Sentimentalism

The bankruptcy of Moral Sense Theory and the Secularisation of Austen.

Posted: 1 March 2008 (printer-friendly permalink)

The Critique of Moral Sense Theory

Hume’s Sentimentalism

Ryle’s Moralising Austen

Where is the Real Frank Churchill?

The Secular Aristotelian Austen

Enlightenment?

Discussion:  (huh?)

The Critique of Moral Sense Theory

Throughout Sense and Sensibility Austen reminds us that we live in a ‘twilight of probability’[1], not just in the twist in the plot (such as Elinor’s misunderstanding of the significance of Edward’s ring in Volume I[2]) and the various mixings up of the suitors,[3] but also in a quite striking incidental scene:

I come now to the relation of a misfortune, which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood. It so happened that while her two sisters with Mrs. Jennings were first calling on her in Harley Street, another of her acquaintance had dropt in—a circumstance in itself not apparently likely to produce evil to her.  But while the imaginations of other people will carry them away to form wrong judgments of our conduct, and to decide on it by slight appearances, one's happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance.  In the present instance, this last-arrived lady allowed her fancy to so far outrun truth and probability, that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods, and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters, she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street; and this misconstruction produced within a day or two afterwards, cards of invitation for them as well as for their brother and sister, to a small musical party at her house.  The consequence of which was, that Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse, must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing to treat them with attention: and who could tell that they might not expect to go out with her a second time?  The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be her's.  But that was not enough; for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of any thing better from them.

Vol. II, XIV (36.6) [4]

Probabilities, chance, appearance, contingency, judgement, conduct and happiness, all compressed into a short comment following an intrusive authorial intervention—the reader can be left in little doubt of the authors epistemological concerns as they relate to ethics,  and, as the passage hints, knowledge of right and wrong, especially as it relates to one’s own intentions, is a central issue.  On the surface, the novel is about the external twilight of probability, the deceptiveness of appearances in the world and how seductive it is interpret evidence to suit desires and the appalling trouble it can follow if no attempt is made to check this natural tendency—but it would be well to consider whether there might be an analogous internal issue as, like Plato, Austen uses external dramatic narrative to reflect internal ethical problems.[5]  Plainly, Marianne, despite her excellent natural abilities and open, affectionate disposition has succeeded in ‘giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters’ (16.1), admits that had she died ‘it would have been self-destruction’ (46.28), and, of course, Elinor ‘suffer[s] almost as much’ but ‘certainly with less self-provocation, and greater fortitude’ (47.46).  While all this undoubtedly gets Elinor into much hot water with modern readers we are here trying to focus on the internal epistemological issue.

If it is accepted that we do indeed live in a twilight of probability with regards external phenomenon—and it is difficult to deny this—then why should internal surfaces be taken at face value?  If Willoughby appears as an intelligent, refined, sensitive and attractive young man but turns out to be quite the contrary then why should Marianne take it at face value that she is just, considerate, candid[6] and wise if her sentiments tell her that she is.  In Volume I we saw Marianne claiming in defence of her visit to Allenham with Willoughby that ‘if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong’ (13.72)—indicating her commitment to moral sense theory—but her embarrassment on Mrs Jennings blowing her cover shows how untenable this is, and is forced to the conclusion on further reflection that ‘it was rather ill-judged in me to go to Allenham’ (13.76).  And we saw that, especially under Willoughby’s malign influence, that there wasn’t a crime that Marianne wasn’t guilty of in some degree that she (and we) censor the vulgarians for,[7] but the reader has to be sharp to see this, for the author skilfully marshals our sentiments into line with Marianne’s in approving of her while condemning their sins; Austen is encouraging us to (mis)read the novel in a way that parallels mistakes made by the sympathetic protagonists, further demonstrating how fickle sentiments are when allowed free play and unchecked by the critical faculties, especially once the ground has been well prepared, which Austen is careful to do.

There is also a suggestion that those with good critical faculties must be especially careful to use them properly otherwise they are liable to be misused.  Marianne before her illness egregiously abuses her natural intelligence (as do Lucy and Willoughby throughout) which gives rise to much unhappiness, but after her illness gives her ‘leisure and calmness for serious recollection’ she sees ‘since the beginning of our acquaintance with him last autumn, nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others’ (46.28).  Charlotte however is irredeemably silly, lacking any critical faculties whatsoever, but her naturally generosity and warm-heartedness serve her well.

