the seasonal stimuli that very soon will cause the leaves to
decay and the branches to become immobile in a winter frost.
Their proper functioning as trees has nothing to do with human
agency, as Marianne's sense of their indifference unconsciously
acknowledges, even while (at the same time) she exorbitantly or-
ganizes her Picturesque landscapes about herself, behaving as
the monarch of all she surveys.
Cowper provides a very different view of trees in "Yardley
Oak"-a view altogether more encompassing and complete:
Thus to Time
The task was left to whittle thee away
With his sly scythe, whose ever-nibbling edge
Disjoining from the rest, has, unobserv'd,
Achiev'd a labour, which had, far and wide,
(By man perform'd) made all the forest ring.24
These lines much more truly put trees sub specie aeternitatis
than Marianne's conception of their unchangeability, an
unchangeability that is finally sentimental in conception. Cowper
might draw on the aesthetic of the Picturesque, but he is never
seduced by its artificial cult of stasis that prefers a landscape to
be graced with idle rather than laboring peasants. Recalling but
reversing Thomas Warton's simile in 'The Pleasures of Melan-
choly" ("the mould'ring obelisc / Here, like a blasted oak, as-
cends the clouds"25), he stresses the ineluctability of change as
fully as Marianne excludes it.
Indeed, a good part of sentimentality can be explained by tem-
poral arrests of one kind or another-the lisping retention of child-
ish habits of speech in an adult, the fixation on a pastoral past at
the expense of an industrial present, and so on. One of the most
common sources of false sentiment, in fact, is a variant form of
neoteny (defined in the OED as "the retention of juvenile charac-
teristics in adult life")-a vision that hypostatizes childhood, and
exalts it above maturity. "Little" is above all its favored adjective,
generating false emotion by paedomorphizing everything, both
verbal and plastic, that comes within its ambit. Prints from
Woolworth's, the decadent repository statues of Catholicism, and
Steven Spielberg's aliens all reveal the same impulse to enlarge
the eye, magnify the tear and shrink the mouth and the size of
body in relation to the head. To sentimentalize is thus often to
freeze in time and to misapply that point of reference in such a
way that it excludes or blurs the full range of experience. By the
same token, the Picturesque movement, in its debased form, sub-
ordinated and even excluded the successive moments of a chang-
ing landscape to those that, by an arbitrary set of criteria, it
specified as being somehow better than others. Living and evolving
phenomena thus fell victim to the Midas touch of aestheticism.
We see this above all in the antithetical landscape judgments
of Edward and Marianne at a later point in the narrative:
"And how does dear, dear Norland look?" cried

Marianne.
"Dear, dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks
much as it always does at this time of year-the woods
and walks thickly covered with dead leaves."
"Oh!" cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensa-
tions have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted,
as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by
the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air
altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them.

They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and
driven as much as possible from the sight!"
"It is not everyone," said Elinor, "who has your pas-
sion for dead leaves."
"No, my feelings are not often shared, not often un-
derstood. But sometimes they are." As she said this she
sank into a reverie for a few moments; but rousing herself
again, "Now, Edward," said she, calling his attention to
the prospect, "here is Barton valley. Look up it, and be
tranquil if you can. Look at those hills! Did you ever see
their equals? To the left is Barton Park, amongst those
woods and plantations. You may see one end of the house.
And there, beneath that farthest hill which rises with such
grandeur, is our cottage."
"It is a beautiful country," he replied; "but these bot-
toms must be dirty in winter."
"How can you think of dirt with such objects before
you?"
"Because," replied he, smiling, "amongst the rest of
the objects before me, I see a very dirty lane."
"How strange!" said Marianne to herself as she walked
on.
(pp. 52-3)
In "dear, dear Norland," Austen picks up the tender epizeuxis of

Marianne's prose ode once again, but she now lets it register as a
mannerism. Without the passion of private rhapsody to support
it, the repetition seems perfunctory at best, absurd at worst, es-
pecially since it represents a failure of decorum-in the Augustan
sense of suiting diction to occasion. Polite conversation is not the
proper context for strong emotion, for what Tanner calls "the lan-
guage of solitude," and, translated to this alien environment, it
becomes the pale ghost of itself. Nothing is more fatal to intensity
than listless, uninflected repetition, and one senses the smile on
Elinor's lips when she runs with her sister's (by now unthinking)
honorific. By having Marianne inquire about the state of Norland,
Austen implies that she has not kept track of its seasonal change
but has carried away her last impression of the estate as a change-
less artifact.
It is Elinor who acknowledges the mutability of things and
thus shows a more intelligent sense of calendar time. For her
sister, on the other hand, autumn is physical instant, entire unto
itself. She has remembered James Thomson's autumn leaves, it

seems, but as a decorative datum only:
Till, choked and matted with the dreary shower,

