Though etymologically “morality” means something like social custom, as we use it it means the desire to govern oneself, expressed as social behavior. People who attempt this fail, and learn in the course of failing that to act well, even to know what it is to act well, is a great struggle and a mystery. Rather than trying to reform others, moral people seem to me especially eager to offer pardon in the hope of receiving pardon, to forgo judgment in the hope of escaping judgment.
So perhaps what I have called priggishness is useful in the absence of true morality, which requires years of development, perhaps thousands of years, and cannot be summoned as needed. Its inwardness and quietism make its presence difficult to sense, let alone quantify, and they make its expression often idiosyncratic and hard to control. But priggishness makes its presence felt. And it is highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs which are in general so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherence to them is reassuring. The prig’s formidable leverage comes from the fact that his or her ideas, notions or habits are always fine variations on the commonplace. A prig with original ideas is a contradiction in terms, because he or she is a creature of consensus who can usually appeal to one’s better nature, if only to embarrass dissent. A prig in good form can make one ashamed to hold a conviction so lightly, and, at the same time, ashamed to hold it at all.
It has almost become a truism that ‘When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’ (G. K. Chesterton). Yet there is an ethical corollary, namely, that the removal of divine judgement doesn’t lead to a gentle, non-judgemental place, but it’s opposite. The contemporary political and philosophical discourse is habitually harsh and judgemental, even when centrists are making their case, yet divines can lead rational debates on ethical matters without ducking the issues, and the contrast to the usual belligerence is remarkable. What is going on?
(ii)
In this essay I have tried to show that Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that Jane Austen first represented the modern personality’ in which the moral life is conceived, as never before, to be ‘complex and exhausting and difficult’, arises out of ethical confusion. Adena Rosmarin identified the ‘hermeneutic dance of bewildering perplexity’ at the heart of Emma, mirroring the heroine’s propensity to misread her world. In Mansfield Park the heroine’s stoic ethics are tested with Fanny repeatedly trying to ‘find her way to her duty’ (I.XVI), and the reader should expect to be faced with similar problems. We are quickly set up with Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris as patrons to the waif and the reader, like Sir Thomas, has made an investment in the novel’s heroine, and is challenged to be ‘the real and consistent patron of the selected child’ (I.I). The cultivated, clever and attractive Crawfords are introduced, yet, as Mary eventually tells us, they are corrupted.
“That’s right; and in London, of course, a house of your own: no longer with the Admiral. My dearest Henry, the advantage to you of getting away from the Admiral before your manners are hurt by the contagion of his, before you have contracted any of his foolish opinions, or learned to sit over your dinner as if it were the best blessing of life! You are not sensible of the gain, for your regard for him has blinded you; but, in my estimation, your marrying early may be the saving of you. To have seen you grow like the Admiral in word or deed, look or gesture, would have broken my heart.” (II.XII)
The novel is related from Fanny’s perspective as she chooses between Edmund and Henry, with the reader being given every reason to join everyone in urging her to accept Henry’s proposals, for the reasons Sir Thomas outlines with great force at the opening of the third volume, excepting, of course, the ‘principles’ that Fanny can’t explain to Sir Thomas. But even for those with greater sensitivity and discernment than Sir Thomas, and all the knowledge that Sir Thomas lacks,
Henry Crawford has more sincerity than his sister, and the adverse judgment which the novel makes on him is therefore arrived at with greater difficulty. He is conscious of his charm, of the winningness of his personal style, which has in it – as he knows – a large element of natural goodness and generosity.
As I have argued, this is just not true. Henry has all the appearance of goodness but of goodness itself, understood as a propensity to avoid selfish action—the missing quality Fanny couldn’t name to her uncle—we see remarkably little, perhaps none. Even Mrs Norris’s loyalty to Maria at the close stands her in better stead.
“Oh yes, yes! and it will be a day of pleasure. It will all end right. I am only vexed for a moment. In fact, it is not that I consider the ball as ill-timed; what does it signify? But, Fanny,” stopping her, by taking her hand, and speaking low and seriously, “you know what all this means. You see how it is; and could tell me, perhaps better than I could tell you, how and why I am vexed. Let me talk to you a little. You are a kind, kind listener. I have been pained by her manner this morning, and cannot get the better of it. I know her disposition to be as sweet and faultless as your own, but the influence of her former companions makes her seem—gives to her conversation, to her professed opinions, sometimes a tinge of wrong. She does not think evil, but she speaks it, speaks it in playfulness; and though I know it to be playfulness, it grieves me to the soul.”
