506
PARTISAN REVIEW
personality, of principle as against style and grace of ease as against
grace of difficulty, it is an important consideration that the Craw–
fords are of London. Their manner is the London manner, their
style is the
chic
of the metropolis. The city bears the brunt of our
modern uneasiness about our life. We think of it as being the scene
and the cause of the loss of the simple integrity of the spirit-in our
dreams of our right true selves we live in the country. This common
mode of criticism of our culture is likely to express not merely our
dissatisfaction with our particular cultural situation but our dislike
of culture itself, or of any culture that is not a folk culture, that is
marked by the conflict of interests and the proliferation and conflict
of ideas. Yet the revulsion from the metropolis cannot be regarded
merely with skepticism; it plays too large and serious a part in our
literature to be thought of as nothing but a sentimentality.
To the style of London Sir Thomas Bertram is the principled
antagonist. The real reason for not giving the play, as everyone
knows, is that Sir Thomas would not permit it were he at home;
everyone knows that a sin is being committed against the absent
father. And Sir Thomas, when he returns before his expected time,
confirms their consciousness of sin.
It
is he who identifies the ob–
jection to the theatricals as being specifically that of impersonation.
His own self is an integer and he instinctively resists the diversifica–
tion of the self that is implied by the assumption of roles.
It
is he, in
his entire identification with his status and tradition, who makes of
Mansfield Park the citadel it is- it exists to front life and to repel
life's mutabilities, like the Peele Castle of Wordsworth's "Elegiac
Verses," of which it is said that it is "cased in the unfeeling armour
of old time."
In
this phrase Wordsworth figures in a very precise
way the Stoic doctrine of
apatheia,
the principled refusal to ex–
perience more motion than is forced upon one, the rejection of
sensibility as a danger to the integrity of the self.
Mansfield stands not only against London but also against what
is implied by Portsmouth on Fanny's visit to her family there. Fanny's
mother, Lady Bertram's sister, had made an unprosperous marriage,
and the Bertrams' minimal effort to assist her with the burdens of a
large family had been the occasion of Fanny's coming to live at
Mansfield nine years before. Her return to take her place in a home
not of actual poverty but of respectable sordidness makes one of the