As Joseph Butler says,

Acting, conduct, behaviour, abstracted from all regard to what is, in fact and event, the consequence of it, is itself the natural object of the moral discernment; as speculative truth and falsehood is of speculative reason.

Joseph Butler, Dissertation II—Of the Nature of Virtue, p. 305

In neo-Butlerian terms, natural science concerns itself primarily with external, physical phenomena while ethics concerns itself primarily with internal mental phenomenon, especially intentions.  However, it makes no more sense to accept sentiments at face value than, for example, to accept that a straight object partially immersed in water becomes bent because it appears so.  The test of science is the ability to make good predictions, and in Austen’s and Butler’s ethics the same principals apply.

“Colonel Brandon's character,” said Elinor, “as an excellent man, is well established.”

“I know it is”—replied her mother seriously, “or after such a warning, I should be the last to encourage such affection, or even to be pleased by it.  But his coming for me as he did, with such active, such ready friendship, is enough to prove him one of the worthiest of men.”

“His character, however,” answered Elinor, “does not rest on one act of kindness, to which his affection for Marianne, were humanity out of the case, would have prompted him.  To Mrs. Jennings, to the Middletons, he has been long and intimately known; they equally love and respect him; and even my own knowledge of him, though lately acquired, is very considerable; and so highly do I value and esteem him, that if Marianne can be happy with him, I shall be as ready as yourself to think our connection the greatest blessing to us in the world.

Vol. III, Ch. IX (45.15-7)

It is perhaps understandable that Elinor should become a little didactic given her mother’s apparent failure even at this stage to see her failure.  Up until the catastrophe we see Elinor urging caution to Marianne and their mother and trying to get meaningful character references for Willoughby.[8] Elinor is trying to make predictions about the future conduct of someone before they gain absolute power over a young woman—Will they continue to treat their partner with respect when the relationship comes under strain?  Will they live responsibly, respectably within their means?  And so on.  Of course the only way to reliably answer such questions is to study the history of the person concerned, which means getting character references from trustworthy people with whom they have ‘been long and intimately known’ as was the case with Colonel Brandon and Mrs Jennings, the Middletons and even Elinor herself.

Hume’s Sentimentalism

It is said that David Hume had Joseph Butler in mind in preparing his A Treatise of Human Nature.

To approve of a character is to feel an original delight upon its appearance.  To disapprove of it is to be sensible of an uneasiness.  The pain and pleasure, therefore, being the primary causes of vice and virtue, must also be the causes of all their effects, and consequently of pride and humility, which are the unavoidable attendants of that distinction.

But supposing this hypothesis of moral philosophy shou'd be allow'd to be false, 'tis still evident, that pain and pleasure, if not the causes of vice and virtue, are at least inseparable from them.  A generous and noble character affords a satisfaction even in the survey; and when presented to us, tho' only in a poem or fable, never fails to charm and delight us.  On the other hand cruelty and treachery displease from their very nature; nor is it possible ever to reconcile us to these qualities, either in ourselves or others.  Thus one hypothesis of morality is an undeniable proof of the foregoing system, and the other at worst agrees with it.  But pride and humility arise not from these qualities alone of the mind, which, according to the vulgar systems of ethicks, have been comprehended as parts of moral duty, but from any other that has a connexion with pleasure and uneasiness.

§2.1.7, Of Vice and Virtue, pp. 347-8

Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates. […]

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. 

§2.3.3, Of the Influencing Motives of the Will, p. 460-2

Thus the course of the argument leads us to conclude, that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them.  Our decisions concerning moral rectitude and depravity are evidently perceptions; and as all perceptions are either impressions or ideas, the exclusion of the one is a convincing argument for the other.  Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judg’d of; tho' this feeling or sentiment is commonly so soft and gentle, that we are apt to confound it with an idea, according to our common custom of taking all things for the same, which have any near resemblance to each other.

