Sensibilities revisted

As I plug along through Sense and Sensibility, reading it as slowly as I have ever done, I keep being reminded that I'm not really sure what to make of the issue of feelings.  There are some things we do know. I think I can set out a sort of creed of what I believe to be true of Austen on feelings.

1. Having sensibilities is a good thing and, all else being equal, the person with strong feelings is a better person than the one without.
2. Sensibility is not something we are born with like blue eyes but something we must develop like the ability to play a musical instrument.
3. There is no difference whatsoever between Marianne and Elinor in terms of the depth of their feeling. The only difference is that Marianne's feelings are not governed and Elinor's are.
4. Governing your feelings means controlling them so they do not lead you to act in ways that run counter to society or (as we shall soon see) the basic facts of life.

But what about the ways in which sensibility makes us a better person? There I think the answers are not so easy to tease out. We can see, for example, that it is to Elinor's credit that she can sense Edward's love for her even though he is not a liberty to declare it or even allow it to show. Even Marianne is not, we will later learn, wrong in thinking Willoughby loves her for he does love her.

Conversely, we should probably condemn Lucy for failing to see that Edward does not love her anymore. And she should realize this even though Edward not only cannot say he does not love her but must go on saying he does.

How, for example, would Elinor respond if she were the one that Edward had made the youthful engagement to but she now sensed that he was no longer in love with her? She would know that simply offering to set him free would not work because he would be honour-bound to refuse her. I think, in such a situation, she would choose to tell Edward that she no longer loved him and ask him to free her. Then his honour would oblige him to accept. That would be a terribly lonely choice, a point I'll come back to, but her feelings would demand it.

By the way, should Edward actually be in love with Lucy even now? I mean, if constancy is a virtue then surely having been in love and having made his engagement , perhaps Edward should nurture his love and keep it alive. That would certainly be a challenge. Or does that only come after marriage?

And feeling, whatever it is, seems to be a lonely thing. Elinor, Marianne and Colonel Brandon all have feeling and it seems to isolate them. Willoughby, to give the devil his due, is also isolated by his feelings.

Given all this, we might wonder if feelings are such a good thing to have.

Or is the point more simply that feelings without sense are bad precisely because feelings are not connected to anything outside of us?