高慢と偏見 — Jane Austen
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Pride and Prejudice Author : Jane Austen Release date : June 1, 1998 [eBook #1342] Most recently updated: February 10, 2026 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342 Credits : Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) *** START OF List of Illustrations. Chapter: I., II., III., IV., V., VI., VII., VIII., IX., X., XI., XII., XIII., XIV., XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., XIX., XX., XXI., XXII., XXIII., XXIV., XXV., XXVI., XXVII., XXVIII., XXIX., XXX., XXXI., XXXII., XXXIII., XXXIV., XXXV., XXXVI., XXXVII., XXXVIII., XXXIX., XL., XLI., XLII., XLIII., XLIV., XLV., XLVI., XLVII., XLVIII., XLIX., L., LI., LII., LIII., LIV., LV., LVI., LVII., LVIII., LIX., LX., LXI. PRIDE. and PREJUDICE by Jane Austen, with a Preface by George Saintsbury and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson Ruskin House. 156. Charing Cross Road. London George Allen. CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. Walt Whitman has somewhere a fine and just distinction between “loving by allowance” and “loving with personal love.” This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved “by allowance” by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and proper thing to love them. And in the sect—fairly large and yet unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of Northanger Abbey, its completeness, finish, and entrain, obscure the undoubted critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the first rank is reached with difficulty. Persuasion, relatively faint in tone, and not enthralling in interest, has devotees who exalt above all the others its exquisite delicacy and keeping. The catastrophe of Mansfield Park is admittedly theatrical, the hero and heroine are insipid, and the author has almost wickedly destroyed all romantic interest by expressly admitting that Edmund only took Fanny because Mary shocked him, and that Fanny might very likely have taken Crawford if he had been a little more assiduous; yet the matchless rehearsal-scenes and the characters of Mrs. Norris and others have secured, I believe, a considerable party for it. Sense and Sensibility has perhaps the fewest out-and-out admirers; but it does not want them. I suppose, however, that the majority of at least competent votes would, all things considered, be divided between Emma and the present book; and perhaps the vulgar verdict (if indeed a fondness for Miss Austen be not of itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity) would go for Emma. It is the larger, the more varied, the more popular; the author had by the time of its composition seen rather more of the world, and had improved her general, though not her most peculiar and characteristic dialogue; such figures as Miss Bates, as the Eltons, cannot but unite the suffrages of everybody. On the other hand, I, for my part, declare for Pride and Prejudice unhesitatingly. It seems to me the most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works; and for this contention in such narrow space as is permitted to me, I propose here to show cause. In the first place, the book (it may be barely necessary to remind the reader) was in its first shape written very early, somewhere about 1796, when Miss Austen was barely twenty-one; though it was revised and finished at Chawton some fifteen years later, and was not published till 1813, only four years before her death. I do not know whether, in this combination of the fresh and vigorous projection of youth, and the critical revision of middle life, there may be traced the distinct superiority in point of construction, which, as it seems to me, it possesses over all the others. The plot, though not elaborate, is almost regular enough for Fielding; hardly a character, hardly an incident could be retrenched without loss to the story. The elopement of Lydia and Wickham is not, like that of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth, a coup de théâtre; it connects itself in the strictest way with the course of the story earlier, and brings about the denouement with complete propriety. All the minor passages—the loves of Jane and Bingley, the advent of Mr. Collins, the visit to Hunsford, the Derbyshire tour—fit in after the same unostentatious, but masterly fashion. There is no attempt at the hide-and-seek, in-and-out business, which in the transactions between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax contributes no doubt a good deal to the intrigue of Emma, but contributes it in a fashion which I do not think the best feature of that otherwise admirable book. Although Miss Austen always liked something of the misunderstanding kind, which afforded her opportunities for the display of the peculiar and incomparable talent to be noticed presently, she has been satisfied here with the perfectly natural occasions provided by the false account of Darcy’s conduct given by Wickham, and by the awkwardness (arising with equal naturalness) from the gradual transformation of Elizabeth’s own feelings from positive aversion to actual love. I do not know whether the all-grasping hand of the playwright has ever been laid upon Pride and Prejudice; and I dare