496
PARTISAN REVIEW
the world by condemning it, by withdrawing from it and shutting
it out, by making oneself and one's mode and principles of life the
very center of existence and to live the round of one's days in the
stasis and peace thus contrived-this, in an earlier age, was one of
the recognized strategies of life, but to us
it
seems not merely imprac–
ticable but almost wicked.
Yet
Mansfield Park
is a great novel, its greatne$ being com–
mensurate with its power to offend.
Mansfield Park
was published in 1814, only one year after the
publication of
Pride and Prejudice,
and no small part of its interest
derives from the fact that it seems to controvert everything that its
predecessor tells us about life. One of the striking things about
Pride
and Prejudice
is that it achieves a quality of transcendence through
comedy. The comic mode typically insists upon the fact of human
limitation, even of human littleness, but
Pride and Prejudice
makes
comedy reverse itself and yield the implication of a divine enlarge–
ment. The novel celebrates the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity,
and lightness, and associates them with happiness and virtue. Its
social doctrine is a generous one, asserting the right of at least the
good
individual to define himself according to his own essence. It is
animated by an impulse to forgiveness. One understands very easily
why many readers are moved to explain their pleasure in the book
by reference to Mozart, especially
The Marriage of Figaro.
Almost
the opposite can be said of
Mansfield Park.
Its impulse
is not to forgive but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom
but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celer–
ity, and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do
with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good
life.
Nobody, I
believ~,
has ever found it possible to like the heroine
of
Mansfield Park.
Fanny Price is overtly virtuous and consciously
virtuous. Our modern literary feeling is very strong against people
who, when they mean to be virtuous, believe they know how to
reach their goal and do reach it. We think that virtue is not inter–
esting, even that it is not really virtue, unless it manifests itself as
a product of "grace" operating through a strong inclination to sin.
Our favorite saint is likely to be Augustine; he is sweetened for us
