MANSFIELD PARK
503
have the first brilliant example of a distinctively modern type, the
person who cultivates the
5t
yie
of sensitivity, virtue, and intelligence.
Henry Crawford has more sincerity than his sister, and the
adverse judgment which the novel makes on him is therefore ar–
rived 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. He is no less con–
scious of his lack of weight and solidity; his intense courtship of
Fanny is, we may say, his effort to add the gravity of principle to
his merely natural goodness. He becomes, however, the prey to his
own charm, and in his cold flirtation with Maria Bertram he is
trapped by his impersonation of passion- his role requires that he
carry Maria off from a dull marriage to a life of boring concupis–
cence. It is his sister's refusal to attach any moral importance to
this event that is the final proof of her deficiency in seriousness. Our
modern impulse to resist the condemnation of sexuality and of sexual
liberty cannot properly come into play here, as at first we think it
should. For it is not sexuality that is being condemned, but precisely
that form of a-sexuality that incurred D. H. Lawrence's greatest
scorn-that is, sexuality as a game, or as a drama, sexuality as an
expression of mere
will
or mere personality, as a sign of power, or
prestige, or autonomy: as, in short, an impersonation and an in–
sincerity.
A passage in one of her letters of 1814, written while
Mansfield
Park
was in composition, enforces upon us how personally Jane
Austen was involved in the question of principle as against personality,
of character as against style. A young man has been paying court to
her niece Fanny Knight, and the girl is troubled by, exactly, the
effect of
his
principledness on his style. Her aunt's comment is
especially interesting because it contains an avowal of sympathy
with Evangelicism, an opinion which is the reverse of that which
she had expressed in a letter of 1809 and had represented in
Pride
and Prejudice,
yet the religious opinion is but incidental to the
af–
firmation that is being made of the moral advantage of the pro–
fession of principle, whatever may be its effect on the personal style.
Mr.
J.
P.- has advantages which do not often meet in one person.
His only fault indeed seems Modesty.
If
he were less modest, he would