The forest-walks, at every rising gale,
Roll wide the withered waste, and whistle bleak.
Fled is the blasted verdure of the fields;
And, shrunk into their beds, the flowery race
Their sunny robes resign. Even what remained
Of bolder fruits falls from the naked tree;
And-woods, fields, gardens, orchards all around-
The desolated prospect thrills the soul.26
Thomson does not present his dead leaves as items of intrinsic

beauty, but rather as a cue for contemplating the transience of
things. Indeed they resemble the detritus that, in Gilpin's view,
ought to have remained strewn around Tintern Abbey: "More pic-
turesque it certainly would have been, if the area, unadorned,
had been left with all its rough fragments of ruin scattered round,
and bold was the hand that removed them."27 Thomson's dead
leaves likewise evoke thoughts of sic transit gloria-a vegetative
parallel to the architectural ruin in such poems as Windsor For-
est and "Grongar Hill." Choking and matting are not qualities
that appeal, per se, to the Augustan sensibility (even a prototypi-
cally Romantic one like Thomson's). We have only to think of the
comparable congestion of the waterways in Goldsmith's Deserted
Village to be reminded of the fact, though we must also recall
that William Shenstone had valorized "the tangled vetch" in "Ru-
ral Elegance."28 Even so, while Thomson's soul thrills to a sense
of the vanity of things, it does not necessarily vibrate to disor-
dered heaps of brown foliage. Indeed his whole tableau serves
primarily to introduce the spirit of "Philosophic Melancholy" and
a discursive passage about its effects upon the "mind's creative
eye"-a moment clearly modeled on Warton's 'The Pleasures of
Melancholy," which revokes traditional values to assert individual
ones ("Let others love soft Summer's ev'ning smiles"; "I choose
the pale December's foggy glooms"),29 allowing "thought contem-
plative" to explore 'This fleeting state of things, the vain delights."30
Marianne, even as she adopts Warton's posture of conscious dif-
ference, is much less explicit about the sentiments her leaves
inspire and so creates the impression of a purely aesthetic reac-
tion that, in Elinor's view, is otiose. And yet at the same time, one
senses a scintilla of sympathy in the reference to impatient sweep-
ers (again Mrs. John Dashwood looms momentarily into sight),

since it seems to recall the bleakness and philistinism of Timon's
villa, where sterile order triumphs over natura naturans: 'The
thriving plants ignoble broomsticks made / Now sweep those Al-
leys they were born to shade."'31
But, even while she seems to be pioneering the new sensibil-
ity (with a glimmer of authorial approval), Marianne is not with-
out the hubris of those poetes maudits who pride themselves on
their unique sensibility, and odiunt profanum vulgus. Her epi-
sodes of self-absorption when she ought to be sustaining a polite
flow of chat are an instance of this. Reveries are not any more
appropriate to conversation than rhapsodies. And the vigor with
which she rouses herself takes on an additional comic color, im-
plying as it does that tranquillity is an unworthy frame of mind,
and that Sturm und Drang agitation is the only respectable re-
sponse to a landscape. This she freeze-frames in a parody of
Gilpinism, since the definite article in "the prospect" implies that
her particular view, and no other, is the authoritative one-the
one that carries the connoisseur's imprimatur.
Edward's reaction, while marked by his habitual reserve, is
by no means Philistine, and, if anything, attests a sense of change
more mature than Marianne's aestheticism of savored moments.
Instead of seeing landscape as a static configuration of coulisses
(those leafy screens beloved of Nicolas Poussin and Claude
Lorraine) and vanishing points and foregrounds, he encompasses
its full dynamic, its winter muddiness as much as its summer
verdure-a space to be traversed as well as contemplated. One
suspects that Austen might have imported the detail of the muddy
bottom from Dr. Johnson, since A Journey to the Western Islands
presents a particular Scottish road as having "the appearance of
an English lane, except that an English lane is almost always
dirty."32 The topographical chauvinism at other points of the Jo
ney makes it clear that Johnson's remarks about the dirtiness of
English lanes in no way compromises the affection he feels for
them.
And indeed there is something distinctly Johnsonian about
Edward's view of landscape in the subsequent debate about Gilpin
and the Picturesque:
"You must not enquire too far, Marianne-remember, I

