68 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
heroine, is here committed by her pair of opposing terms to
offer two, Elinor and Marianne, incarnating respectively
sense and sensibility. This is dictated by the current plan of
writing about pairs of ethical opposites, Nature versus Art,
The Man of Feehng versus The Man of the World, etc. The
scheme is so obvious that it is unnecessary to consider the
possibility of a direct influence from Jane West’s The Gos-
sip’s Story, though such an influence has been suggested by
Miss J. M. S. Tompkins in an ingenious and well wrought
article.5 Jane Austen could work out her own antithesis, but
the comment has been justly made that it is mechanical, and
contrasts unfavorably with Pride and Prejudice, where we
find pride and prejudice subtly blended in Elizabeth Bennet
and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and variously illustrated in other
characters. It should be noticed, however, that Jane Austen
does not intend to deny intelligence and the seeds of judg-
ment to Marianne; we are told at the end of the first chap-
ter that Margaret, the third and youngest sister, “had already
imbibed a good deal of Marianne’s romance, without having
much of her sense.” The concession of sense to Marianne
should not be overlooked. Without claiming a direct in-
fluence from Camilla, a novel read closely by Jane Austen
in the summer of 1796, we may say of Marianne what Mme.
d’Arblay says of her heroine :
Her every propensity was pure, and, when reflection came to
her aid, her conduct was as exemplary as her wishes. But
the ardour of her imagination, acted upon by every passing
idea, shook her Judgment from its yet unsteady seat, and
left her at the mercy of wayward Sensibility—that delicate,
but irregular power, which now impels to all that is most
disinterested for others, now forgets all mankind, to watch
the pulsations of its own fancies.6
Elinor, unfortunately, is not complicated even to this
degree, and her colorless common sense is not interestingly
heightened by Jane Austen’s device of making her the ra-