MANSFIELD PARK
505
the shining outward perfection of style, that it must maintain a
degree of roughness of texture, a certain hard literalness, that, for the
sake of its moral life, it must violate its own beauty by incorporating
some of the irreducible prosy actuality of the world. It is as
if
she
were saying of
Pride and Prejudice
what Henry James says of one
of the characters of his story "Crapy Cornelia": "Her grace of ease
was perfect, but it was all grace of ease, not a single shred of it grace
of uncertainty or of difficulty."*
Mansfield Park,
we may conceive, was the effort to encompass
the grace of uncertainty and difficulty. The idea of morality as
achieved style, as grace of ease, is not likely ever to be relinquished,
not merely because some writers will always assert it anew, but also
because morality itself will always insist on it-at a certain point in
its development, morality seeks to express its independence of the
grinding necessity by which it
is
engendered, and to claim for itself
the autonomy and gratuitousness of art. Yet the idea is one that
may easily deteriorate or be perverted. Style, which expresses the
innermost truth of any creation or action, can also hide the truth;
it is in this sense of the word that we speak of "mere style."
M ans–
field Park
proposes to us the possibility of this deception.
If
we per–
ceive this, we cannot say that the novel is without irony-we must
say, indeed, that its irony is more profound than that of any of Jane
Austen's novels.
In the investigation of the question of character as against
• This may be the place to remark that although the direct line of descent
from Jane Austen to Henry James has often been noted, and although there
can be no doubt of the lineage, J ames had a strange misconception of the
nature of the art of his ancestress. "Jane Austen, with her light felicity," he
says in
The Lesson of Bakac,
"leaves us hardly more curious of her process,
or of the experience that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story
from the garden bough." He says of her reputation (in 1905) that it is higher
than her intrinsic interest and attributes it to "the body of publishers, editors,
illustrators, producers of the present twaddle of magazines, who have found
their 'dear', our dear, everybody's dear, J ane so infinitely to their material
purpose." An acid response to the "dear Jane" myth is always commendable,
but it seems to have led James into a strange obtuseness: "The key to Jane
Austen's fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of
her facility, in part of her
unconsciousne~s
...." This failure of perception (and
syntax) is followed by an unhappy metaphor of Jane Austen musing over her
"work-basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool drawing-room of other
days." Jane Austen was, it need scarcely be said at this date, as little unconscious
as James himself either in her intentions or (as her remarks about the style of
Pride and Prejudice
show) in her "process."