(II.IX)
“Cruel!” said Fanny, “quite cruel. At such a moment to give way to gaiety, to speak with lightness, and to you! Absolute cruelty.”
“Cruelty, do you call it? We differ there. No, hers is not a cruel nature. I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings. The evil lies yet deeper: in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings; in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did. She was speaking only as she had been used to hear others speak, as she imagined everybody else would speak. Hers are not faults of temper. She would not voluntarily give unnecessary pain to any one, and though I may deceive myself, I cannot but think that for me, for my feelings, she would— Hers are faults of principle, Fanny; of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind. Perhaps it is best for me, since it leaves me so little to regret. Not so, however. Gladly would I submit to all the increased pain of losing her, rather than have to think of her as I do. I told her so.”
(III.XVI)
The reader is put into a similar position over Henry as Edmund is over Mary. If they have understood Pride and Prejudice to be offering the possibility of morality as style, then Henry’s appearance of goodness will further try the reader’s patience with the heroine.
As Fanny romantic ideas are tested in the course of the novel, so are the reader’s. The Crawfords are given a choice; Mary could have staid away from the London scene that she knows is no good, but instead arranges her visit on realising that Edmund won’t deviate from his chosen vocation. This happens when Edmund and Fanny first dine at the parsonage in Volume II but when both families recollect there in the seventh chapter—the centre of the book—we see Henry’s plans for improving Thornton Lacey squelched by Edmund and receive Sir Thomas’s homily on the duties of a parish priest. Mary can no longer ‘shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune,’ (II.VII) and neither can the reader. At Portsmouth Fanny’s romantic disdain for the real world will get tested when, as Sir Thomas intends, she learns ‘the value of a good income’ (II.VI) but in rejecting Edmund’s modest proposal Mary’s worldly philosophy is dramatised, which she most fully elaborates in her debate with Edmund and Mrs Grant.
“Oh! you can do nothing but what you do already: be plagued very often, and never lose your temper.”
“Thank you; but there is no escaping these little vexations, Mary, live where we may; and when you are settled in town and I come to see you, I dare say I shall find you with yours, in spite of the nurseryman and the poulterer, perhaps on their very account. Their remoteness and unpunctuality, or their exorbitant charges and frauds, will be drawing forth bitter lamentations.”
“I mean to be too rich to lament or to feel anything of the sort. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it.” (II.IV)
In Edmund’s sticking to his vocation and rejecting the Crawford’s flashy lifestyle and Fanny’s outright rejection of Henry, our modern romantic pieties—morality as style—are being called into question. Any disappointment on this will likely be directed at Fanny, firstly in rejecting all of this on moral grounds and disdaining the Crawford’s pretty surfaces, but again when we she is horrified by her Portsmouth home. But if Fanny is too nice the reader has to be careful, because Fanny’s assessment is reasonable. Mrs Price is not much of a parent, indeed ‘a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children’ (III.VIII) and Susan, who has none of Fanny’s unworldliness nor passive-aggressive tendencies, is there to show us it is so. As Edmund earns our early respect for taking Fanny in hand, so Fanny can when she does the same for Susan—provided the reader hasn’t given up on Fanny but remained ‘the real and consistent patron’.
The reader’s ethical framework gets drawn into the drama and tested along with Fanny’s, each having to ‘find her way to her duty’ (I.XVI). Fanny has to fight her jealousy, an affliction she shares with Julia after they both exclude themselves from the theatricals and get to watch Henry and Edmund make love under the guise of acting.
Fanny saw and pitied much of this in Julia; but there was no outward fellowship between them. Julia made no communication, and Fanny took no liberties. They were two solitary sufferers, or connected only by Fanny’s consciousness. (I.XVII)
But the reader is looking on too, possibly as unaware as Julia with the connection to Fanny’s consciousness. Like Mrs Norris we can get distracted by Fanny’s prettier and more accomplished peers, or like Sir Thomas we can overlook her inner qualities or gets distracted by mercenary considerations, or perhaps like Fanny herself prioritise our romantic ideas over reality. All of these can lead us to abandon the heroine, our sentiments not being driven towards Fanny but away from her, and against our better judgement. To the extent that we abandon Fanny we will be condemned by our own judgement, for we will have condemned Mrs Norris, and perhaps Sir Thomas. Or maybe we have taken no interest in any of it, content to laugh at ‘the barking of Pug in his mistress’s arms’ (I.XIII).