have no knowledge of the picturesque, and I shall offend
you by my ignorance and want of taste, if we come to
particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold;
surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregu-

lar and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which
ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a
hazy atmosphere. You must be satisfied with such admi-
ration as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country-
the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and
the valley looks comfortable and snug-with rich mead-
ows and several neat farm-houses scattered here and
there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, be-
cause it unites beauty with utility-and I dare say it is a
picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily
believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss
and brushwood, but these are all lost on me. I know noth-
ing of the picturesque."
(pp. 57-8)
Behind this half-deprecatory utterance is an anthropocentric idea

of comfortableness, an idea predicated, indeed, upon a sense of
changing seasons. The snugness of the village and the sheltering
steepness of the hills impress themselves upon Edward because
he sees them proleptically as well as presently-in a winter as
well as an autumnal frame. Take away enclosing steepness and
nestling snugness, and sublime landscapes are quite as likely to
discomfit as transport their human spectators. One has only to
recall Dr. Johnson's horror of "vacuity" and his revulsion from a
Scottish heath to realize the source of Edward's values: "An eye
accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is aston-
ished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility."33
It goes without saying that such a position would have been
hotly refuted by Gilpin and his disciples. In his Observations on
Several Parts of Great Britain, the former remarks that "It is true
indeed, that an eye, like Dr. Johnson's which is accustomed to
see the beauties of landscape only in flowery pastures, and wav-
ing harvests, cannot be attracted by the great and sublime in
nature. It will bring every thing to it's [sic] own model; and mea-
sure the proportions of a giant by the limbs of a dwarf."34 In the
same text, after all, he had remarked that "Wherever man ap-
pears with his tools, deformity follows in his steps. His spade,
and his plough, his hedge, and his furrow, make shocking en-
croachments on the simplicity, and elegance of landscape."35 From
which misanthropic utterance-the stagy epithet "shocking" all
but anticipates Isabella Thorpe's frivolous use of "horrid" in
Northanger Abbey-we can conclude that it would be no carica-
ture of the Picturesque to claim that it disunites beauty from

utility, and frowns upon the fact of change. Hence Edward's jocular
retort:
"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all

the delight in a fine prospect that you profess to feel. But,
in return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than
I profess. I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque
principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I
admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flour-
ishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not
fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more
pleasure in a snug farmhouse than a watchtower-and a
troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the
finest banditti in the world."
(p. 58)
Perhaps Edward's aversion to thistles is an encrypted reference

to Dr. Johnson's contempt for the Scottish heath, and, to that
extent, it might be expected to give a certain authoritativeness to
his anti-Picturesque position, since, as Graham Hough has
pointed out, apropos of certain inflections in Austen's style, "the
Johnsonian cadence evokes a special social and moral ethos, one
that carries authority and weight."36 It is possible that Edward
here offers just such a mouthpiece for authorial reservations about
the Picturesque, rather as Henry Tilney provides a judicious, im-
personal assessment of Mrs. Radcliffe in Northanger Abbey, a
lightning rod for judgments that might otherwise be laid at the
author's own door. If to be anti-Picturesque is to be Philistine,
according to this submerged implication, then distinguished Phi-
listines have gone before.
However, another factor might well complicate this picture,
and that is Austen's avowed admiration for George Crabbe. One
of his achievements was to disclose austere beauties where none
had been found before, beauties that certainly fell beyond the
range of Gilpin's Claude-glassing sorties into the British land-
scape. Look, for example, at the following extract from The Vil-
lage:
Lo where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,

Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its wither'd ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,

Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye:
Here thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil,
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil.37
Here are all the qualities-blightedness, withering, sterility-that