The next question is, Of what nature are these impressions, and after what manner do they operate upon us?  Here we cannot remain long in suspense, but must pronounce the impression arising from virtue, to be agreeable, and that proceding from vice to be uneasy.  Every moments experience must convince us of this.  There is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble and generous action; nor any which gives us more abhorrence than one that is cruel and treacherous.  No enjoyment equals the satisfaction we receive from the company of those we love and esteem; as the greatest of all punishments is to be oblig’d to pass our lives with those we hate or contemn.  A very play or romance may afford us instances of this pleasure, which virtue conveys to us; and pain, which arises from vice.

3.1.2 Moral Distinctions Deriv’d from a Moral Sense, pp. 522

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

With or without its nobler parts there can be little doubt that Butler would have much to disagree with and Sense and Sensibility shows us why.  In retrospect it was inevitable that moral sense theory would find favour in the eighteenth century.  Gentleman philosophers like Shaftesbury with the means to saturate their environment with exotic and beautiful art would naturally want to establish that this cultivation of their aesthetic sensibilities was the route to becoming a morally better person.  Any people that succeed in concentrating wealth around themselves are bound to be tempted by this route, and in many respects many of the middle classes in the industrial world remain in the same situation as the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.

Further with the rise of science and the triumph of the Newtonian synthesis sweeping aside the medieval cosmos there was a strong sense, reinforced by the great European schism of the reformation, that the old authorities that guaranteed and underpinned the ethical foundations of society weren’t safe, and (lets be honest) provided some space that gentleman scholars sought to occupy.  And it should come as no surprise that they chose as inspiration the scientific method that the natural philosophers had used to such good effect to carry all before them, both Hume and Kant saying in the prefaces to their magna opera that they aimed to replicate the success of the scientific method.  They were both looking to found a science of, ethics of course.

It is inevitable that a people that has gained unprecedented powers to shape their environment (as those in the modern industrial world have) would want to cultivate an ethic that seeks to place the heart firmly in control of the head.  Firstly the power of our intellectual faculties are not a little intimidating and so we naturally don’t want to turn them on ourselves.  Secondly, on encountering a collision between the way of things and the way we want them to be that we should cultivate an ethic that encourages a resolution by shaping our environment to meet our expectations.

Further, the natural philosophers succeeded by finding productive ways of breaking reality into simpler parts whose relationships can be explained with mathematical laws, something that Hume was trying to reproduce, though without much success (see The War of Ideas on Gilbert Ryle’s critique).  It is at about this stage that the division between head and heart seems to have became much more exaggerated as shown by the clumsiness with which classical concepts like Greek ψυχή and Sanskrit citta (typically translated with some combination of mind/self/soul and mind-heart, respectively).

As I have shown in this book, a close reading of the critical literature on Austen reveals just how powerful this idea is—the pre-eminent role that sentiment has in judgement—with the critics repeatedly confusing judgement and sentiment, how we feel about a character (whether we approve or disapprove) and then trying to rationalise the sentiments and nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of Marianne.  The evidence is that Austen used all the devices of sentimental fiction to get us to take Marianne to our hearts while structuring the plot to show that ‘judgment in serious matters’ (17.39) was seriously awry, and on analysis not much better than the host of vulgarians she (and we) heartily disapprove of.  Austen continued to this motif throughout for the remainder of the novels she published, with tension between sentiment and judgement in the pairing of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Fanny Price and Mary Crawford and Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax.  The cycle of novels demonstrates consistently that sentiment cannot be left unsupervised to judge character, that Hume’s idea that ‘generous and noble character affords a satisfaction even in the survey’ is no more generally true than it is true that straight things half-immersed in water are bent because they appear so.  It is often assumed that Austen was interested in ‘every common-place notion of decorum’ (10.5) to the sacrifice of everything else, yet nothing could be further from the truth (see the following section, Ryle’s Moralising Austen).  Austen was showing up our preoccupation with surfaces, our reluctance to challenge the sentimental basis of our judgements.