Just as with Emma, the reader may settle back in the expectation of a tough time for the heroine on the way to her reward, but fairly quickly finds their judgement coming under psychological pressure. On the one hand the action demands that the reader take an active interest in their assessment—the novel is the least forgiving of poor judgement of all the Austen novels—and yet any temptations to side with the laissez faire Crawfords or the authoritarian Sir Thomas becomes problematic. The effect of the whole is to provoke ethical assessment while encouraging a sceptical attitude towards such assessments. It is a working out of the rational ethical life founded on self-examination.
(iii)
The novel, having the capacity to test and shape the reader’s ethics, is being used to construct an ethical laboratory and workshop, much as it was throughout the eighteenth century. Many in the eighteenth century worried about the potentially corrosive impact of the realistic novel on ethics.
Even without Henry Austen’s assurance, we should be able to recognise Johnson as Jane Austen’s ‘favourite moral writer … in prose’. It is surely clear that the morality she accepted from him included literary good manners, the foundation of a just and happy relationship between writer and reader.
Here, the novelist enjoys one advantage, if he chooses to consider it as such. As Walter Raleigh says, ‘Novelists generally have been insatiable novel-readers.’ It is in many ways a companionable art – too companionable, some of them may think: it seems as if every reader is ready to tell them how fiction should be written. The great novelists will seldom demur: after all, they alone know where the faint line runs between illusion and delusion – what the novel is, and is not.
Indeed the eighteenth century essayists were only too aware of the way that the realistic novel could shape the ethics of nations, not least Johnson himself in The Rambler.
The purpose of these writings is surely not only to show mankind, but to provide that they may be seen hereafter with less hazard; to teach the means of avoiding the snares which are laid by Treachery for Innocence without infusing any wish for that superiority with which the betrayer flatters his vanity; to give the power of counteracting fraud without the temptation to practice it; to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defence, and to increase imprudence without impairing virtue. […]
It is therefore to be steadily inculcated that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts, and it begins in mistake and ends in ignominy.
The intellectual debates were as ferocious as the innovations were intellectually and psychologically sophisticated.
(iv)
The modern convention is to sneer at the expression of ethical concerns such as Johnson’s, that art should promote rather than degrade ethics, Kant and the Enlightened philosophers having provided an adequate foundation for modern ethics, but Mansfield Park disabuses the attentive reader of any such conceit. Kant doesn’t even seem to have understood (as Butler did) that ethics is primarily concerned with motivation (i.e., what is happening in the mind) abstracted of outcomes, just as natural philosophy is concerned with predicting natural causation abstracted of any intentional inputs. When Kant wasn’t trying to abstract ethics into formulae he could write persuasively but he and those that followed him don’t seem to have noticed that the gap between the content of his theories and the blurb used to market them.
Kant was trying to achieve the holy grail of replicating the successes of the natural sciences in ethics as can be seen in his propensity for proclaiming Copernican revolutions, so it would be well to consider what somebody who does deeply understand physics, its philosophy and history, and possessed a rare gift for explaining them, has to say on the matter.
The history of the thing [Newton’s law of gravitation] is this. The ancients first observed the way the planets seemed to move in the sky and concluded that they all, along with the earth, went around the sun. This discovery was later made independently by Copernicus, after people had forgotten that it had already been made.
Now the next question that came up for study was: exactly how do they go round the sun, that is, with exactly what kind of motion? Do they go with the sun as the centre of a circle, or do they go in some other kind of curve? How fast do they move? And so on. This discovery took longer to make. The times after Copernicus were times in which there were great debates about whether the planets in fact went around the sun along with the earth, or whether the earth was at the centre of the universe and so on. Then a man named Tycho Brahe evolved a way of answering the question. He thought that it might perhaps be a good idea to look very carefully and to record exactly where the planets appear in the sky, and then the alternative theories might be distinguished from one another. This is the key of the modern science and it was the beginning of the true understanding of Nature – this idea to look at the thing, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained might lie a clue to one or another theoretical interpretation. So Tycho, a rich man who owned an island near Copenhagen, outfitted his island with great brass circles and special observing positions, and recorded night after night the positions of the planets. It is only though such hard work that we can find anything.
