510
PARTISAN REVIEW
grace son. "Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no neces–
sary proportions," she says. "A large bulky figure has as good a right
to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world.
But fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason
will patronize in vain-which taste cannot tolerate, which ridicule
will seize." We feel this to be unconscionable, and Henry James and
E. M. Forster will find occasion to warn us that it is one of the signs
of the death of the heart to regard a human being as an object of
greater or less
vertu;
in fairness to Jane Austen we must remember
that the passage occurs in the very novel which deals mercilessly
with Sir Walter Elliot for making just this illegitimate application of
taste to life. But although this aesthetic-spiritual snobbery is for Jane
Austen a unique lapse, it is an extension, an extravagance, of her
characteristic mode of judgment, and it leads us to see what is im–
plied by the "secularization of spirituality," which requires of us that
we judge not merely the moral act itself but also, and even more
searchingly, the quality of the agent. This is what Hegel has in mind
when he is at such pains to make his distinction between character
and personality and to show how the development of the idea of
personality is one of the elements of the secularization of spirituality.
Dewey followed Hegel in this when, in his
Ethics,
he said that moral
choice is not really dictated by the principle or the maxim that
is applicable to the situation but rather by the "kind of selfhood"
one wishes to "assume." And Nietzsche's conception of the Third
Morality, which takes cognizance of the
real-that
is, the unconscious
-intention of the agent, is the terrible instrument of criticism of this
new development of the moral life. Weare likely to feel that this
placing of the personality, of the quality of being, at the center of
the moral life is a chief glory of spirit in its modern manifestation,
and when we take pleasure in Jane Austen we are responding to her
primacy and brilliance in the exercise of this new mode of judgment.
Yet we at times become aware of the terrible strain it imposes upon
us, of the exhausting effort that the concept of personality requires
us to make, and of the pain of exacerbated sensitivity to others, lead–
ing to the
disgust
which is endemic in our culture.
Jane Austen's primacy in representing this great and decisive
mutation in the life of the spirit constitutes a large part of her claim
to greatness. But in her representation of the modern situation
M
ans-