Edward rejects as affectations of the Picturesque, and yet, pre-
cisely because they are not advanced with the self-conscious-
ness of a connoisseur's eye, they have a kind of gritty integrity
that Austen almost certainly admired, and which might indeed
set her in opposition to Edward's values-though of course it is
not at all easy to establish undeclared positions in this way, es-
pecially if we recall that she herself had distinct reservations about
dead trees. A dour Goldsmithian lapallisade in one of her letters
makes this plain: "I will not say that your Mulberry trees are
dead, but I am afraid they are not alive."38
We must bear in mind that Elinor herself feels extreme vexa-
tion when her half brother admits to having "clear[edi away all
the old thorns that grew in patches over the brow," thorns that,
given their irregular clumping and their age, would certainly have
disqualified themselves from Edward's admiration (p. 135). Clearly
Austen wants us to note that Augustan habits of viewing trees
are fast becoming obsolete, and yet, even so, Edward's rejection
of blighted trees, to some extent, derives from his seasonal, dy-
namic vision of landscape and (extrapolating outward) from his
dynamic vision of things in general. Blighted trees are fixities,
freeze-framed as measures of distance or repoussoirs for the per-
spective of the view-as in Marianne's habitually static way of
responding to prospects. "Flourishing" trees, on the other hand,
are subject to process, while the nuclear families implicit in the
"happy villagers" imply the cycle of omnes generationes rather
more vividly than the solitary braviwe encounter in Salvator Rosa.
Of course, as so often in Austen, some sort of via media
emerges from the counterplay of vantage points and positionings.
It might be fitting, therefore, to bid farewell to Marianne's trees
by considering the entirely antithetical values of Mrs. Jennings.
Here, the utilitarianism implicit in Edward's vision gets pushed
to a parodic extreme, for she sees them primarily as purveyors of
fruit or the providers of shade for the engaging spectacle of a
busy road (which reminds us, once again, of A Journey to the
Western Islands). Austen documents her good-natured,
Rabelaisian excesses with a sobriety nonetheless acute for being

affectionate. No views in her case, but fructifying, warm walls, no
fallen leaves but a huge surfeit of berries: "Delaford is a nice
place, I can tell you; exactly what I call a nice old-fashioned place,
full of comforts and conveniences; quite shut in with great gar-
den walls that are covered with the best fruit-trees in the coun-
try; and such a mulberry tree in one corner! Lord! How Charlotte
and I did stuff the only time we were there!" (p. 116). Tanner has
pointed out how "in a book which, at root, is about to what extent
'nature' has to be reshaped and 'pruned' to make society possible
the resolution [of Marianne's marriage to Brandon] can only be a
temporary pause in an endless dialectic."39 Endless dialectic fig-
ures throughout the novel itself, and the habit of self-consuming
irony is responsible for the sphinxian poise and detachment it
shares with all the other works in the canon. Approaching the
topic of trees from several angles, and with an ironized commit-
ment that both endorses and mocks in the same breath, Austen
all but fulfills a central dictum of the Picturesque, viz., that "Pic-
turesque composition consists in uniting in one whole a variety
of parts." And since, in the same breath, Gilpin solemnly assures
us that "these parts can only be obtained from rough objects," 40
what better candidates in this regard-given the tough and shaggy
nature of their bark-than trees!
NOTES
'Tony Tanner, introduction to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 22.
2William Cowper, "Retirement," in Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, edn.
ed. Norma Russell (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 117.
3Austen, Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed.
R. W. Chapman, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:273.
4Austen, Sense and Sensibility, in The Comnplete Novels of Jane Austen
(New York: Random House, n.d.), p. 16. Further references will be from this
edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
5Austen, Letters, 2:267.
6Angus Wilson, 'The Neighbourhood of Tombuctoo: Conflicts in Jane
Austen's Novels," in Critical Essays onJaneAusten, ed. B. C. Southam (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 182-99, 187.
7A. Walton Litz, "The Picturesque in Pride and Prejudice," Persuasions:
Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 1 (1979): 13-5; 20-4.
8Lady Winchilsea, 'The Nocturnal Reverie," in Poetry of the Landscape
and the Night: Two Eighteenth-Century Traditions, ed. Charles Peake (Lon-
don: Edward Arnold, 1967), pp. 39-40, line 6.
9William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South
Wales, &c Relative Chefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in the Summer of the
Year 1770 (London: R. Blamire, 1782), p. 16.
10 James Bramston, "Man of Taste," in A Collection of Poemns in Six Vol-
umes by Several Hands, with Notes, ed. J. Dodsley, 6 vols. (London: J. Dodsley,
1782), 1:312-26, lines 144-5.
11 Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village," in The Poems of Thomas Gray,
William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman,
1969), pp. 669-94, line 1.
12 Gray, "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," in Lonsdale, pp.
54-63, line 20.
13Jill Heydt, "'First Impressions' and Later Recollections: The Place of
the Picturesque in Pride and Prejudice," StHum 12 (1985): 115-24.
14 Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sub-
lime and Beautiful; and On the Use of Studying Pictures for the Purpose of
Improving Real Landscape (London: J. Mawman, 1810), p. 122.
'5Alexander Pope, "Summer," in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-
Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations, ed. John
Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 129-32, 131, lines 73-4.
16 Gray, 'The Bard, A Pindaric Ode," in Lonsdale, pp. 177-200, line 25.
17George Lyttelton, "To the Memory of the Same Lady," in Dodsley, 2:74-
85, lines 24-5.
18Thomas Tickell, "To Sir Godfrey Kneller at His Country Seat," in Dodsley,
1:39-41, lines 27-30.
19John Halperin, 'The Worlds of Emma Jane Austen and Cowper," in
Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1975), pp. 197-206, 203.
20 Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, p. 8.
21 Isobel Armstrong, "Politics, Pride, Prejudice, and the Pictures
"Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," ed. Robert Clark (London:
St. Martin's, 1994), pp. 159-79, 171; William Galperin, "The Picturesque,
the Real, and the Consumption of Jane Austen," WC 28 (1997): 19-27, 19.
22John Dyer, "Grongar Hill," in Peake, pp. 88-93, lines 84-6.
24 Cowper, "Yardley Oak," in Poetical Works, pp. 410-4, lines 103-9.
25Thomas Warton, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," in Dodsley, 4: 224-
35, lines 263-4.
26James Thomson, "Autumn," in "The Seasons" and "The Castle of Indo-
lence," ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 89-126,
lines 995-1003.
28William Shenstone, "Rural Elegance," in Dodsley, 5:1-14, line 13.
29Warton, lines 97, 100.
30Warton, lines 108-9.
31 Pope, Epistle to Burlington, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, pp. 588-
95, lines 97-8.
32 Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Lon-
don: Chapman and Dodd, 1924), p. 43.
33Johnson, p. 56.
34 Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the