When all these data were collected they came into the hands of Kepler, who then tried to analyse what kind of motion the planets made around the sun. At one stage he thought he had it; he figured out that they went round the sun in circles with the sun off centre. Then Kepler noticed that one planet, I think it was Mars, was eight minutes of arc off, and he decided that this was too big for Tycho Brahe to have made an error, and that this was not the right answer. So because of the precision of the experiments he was able to proceed to another trial and ultimately found out three things.
The crucial starting point, as Feynman noted, was de Brahe’s systematic accumulation of astronomical data, which was analysed by Kepler to provide mathematical models of the planetary laws and the first modern theory of celestial mechanics. Note that while Galileo’s telescope was a marvellous plaything for impressing ambassadors and the like, it played a peripheral role in the development of science, certainly in comparison to his own great achievements, which were to collect the data and build a mathematical model for terrestrial motion. Newton unified de Brahe/Kepler celestial mechanics with Galileo’s terrestrial mechanics to provide a universal mechanics that blew apart the medieval cosmos (see Koestler).
Note the order. The basic metaphysical and methodological framework was hit upon, and the data systematically collected over generations, being ordered in different strands, to be synthesised by somebody who had mastered the whole. Ethics is concerned with motivation and the Galilean/Newtonian methodological and the metaphysical frameworks that so heavily influenced Hume and Kant were inappropriate.
But the eighteenth century novelists had no such distractions, instead focusing on mastering the art of saving the psychological essence of daily life with all of its ethical preoccupations. Kant himself was famously so influenced, but unfortunately by the father of modern romanticism, a so-so novelist and worse moralist.
(v)
The result is all too clear in the severing of the heart and head, clearly in evidence in Amis’s review of Mansfield Park. In the first half of his essay, where he establishes his credentials as a ‘rational critic’ rather than one of the ‘going-through-the-motions-appreciators’, he demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the architecture of the novel, acknowledging that the Crawford’s social graces relative to Edmund and Fanny were ‘a large part of author’s theme’. But then comes the ethical critique—and Amis serves notice with his ‘moral ought’ auto-commentary— Amis unloads on them, his considerable intellect at the service of an apparently wounded passion, but without (as I have said) at all explaining what Fanny’s and Edmund’s great crimes are, who they have intentionally or negligently hurt or tried to hurt. It is the final essay in the casebook collection, and nothing illustrates more clearly this central theme of Mansfield Park and Jane Austen’s novels.
(Note that the presentation I have given here could be said to place some of the strands of critical assessment into a coherent framework in which appreciators like Tanner and Trilling are responding differently to depreciators like Farer and Amis, reflecting their different responses to the provocations of the novel. Where the authors take issue with Jane Austen’s ethics, as distinct from her artistic execution, they have failed to provide a coherent critique that withstands analysis. Apart from these failed ethical critiques their accounts of the novel show great penetration and agreement.)
Ethics can’t be captured in the statically-reified sentiment and rationality of the unreflective, authoritarian, Kantian Sir Thomas, his principles needing to be integrated with the ‘popular manners and more diffused intimacies’ of the Grants and Crawfords (II.X). In trying to bully Fanny into marrying Henry Sir Thomas finds that ‘independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days’ to be ‘offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence’ (III.I), but his own views are just as modern and open to criticism. People aren’t machines; wellbeing and goodness can’t be forced even onto people over which we have absolute power. In the world of Mansfield Park, psychological realities need to be attended to.
To be able to attend to psychological realities they need to be observable, something that Fanny Price constantly strives for. She is not an inert presence like Lady Bertram, nor a stupid presence like Mr Rushworth, indeed not a ‘shining character’, but with ‘a thousand good qualities’ (II.II). One of those is a capacity for stillness and a constant orientation towards tranquillity, something achieved through constant application, as Park Honan put it, ‘life as a struggle never won.’ By perpetually seeking to lose themselves in distraction all the young ones except Edmund and Fanny remain a mystery onto themselves. Trying to practice ethics like this is akin to pre-scientific practice of advancing speculations about the natural world without collecting any data. Yet this was the approach taken by the official moral philosophy that came out of the Enlightenment, with results to match.