No other work that I am aware of does such a thorough job of exposing the nakedness of Hume’s (and the enlightenment’s and modernity’s) sentimental project, blasting its ethical system into rubble, or at least it ought to have done, for as we know it did no such thing.  Hume was a prophet.  When he said that ‘Reason is and ought to be a slave of the passions’[9] he was fixing the philosophy of the enlightenment; Hume’s treatise and everything that flowed from it is self-inoculated and quite immune from any objections founded in ‘vulgar systems of ethicks’[10] because it offers up a narative that is just too congenial for the modern sensibility.

Ryle’s Moralising Austen

If Austen has demolished Hume’s sentimentalism, arguing as he did that the distinction between vice and virtue is an aesthetic one, it is interesting to note the philosopher Gilbert Ryle making the case that Austen, either directly or indirectly, a disciple of that arch-sentimentalist and aesthete, Lord Shaftesbury.

So Jane Austen’s moral system was a secular, Aristotelian ethic-cum-aesthetic, but to say all this is to say that her moral Weltanschauung was akin to that of Lord Shaftesbury.  Shaftesbury too had, a century before, assimilated moral sense to artistic sense, aesthetic taste to moral taste.  A Grecian by study and predilection, he had followed Aristotle in preference to Plato, the Stoics or the Epicureans.  A Deist rather than a Christian, he had based his religion, such as it was, on his ethics and aesthetics, rather than these on his religion.  So I now put forward the historical hypothesis that Jane Austen’s specific moral ideas derived, knowingly or unknowingly, from Shaftesbury.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 287

As is to be expected, in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park Austen has blotted her copy book by descending into preaching and moralising.

Jane Austen did, then, consider quite general or theoretical questions.  These questions were all moral questions; though only in Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility did she cross over the boundary into moralising.  I am now going to be more specific and say what kind of ideas were congenial to her.  I will try to bring out together both what I mean by this question and what its answer is.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 283-4

One is left to wonder how can one write on ethics without moralising.  She was indeed interested in the ‘general theoretical questions’ but what good is any general theory if it never, ever gets realised in any particular instances.  Only a thoroughly enlightened academic professor could seriously propose that an ethical system must never be used to determine the wisdom[11] of any particular course of action.

Ryle identifies two camps of moralists in the eighteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, and in other centuries too, moralists tended to belong to one of two camps.  There was what I shall call, with conscious crudity, the Calvinist camp, and there was what I shall call the Aristotelian camp.  A moralist of the Calvinist type thinks, like a criminal lawyer, of human beings as either saved or Damned, either Elect or reject, either children of Virtue or children of Vice, either heading for Heaven or heading for Hell, either White or Black, either Innocent or Guilty, either saints or Sinners.  The Calvinist moral psychology is correspondingly bipolar.  People are dragged upwards by Soul or Spirit or Reason or Conscience; but they are dragged down by Body or Flesh or Passion or Pleasure or Desire or Inclination.  A man is an unhappy combination of a white angelic part and a black satanic part.  At the best, the angelic part has the satanic part cowed and starved and subjugated now, and can hope to be released altogether from it in future.  Man’s life here is either a life of Sin or else is a life of self-extrication from Sin.  We find people being depicted in such terms in plenty of such places.  The seducer in The Vicar of Wakefield is wickedness incarnate.  So he has no other ordinary qualities.  Fanny Burney’s bad characters are pure stage-villains.  Occasionally Johnson in the Rambler depicts persons who are all Black; and since they possess no Tuesday morning attributes, we cannot remember a thing about them afterwards.  They are black cardboard and nothing more.

In contrast with this, the Aristotelian pattern of ethical ideas represents people as differing from one another in degree and not in kind, and differing from one another not in respect just of a single generic Sunday attribute, Goodness, say, or else Wickedness, but in respect of a whole spectrum of specific week-day attributes.  A is a bit more irritable and ambitious than B, but less indolent and less sentimental.  C is meaner and quicker witted than D, and D is greedier and more athletic than C.  And so on.  A person is not black or white, but irridescent with all colours of the rainbow; and he is not a flat plane, but a highly irregular solid.  He is not only Good or Bad, blankly angelic or fiendish; he is better than most in one respect, about level with the average in another respect, and a bit, perhaps a big bit, deficient in a third respect.  In fact he is like the people we really know, in a way in which we do not know and could not know any people who are just Bad or else just Good.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, pp. 284-5

According to this narrative the eighteenth century was populated by religious types who follow Augustine and see the world in black and white with people either getting elected as saints or damned as sinners, as against secular followers of Aristotle who see a multicoloured world with all of us being made up of good and bard parts.  With such stark (‘bipolar’) choices it is entirely predictable that Austen should (with a few regrettable lapses) get nudged into the secular Aristotelian camp.