High-lands of Scotland, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the
Year 1776, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 2:120.
35 Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, 2:112.
36 Graham Hough, "Narrative and Dialogue in Jane Austen," in Selected
Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 46-82, 55.
37 George Crabbe, "The Village," in The Poetical Works of George Crabbe,
ed. A. J. and R. M. Carlyle (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1914), p. 35.
38Austen, Letters, 2:285.
39Tanner, p. 33.
40 Gilpin, quoted in Galperin, p. 21.

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Rice University

Change and Fixity in "Sense and Sensibility"

Change and Fixity in Sense and

In his introduction to Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner notes

Ye groves (the statesman at his desk exclaims,

Here the servant of the public has his solitude compromised by

Rodney S. Edgecombe, Associate Professor of English at the University of

thoughts and the discrepancy it reveals between the public and

Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieux to

Let us start with a detail potentially unorthodox and therefore

ironies and jests in her references that it is often difficult to know

Even so, Austen does imply a reservation about Marianne's

To that extent, the passage recalls another topographic poem

to human joy or grief, Marianne throws to the wind, stressing

Vain care of parts, if impotent of soul,

Marianne's sensibility, both here and elsewhere, is very much a

This weakness, indeed, is apparent throughout the novel.

tion that is deficient because it is wrong. Nature's indifference to

(Yet Time has seen, that lifts the low,

but rather a static texture, measurable by the litmus of the Pic-

"And how does dear, dear Norland look?" cried

altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them.

In "dear, dear Norland," Austen picks up the tender epizeuxis of

itself. She has remembered James Thomson's autumn leaves, it

Till, choked and matted with the dreary shower,

Thomson does not present his dead leaves as items of intrinsic

ers (again Mrs. John Dashwood looms momentarily into sight),

"You must not enquire too far, Marianne-remember, I

surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregu-

Behind this half-deprecatory utterance is an anthropocentric idea

ture of the Picturesque to claim that it disunites beauty from

"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all

Perhaps Edward's aversion to thistles is an encrypted reference

Lo where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,

Here are all the qualities-blightedness, withering, sterility-that

Rabelaisian excesses with a sobriety nonetheless acute for being

'Tony Tanner, introduction to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

34 Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the

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