Yet the Enlightenment didn’t fail us. A powerful tradition, shaping manners and conduct more directly than anything that came out of the universities, and carrying a genius just as characteristic of modernity as the natural sciences that the humanities seem perennially under pressure to ape, may contain at its heart a precious inheritance, the classical understanding of the good life, one that has safeguarded the heart of our own and other great civilisations for over a thousand years. William Cowper’s verses from The Task are worth repeating, for they sum up the central theme of Mansfield Park as well as any words have, and Mansfield Park could be understood as a commentary on them.
He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
He that is ever occupied in storms,
Or dives not for it or brings up instead,
Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.
William Cowper, The Task (Book III: The Garden)
In a revealing phrase Lionel Trilling [Trilling, 1954, p. 217] talks of the malice of irony, even irony in the ‘large derived’ sense of the world, which surely speaks of a modern aversion to judgement and self-scrutiny. Yet if neither treacherous sentiment nor rigid duties can be relied on, our disposition must be perpetually scrutinised if we are to attain ‘self-knowledge, generosity and humility’ (I.II).
Mansfield Park: Conclusion
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
5. Conclusion
(i)
It has almost become a truism that ‘When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’ (G. K. Chesterton). Yet there is an ethical corollary, namely, that the removal of divine judgement doesn’t lead to a gentle, non-judgemental place, but it’s opposite. The contemporary political and philosophical discourse is habitually harsh and judgemental, even when centrists are making their case, yet divines can lead rational debates on ethical matters without ducking the issues, and the contrast to the usual belligerence is remarkable. What is going on?
(ii)
In this essay I have tried to show that Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that Jane Austen first represented the modern personality’ in which the moral life is conceived, as never before, to be ‘complex and exhausting and difficult’, arises out of ethical confusion. Adena Rosmarin identified the ‘hermeneutic dance of bewildering perplexity’ at the heart of Emma, mirroring the heroine’s propensity to misread her world. In Mansfield Park the heroine’s stoic ethics are tested with Fanny repeatedly trying to ‘find her way to her duty’ (I.XVI), and the reader should expect to be faced with similar problems. We are quickly set up with Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris as patrons to the waif and the reader, like Sir Thomas, has made an investment in the novel’s heroine, and is challenged to be ‘the real and consistent patron of the selected child’ (I.I). The cultivated, clever and attractive Crawfords are introduced, yet, as Mary eventually tells us, they are corrupted.
The novel is related from Fanny’s perspective as she chooses between Edmund and Henry, with the reader being given every reason to join everyone in urging her to accept Henry’s proposals, for the reasons Sir Thomas outlines with great force at the opening of the third volume, excepting, of course, the ‘principles’ that Fanny can’t explain to Sir Thomas. But even for those with greater sensitivity and discernment than Sir Thomas, and all the knowledge that Sir Thomas lacks,
As I have argued, this is just not true. Henry has all the appearance of goodness but of goodness itself, understood as a propensity to avoid selfish action—the missing quality Fanny couldn’t name to her uncle—we see remarkably little, perhaps none. Even Mrs Norris’s loyalty to Maria at the close stands her in better stead.
The reader is put into a similar position over Henry as Edmund is over Mary. If they have understood Pride and Prejudice to be offering the possibility of morality as style, then Henry’s appearance of goodness will further try the reader’s patience with the heroine.
As Fanny romantic ideas are tested in the course of the novel, so are the reader’s. The Crawfords are given a choice; Mary could have staid away from the London scene that she knows is no good, but instead arranges her visit on realising that Edmund won’t deviate from his chosen vocation. This happens when Edmund and Fanny first dine at the parsonage in Volume II but when both families recollect there in the seventh chapter—the centre of the book—we see Henry’s plans for improving Thornton Lacey squelched by Edmund and receive Sir Thomas’s homily on the duties of a parish priest. Mary can no longer ‘shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune,’ (II.VII) and neither can the reader. At Portsmouth Fanny’s romantic disdain for the real world will get tested when, as Sir Thomas intends, she learns ‘the value of a good income’ (II.VI) but in rejecting Edmund’s modest proposal Mary’s worldly philosophy is dramatised, which she most fully elaborates in her debate with Edmund and Mrs Grant.
