We need not suppose that she had thought much about the philosophical sanction of conduct as opposed to the purely religious, or that she had studied the French _Encyclopædia_. She was born and brought up in an atmosphere wherein convention, in regard to the things that matter, was almost omnipotent, and she was not of the type whereof iconoclasts are made. She attacked no system, social or religious; but she had no fondness for "isms," and thus it is that dogmatism is quite as hard to discover in her writings as scepticism.
It has been said already that Jane Austen was not a cynic. Yet it would be easy, by making _Lady Susan_ one's text, and ignoring the rest of her writings, to show that she was as cynical as a Swift or an Anatole France. Of course I do not mean that her apparent cynicism in this case was exercised on the kind of subjects which is ridiculed in _The Tale of a Tub_ or in _L'Ile des { 150} Pingouins_. But I know nothing, in its way, more cold-blooded in the presentation of "love" than the conclusion of that novel of Jane's springtime, which she herself, her own wise critic, withheld from publication. The rivalry of mother and daughter for the affections of the same man must always be an unpleasant subject, and the story of the conflict between Lady Susan Vernon and her daughter for the matrimonial prize represented by Reginald de Courcy, as told in letters among the characters concerned, is on a low plane. The morals of the "heroine" may not be suspect, but her tone is below suspicion.
What is the _dénouement_ of _Lady Susan_? The mother's schemes to marry the man of the daughter's choice have ended in her own marriage to the wealthy noodle whom she had tried to force upon the daughter. "Frederica," says the author,--dropping the "correspondence" plan in order to wind up the book more readily--"was therefore fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt till such time as Reginald de Courcy could be talked, flattered and finessed into an affection for her which, allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to her mother, for his abjuring all future { 151} attachments, and detesting the sex, might be reasonably looked for in the course of a twelve-month. Three months might have done it in general, but Reginald's feelings were no less lasting than lively. Whether Lady Susan was or was not happy in her second choice, I do not see how it can ever be ascertained...."