MANSFIELD PARK
499
senses of that word are in point here, the open avowal of principles
and beliefs as well as a man's commitment to a particular kind of
life-work. It is the latter sense that engages us first. The argument
between Fanny and Mary is over what will happen to Edmund as
a person, as a
man,
if he chooses to become a clergyman. To Mary,
every clergyman is the Mr. Collins of
Pride and Prejudice;
she
thinks of ordination as a surrender of manhood. But Fanny sees the
Church as a career that claims a man's best manly energies; her
expressed view of the Churchman's function is that which was to
develop through the century, exemplified in, say, Thomas Arnold,
who found the Church to be an adequate field for what he called
his talents for command.
The matter of a man's profession was of peculiar importance
to Jane Austen. It weighs heavily against Mr. Bennet that, his estate
being entailed, he has made no effort to secure his family against
his death, and by reason of his otiosity he is impotent to protect his
family's good name from the consequences of Lydia's sexual esca–
pade. He is represented as being not only less a man but also as less
a gentleman than his brother-in-law Gardiner, who is in trade in
London. Jane Austen's feelings about men in relation to their pro–
fession reach their highest intensity in
Persuasion,
in the great comic
scene in which Sir Walter Elliot is flattered by Mrs. Clay'S telling
him that every profession puts its mark upon a man's face, and that
a true gentleman will avoid this vulgar injury to his complexion.
And in the same novel much is made of the professional pride of
the Navy and the good effect it has upon the personal character.
In nineteenth-century England the ideal of professional commit–
ment inherits a large part of the moral prestige of the ideal of the
gentleman. Such figures as the engineer Daniel Doyce of
Little
Dorrit
or Dr. Lydgate of
Middlemarch
represent the developing be–
lief that a man's moral life is bound up with his loyalty to the
discipline of
his
calling. The concern with the profession was an as–
pect of the ethical concept which was prepotent in the spiritual
life of England in the nineteenth century, the concept of duty. The
Church, in its dominant form and characteristic virtue, was here
quite at one with the tendency of secular feeling; its preoccupation
may be said to have been less with the achievement of salvation
than with the performance of duty.
