MANSFIELD PARK
501
years before, of "Tintern Abbey," the certitude that "Nature never
did betrayjThe heart that loved her": a new Paraclete is needed
and he comes in the shape of the Old Leech Gatherer, a man rock–
like in endurance, rocklike in insensibility, annealed by a simple,
rigorous religion, preserved in life and in virtue by the "anti-vital
element" and transfigured by that element.
That the self may destroy the self by the very energies that
define its being, that the self may be preserved by the negation of
its own energies-this, whether or not we agree, makes a paradox,
makes an irony, that catches our imagination. Much of the nine–
teenth-century preoccupation with duty was not a love of Law for
its own sake, but rather a concern with the hygiene of the self.
If
we are aware of this, we are prepared to take seriously an incident
in
Mansfield Park
that on its face is perfectly absurd.
The great fuss that is made over the amateur theatricals can
seem to us a mere travesty on virtue. And the more so because it is
never made clear why it is so very wrong for young people in a
dull country house to put on a play. The mystery deepens, as does
our sense that
Mansfield Park
represents an unusual state of the
author's mind, when we know that amateur theatricals were a favor–
ite amusement in Jane Austen's home. The play is Kotzebue's
Lovers'
Vows
and it deals with illicit love and a bastard, but Jane Austen,
as her letters and novels clearly show, was not a prude. Some of the
scenes of the play permit Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford to
make love in public, but this is not said to be decisively objection–
able. What is decisive is a traditional, almost primitive, feeling about
dramatic impersonation. We know of this, of course, from Plato, and
it
is
one of the points on which almost everyone feels superior to
Plato, but it may have more basis in actuality than we commonly
allow. It is the fear that the impersonation of a bad or inferior
character will have a harmful effect upon the impersonator, that,
indeed, the impersonation of any other self will diminish the in–
tegrity of the real self.
A right understanding of the seemingly absurd episode of the
play must dispel any doubt of the largeness of the cultural signifi–
cance of
Mansfield Park.
The American philosopher George Mead
has observed that the "assumption of roles" was one of the most
important elements of romanticism. Mead conceived of impersona-
