A whole lot of speculation, much of it much more intelligent and well-informed than I could hope to be, has gone into determining where Miss Austen stood on big philosophical questions of her day. Was she opposed to romanticism or partly in line with and partly opposed? Was she a Burkean? Had she read Shaftesbury? All, as I say, interesting stuff but we can be absolutely certain that Austen had views about the picturesque as we find it discussed directly here in Northanger Abbey, again in Sense and Sensibility, in Pride and Prejudice, in Emma and in Mansfield Park. There may even be a passage in Persuasion that I have not found yet.
For now, let's just note one of the most wonderful sentences Austen wrote, and she wrote lots of wonderful sentences:
They [the Tilney's] were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste.Let's stop and teach ourselves to suck eggs for a bit. "Capability" is a fascinating word choice because its use in association with landscape would have had contemporary readers thinking of "Capability" Brown, a landscape architect famous or infamous, depending on your taste, for improving on nature. Among those who valued the picturesque or the sublime in nature, Capability Brown was despised. Austen linking him here with the picturesque is yoking two contradictory notions together.
Is she just playing with us or is she suggesting that the two are not that different and that the education Henry and Eleanor Tilney are giving Catherine is a distortion. That framing the sublime is to mold and falsify nature every bit as much as Brown's landscapes?
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