H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e2 2decorum over these disreputable motives. But the sentence also
allows us to see it doing this, which is where the irony lurks. People,
it suggests, feel better about their own baser desires if they can
rationalise them as part of the natural order of things. There is a
certain amusement to be reaped from watching them engage in this
bad faith. The language of the sentence, abstract, beautifully meas-
ured and slightly dry in Austen’s familiar manner, needs this mild
irony to enliven it a little. One sign that this is not modern English
is the comma after ‘acknowledged’, which would not be thought
necessary in a modern text.
Austen’s irony can be tart and pointed, as can some of her
moral judgements. Not many authors would suggest, as she does in
Persuasion, that one of her characters would have been better off
never being born. It is hard to get tarter than that. The irony which
opens Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, is delightfully bland, as is
the one encoded in the first lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue
to his Canterbury Tales:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye –
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages –
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgramages...