MANSFIELD PARK
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moment she wants to withdraw from the exigent energies of her actual
self, that she claims in fancy the right to be rich and fat and smooth
and dull like Lady Bertram, to sit on a cushion, to be a creature of
habit and an object of ritual deference, not to be conscious, especially
not to be conscious of herself. Lady Bertram is, we may imagine, her
mocking representation of her wish to escape from the requirements
of personality.
It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern
personality and the culture in which
it
had its being. Never before
had the moral life been shown as she shows it to be, never before
had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting.
Hegel speaks of the "secularization of spirituality" as a prime char–
acteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell
us what this involves. She is the first novelist to represent society, the
general culture, as playing a part in the moral life, generating the
concepts of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" which no earlier time would
have understood the meaning of, and which for us are so subtle that
they defy definition, and so powerful that none can escape their
sovereignty. She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules
our moral situation, the ubiquitous anonymous judgment to which we
respond, the necessity we feel to demonstrate the purity of our secular
spirituality, whose dark and dubious places are more numerous and
obscure than those of religious spirituality, to put our lives and styles
to the question, making sure that not only in deeds but in
decor
they
exhibit the signs of our belonging to the number of the secular–
spiritual elect.
She herself is an agent of the TelTor- we learn from her what
our lives should be and by what subtle and fierce criteria they will
be judged, and how to pass upon the lives of our friends and fellows.
Once we have comprehended her mode of judgment, the moral and
spiritual lessons of contemporary literature are easy-the metaphysics
of "sincerity" and "vulgarity" once mastered, the modern teachers,
Lawrence and Joyce, Yeats and Eliot, Proust and Gide, have but
little to add save in the way of abstruse contemporary examples.
To what extremes the Terror can go she herself has made all
too clear in the notorious passage in
Persuasion
in which she com–
ments on Mrs. Musgrove's "large, fat sighings" over her dead scape-
