502
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion
.as
a new mode of thought appropriate to that new sense of the
self which was romanticism's characteristic achievement. It was, he
said further, the self's method of defining itself. Involved as we all
are in this mode of thought and in this method of self-definition, we
are not likely to respond sympathetically to Jane Austen when she
puts it under attack as being dangerous to the integrity of the self
as a moral agent. Yet the testimony of John Keats stands in her
support-in one of his most notable letters Keats says of the poet
that, as poet, he cannot be a moral agent; he has no "character,"
no "self," no "identity"; he is concerned not with moral judgment
but with "gusto," subordinating his own being to that of the objects
of his creative regard. Wordsworth implies something of a related
sort when he contrasts the poet's volatility of mood with the bulking
permanence of identity of the Old Leech Gatherer. And of course
not only the poet but the reader may be said to be involved in the
problems of identity and of (in the literal sense) integrity. Literature
offers the experience of the diversification of the self, and Jane
Austen puts the question of literature at the moral center of her
novel.
The massive ado that is organized about the amateur theatricals
and the dangers of impersonation thus has a direct bearing upon the
matter of Edmund Bertram's profession. The election of a profession
is of course in a way the assumption of a role, but it is a permanent
impersonation which makes virtually impossible the choice of an–
other. It is a commitment which fixes the nature of the self.
The ado about the play extends its significance still further.
It points, as it were, to a great and curious triumph of Jane Austen's
art. The triumph consists in this-that although on a first reading
of
Mansfield Park
Mary Crawford's speeches are all delightful, they
diminish in charm as we read the novel a second time. We begin to
hear something disagreeable in their intonation: it is the peculiarly
modern bad quality which Jane Austen was the first to represent–
insincerity. This is a trait very different from the
hypocrisy
of the
earlier novelists. Mary Crawford's intention is not to deceive the
world but to comfort herself; she impersonates the woman she thinks
she ought to be. And as we become inured to the charm of her per–
formance we see through the moral impersonation and are troubled
that it should have been thought necessary. In Mary Crawford we