In Edmund’s sticking to his vocation and rejecting the Crawford’s flashy lifestyle and Fanny’s outright rejection of Henry, our modern romantic pieties—morality as style—are being called into question. Any disappointment on this will likely be directed at Fanny, firstly in rejecting all of this on moral grounds and disdaining the Crawford’s pretty surfaces, but again when we she is horrified by her Portsmouth home. But if Fanny is too nice the reader has to be careful, because Fanny’s assessment is reasonable. Mrs Price is not much of a parent, indeed ‘a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children’ (III.VIII) and Susan, who has none of Fanny’s unworldliness nor passive-aggressive tendencies, is there to show us it is so. As Edmund earns our early respect for taking Fanny in hand, so Fanny can when she does the same for Susan—provided the reader hasn’t given up on Fanny but remained ‘the real and consistent patron’.
The reader’s ethical framework gets drawn into the drama and tested along with Fanny’s, each having to ‘find her way to her duty’ (I.XVI). Fanny has to fight her jealousy, an affliction she shares with Julia after they both exclude themselves from the theatricals and get to watch Henry and Edmund make love under the guise of acting.
But the reader is looking on too, possibly as unaware as Julia with the connection to Fanny’s consciousness. Like Mrs Norris we can get distracted by Fanny’s prettier and more accomplished peers, or like Sir Thomas we can overlook her inner qualities or gets distracted by mercenary considerations, or perhaps like Fanny herself prioritise our romantic ideas over reality. All of these can lead us to abandon the heroine, our sentiments not being driven towards Fanny but away from her, and against our better judgement. To the extent that we abandon Fanny we will be condemned by our own judgement, for we will have condemned Mrs Norris, and perhaps Sir Thomas. Or maybe we have taken no interest in any of it, content to laugh at ‘the barking of Pug in his mistress’s arms’ (I.XIII).
Just as with Emma, the reader may settle back in the expectation of a tough time for the heroine on the way to her reward, but fairly quickly finds their judgement coming under psychological pressure. On the one hand the action demands that the reader take an active interest in their assessment—the novel is the least forgiving of poor judgement of all the Austen novels—and yet any temptations to side with the laissez faire Crawfords or the authoritarian Sir Thomas becomes problematic. The effect of the whole is to provoke ethical assessment while encouraging a sceptical attitude towards such assessments. It is a working out of the rational ethical life founded on self-examination.
(iii)
The novel, having the capacity to test and shape the reader’s ethics, is being used to construct an ethical laboratory and workshop, much as it was throughout the eighteenth century. Many in the eighteenth century worried about the potentially corrosive impact of the realistic novel on ethics.
Indeed the eighteenth century essayists were only too aware of the way that the realistic novel could shape the ethics of nations, not least Johnson himself in The Rambler.
The intellectual debates were as ferocious as the innovations were intellectually and psychologically sophisticated.
(iv)
The modern convention is to sneer at the expression of ethical concerns such as Johnson’s, that art should promote rather than degrade ethics, Kant and the Enlightened philosophers having provided an adequate foundation for modern ethics, but Mansfield Park disabuses the attentive reader of any such conceit. Kant doesn’t even seem to have understood (as Butler did) that ethics is primarily concerned with motivation (i.e., what is happening in the mind) abstracted of outcomes, just as natural philosophy is concerned with predicting natural causation abstracted of any intentional inputs. When Kant wasn’t trying to abstract ethics into formulae he could write persuasively but he and those that followed him don’t seem to have noticed that the gap between the content of his theories and the blurb used to market them.
Kant was trying to achieve the holy grail of replicating the successes of the natural sciences in ethics as can be seen in his propensity for proclaiming Copernican revolutions, so it would be well to consider what somebody who does deeply understand physics, its philosophy and history, and possessed a rare gift for explaining them, has to say on the matter.
The crucial starting point, as Feynman noted, was de Brahe’s systematic accumulation of astronomical data, which was analysed by Kepler to provide mathematical models of the planetary laws and the first modern theory of celestial mechanics. Note that while Galileo’s telescope was a marvellous plaything for impressing ambassadors and the like, it played a peripheral role in the development of science, certainly in comparison to his own great achievements, which were to collect the data and build a mathematical model for terrestrial motion. Newton unified de Brahe/Kepler celestial mechanics with Galileo’s terrestrial mechanics to provide a universal mechanics that blew apart the medieval cosmos (see Koestler).
