even our author is finer and more delicately touched than the change of

his demeanour at the sudden meeting in the grounds of Pemberley. Had he

been a bad prig or a bad coxcomb, he might have been still smarting

under his rejection, or suspicious that the girl had come

husband-hunting. His being neither is exactly consistent with the

probable feelings of a man spoilt in the common sense, but not really

injured in disposition, and thoroughly in love. As for his being in

love, Elizabeth has given as just an exposition of the causes of that

phenomenon as Darcy has of the conditions of his unregenerate state,

only she has of course not counted in what was due to her own personal

charm.
The secret of that charm many men and not a few women, from Miss Austen

herself downwards, have felt, and like most charms it is a thing rather

to be felt than to be explained. Elizabeth of course belongs to the

allegro or allegra division of the army of Venus. Miss Austen was

always provokingly chary of description in regard to her beauties; and

except the fine eyes, and a hint or two that she had at any rate

sometimes a bright complexion, and was not very tall, we hear nothing

about her looks. But her chief difference from other heroines of the

lively type seems to lie first in her being distinctly clever—almost

strong-minded, in the better sense of that objectionable word—and

secondly in her being entirely destitute of ill-nature for all her

propensity to tease and the sharpness of her tongue. Elizabeth can give

at least as good as she gets when she is attacked; but she never

“scratches,” and she never attacks first. Some of the merest

obsoletenesses of phrase and{xxii} manner give one or two of her early

speeches a slight pertness, but that is nothing, and when she comes to

serious business, as in the great proposal scene with Darcy (which is,

as it should be, the climax of the interest of the book), and in the