Jane Austen’s moral ideas are, with certain exceptions, ideas of the Aristotelian and not of the Calvinist pattern.  Much though she had learned from Johnson, this she had not learned from him.  When Johnson is being ethically solemn, he draws people in black or white.  So they never come to life, any more than the North Pole and the South Pole display any scenic features.  Jane Austen’s people are, nearly always, alive all over, all through and all round, displaying admirably or amusingly or deplorably proportioned mixtures if all the colours that there are, save pure White and pure Black.  If a Calvinist critic were to ask us whether Mr Collins was Hell-bound or Heaven-bent, we could not answer.  The question does not apply.  Mr Collins belongs to neither pole; he belongs to a very particular parish in the English midlands.  He is a stupid, complacent and inflated ass, but a Sinner? No. A saint? No. He is just a ridiculous figure, that is, a figure for which the Calvinist ethical psychology does not cater.  The questions was Emma Good?  Was she Bad? are equally unanswerable and equally uninteresting; obviously, too, eternal Hell-fire is not required for her.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 285

The reservations are of course that the novels should pass judgement on any of the protagonists, especially the unethical characters in the darker novels that trial the heroine’s sound ethics (Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persuasion).

Let me now bring out my reservations.  Jane Austen does, with obvious reluctance and literary embarrassment, use the criminal lawyer’s Black-White process three or four times.  Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility begins by being or at least seems to be, behind he attractive exterior, black hearted.  It turns out that he is only a bit grey at heart and not black.  The latter shade is reserved for his fiancée, whom therefore we do not meet.  In Pride and Prejudice Wickham and Lydia do become regulation Sinners, as do Mr Elliot and Mrs Clay in Persuasion.  Fortunately London exists, that desperate but comfortingly remote metropolis; so Jane Austen smartly bundles off her shadowy representatives of vice to the convenient sink.  It is London that Henry Crawford and Maria enjoy or endure their guilty association.  Thus Jane Austen is exempted by the width of the Home Counties from having to portray in her pastel shades the ebony complexions of urban sin.  Human saints and angels gave her no such literary anxieties.  She just forgot that there were officially supposed to exist such arctic paragons, a piece of forgetfulness for which we are not inclined to reprove her.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 285

Again we are presented with the curious idea that one can develop a system of ethics yet never call it into action to make a judgement.  Only a complete idiot would imagine that people come in two varieties, but that doesn’t mean that we can never be called on to make any ethical decisions about whether it is wise to disregard the conventions of society, or encourage the friendship of a Lucy Steele or the suit of a John Willoughby.

In one area it is essential to understand character in Austen’s world: in choosing a marriage partner, and we see Emma Woodhouse has to come to a judgement about Frank Churchill with her mentor (and future husband).

Where is the Real Frank Churchill?

For those who haven’t read Emma, or have forgotten the plot, Frank is the son of Mr Weston (the husband of Emma’s governess) by a previous marriage.  On the early death of Mr Weston’s first wife and Frank’s mother, Frank was adopted by the Churchill’s, rich relations of his mother who disapproved of her marriage to Mr Weston, the adopted mother being proud and jealous; Frank has never visited his Father in Highbury, even on being remarried.  (By the social conventions of the day this was regarded as a snub, especially to Mrs Weston.)  In the background of Emma and Knightley’s discussion of Frank Churchill at the end of Volume I,[12] there is the expected pairing off of Emma and Frank and Mr Knightley’s resistance to this idea.

“The Churchills are very likely in fault,” said Mr. Knightley, coolly; “but I dare say he might come if he would.”

“I do not know why you should say so.  He wishes exceedingly to come; but his uncle and aunt will not spare him.”

“I cannot believe that he has not the power of coming, if he made a point of it.  It is too unlikely, for me to believe it without proof.”

