The Context of Sense and Sensibility

66 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

These commonplace remarks indicate how the current code
tried to dispose of SentimentaBsm and related ideas in rela-
tion to character and conduct. Simply to announce that one
was going to present a character embodying a quality had
the precedent of classical comedy to justify it, but to start
in this way at the end of the eighteenth century, with ab-
stract nouns in the very title, was to drag a lengthening chain
of didacticism. Yet the artist was not in exactly the same
situation as the moralist. Individuals in a story could never
be the mere embodiment of these terms, and social situa-
tions, no matter how exactly schematized, could never mirror
ideas and principles in an unambiguous way.

It was a favorite idea of the time that these ideas were
transmitted principally by reading; sentimentalists ex-
pressed themselves in verse and fiction and were some-
how created by that same verse and fiction. Such a direct
correlation between reading and behavior leads to absurdi-
ties like the following, reported in another story by a novelist
of whom Jane Austen disapproved.

Having no character of her own, Julia was always, as
nearly as she was able, the heroine whom the last read
novel inclined her to personate. But as those who forsake
the guidance of nature are in imminent danger of absurdity,
her copies were always caricatures. After reading Evelina,
she sat with her mouth extended in a perpetual smile, and
was so very timid, that she would not for the world have
looked at a stranger. When Camilla was the model for the
day, she became insufferably rattling, infantine, and thought-
less. After perusing the Gossip’s Story, she in imitation of
the rational Louisa, suddenly waxed very wise—spoke in
sentences—despised romance—sewed shifts—and read ser-
mons. But, in the midst of this fit, she, in an evil hour, opened
a volume of the Novelle [sic] Eloise, which had before
disturbed many wiser heads. The shifts were left unfinished,
the sermons thrown aside, and Miss Julia returned with
renewed impetus to the sentimental.²

The presentation in terms of literature is very common, but

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