Note the order. The basic metaphysical and methodological framework was hit upon, and the data systematically collected over generations, being ordered in different strands, to be synthesised by somebody who had mastered the whole. Ethics is concerned with motivation and the Galilean/Newtonian methodological and the metaphysical frameworks that so heavily influenced Hume and Kant were inappropriate.
But the eighteenth century novelists had no such distractions, instead focusing on mastering the art of saving the psychological essence of daily life with all of its ethical preoccupations. Kant himself was famously so influenced, but unfortunately by the father of modern romanticism, a so-so novelist and worse moralist.
(v)
The result is all too clear in the severing of the heart and head, clearly in evidence in Amis’s review of Mansfield Park. In the first half of his essay, where he establishes his credentials as a ‘rational critic’ rather than one of the ‘going-through-the-motions-appreciators’, he demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the architecture of the novel, acknowledging that the Crawford’s social graces relative to Edmund and Fanny were ‘a large part of author’s theme’. But then comes the ethical critique—and Amis serves notice with his ‘moral ought’ auto-commentary— Amis unloads on them, his considerable intellect at the service of an apparently wounded passion, but without (as I have said) at all explaining what Fanny’s and Edmund’s great crimes are, who they have intentionally or negligently hurt or tried to hurt. It is the final essay in the casebook collection, and nothing illustrates more clearly this central theme of Mansfield Park and Jane Austen’s novels.
(Note that the presentation I have given here could be said to place some of the strands of critical assessment into a coherent framework in which appreciators like Tanner and Trilling are responding differently to depreciators like Farer and Amis, reflecting their different responses to the provocations of the novel. Where the authors take issue with Jane Austen’s ethics, as distinct from her artistic execution, they have failed to provide a coherent critique that withstands analysis. Apart from these failed ethical critiques their accounts of the novel show great penetration and agreement.)
Ethics can’t be captured in the statically-reified sentiment and rationality of the unreflective, authoritarian, Kantian Sir Thomas, his principles needing to be integrated with the ‘popular manners and more diffused intimacies’ of the Grants and Crawfords (II.X). In trying to bully Fanny into marrying Henry Sir Thomas finds that ‘independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days’ to be ‘offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence’ (III.I), but his own views are just as modern and open to criticism. People aren’t machines; wellbeing and goodness can’t be forced even onto people over which we have absolute power. In the world of Mansfield Park, psychological realities need to be attended to.
To be able to attend to psychological realities they need to be observable, something that Fanny Price constantly strives for. She is not an inert presence like Lady Bertram, nor a stupid presence like Mr Rushworth, indeed not a ‘shining character’, but with ‘a thousand good qualities’ (II.II). One of those is a capacity for stillness and a constant orientation towards tranquillity, something achieved through constant application, as Park Honan put it, ‘life as a struggle never won.’ By perpetually seeking to lose themselves in distraction all the young ones except Edmund and Fanny remain a mystery onto themselves. Trying to practice ethics like this is akin to pre-scientific practice of advancing speculations about the natural world without collecting any data. Yet this was the approach taken by the official moral philosophy that came out of the Enlightenment, with results to match.
Yet the Enlightenment didn’t fail us. A powerful tradition, shaping manners and conduct more directly than anything that came out of the universities, and carrying a genius just as characteristic of modernity as the natural sciences that the humanities seem perennially under pressure to ape, may contain at its heart a precious inheritance, the classical understanding of the good life, one that has safeguarded the heart of our own and other great civilisations for over a thousand years. William Cowper’s verses from The Task are worth repeating, for they sum up the central theme of Mansfield Park as well as any words have, and Mansfield Park could be understood as a commentary on them.
In a revealing phrase Lionel Trilling [Trilling, 1954, p. 217] talks of the malice of irony, even irony in the ‘large derived’ sense of the world, which surely speaks of a modern aversion to judgement and self-scrutiny. Yet if neither treacherous sentiment nor rigid duties can be relied on, our disposition must be perpetually scrutinised if we are to attain ‘self-knowledge, generosity and humility’ (I.II).
Next: Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price