“How odd you are!  What has Mr. Frank Churchill done, to make you suppose him such an unnatural creature?”

Isn’t this a striking choice of words—‘an unnatural creature’.  This is the line that Emma is follows, arguing that Frank is a product of his conditioning, and therefore censure of his conduct is misplaced for if any of us were placed in Frank’s shoes, subjected to the same conditioning we would do the same. Also by suggesting that Frank is unnatural Emma is hinting that Knightley doesn’t have in mind any Frank Churchill to be found in reality, but a projection of Knightley’s inclination to censure him.

“I am not supposing him at all an unnatural creature, in suspecting that he may have learnt to be above his connexions, and to care very little for any thing but his own pleasure, from living with those who have always set him the example of it.  It is a great deal more natural than one could wish, that a young man, brought up by those who are proud, luxurious, and selfish, should be proud, luxurious, and selfish too.  If Frank Churchill had wanted to see his father, he would have contrived it between September and January.  A man at his age–what is he?–three or four-and-twenty–cannot be without the means of doing as much as that.  It is impossible.”

Knightley agrees that Frank’s character is shaped by his background, but points out that that very background is most likely to produce someone with a defective character.

“That's easily said, and easily felt by you, who have always been your own master.  You are the worst judge in the world, Mr. Knightley, of the difficulties of dependence.  You do not know what it is to have tempers to manage.”

“It is not to be conceived that a man of three or four-and-twenty should not have liberty of mind or limb to that amount.  He cannot want money–he cannot want leisure.  We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom.  We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other.  A little while ago, he was at Weymouth. This proves that he can leave the Churchills.”

“Yes, sometimes he can.”

“And those times are whenever he thinks it worth his while; whenever there is any temptation of pleasure.”

“It is very unfair to judge of any body's conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation.  Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.  We ought to be acquainted with Enscombe, and with Mrs. Churchill's temper, before we pretend to decide upon what her nephew can do. He may, at times, be able to do a great deal more than he can at others.”

“There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution.  It is Frank Churchill's duty to pay this attention to his father.  He knows it to be so, by his promises and messages; but if he wished to do it, it might be done.  A man who felt rightly would say at once, simply and resolutely, to Mrs. Churchill–`Every sacrifice of mere pleasure you will always find me ready to make to your convenience; but I must go and see my father immediately. I know he would be hurt by my failing in such a mark of respect to him on the present occasion.  I shall, therefore, set off to-morrow.'–If he would say so to her at once, in the tone of decision becoming a man, there would be no opposition made to his going.”

“No,” said Emma, laughing; “but perhaps there might be some made to his coming back again.  Such language for a young man entirely dependent, to use!–Nobody but you, Mr. Knightley, would imagine it possible.  But you have not an idea of what is requisite in situations directly opposite to your own.  Mr. Frank Churchill to be making such a speech as that to the uncle and aunt, who have brought him up, and are to provide for him!–Standing up in the middle of the room, I suppose, and speaking as loud as he could!–How can you imagine such conduct practicable?”

“Depend upon it, Emma, a sensible man would find no difficulty in it. He would feel himself in the right; and the declaration–made, of course, as a man of sense would make it, in a proper manner–would do him more good, raise him higher, fix his interest stronger with the people he depended on, than all that a line of shifts and expedients can ever do.  Respect would be added to affection.  They would feel that they could trust him; that the nephew who had done rightly by his father, would do rightly by them; for they know, as well as he does, as well as all the world must know, that he ought to pay this visit to his father; and while meanly exerting their power to delay it, are in their hearts not thinking the better of him for submitting to their whims.  Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.  If he would act in this sort of manner, on principle, consistently, regularly, their little minds would bend to his.”

“I rather doubt that.  You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.  I can imagine, that if you, as you are, Mr. Knightley, were to be transported and placed all at once in Mr. Frank Churchill's situation, you would be able to say and do just what you have been recommending for him; and it might have a very good effect.  The Churchills might not have a word to say in return; but then, you would have no habits of early obedience and long observance to break through.  To him who has, it might not be so easy to burst forth at once into perfect independence, and set all their claims on his gratitude and regard at nought.  He may have as strong a sense of what would be right, as you can have, without being so equal, under particular circumstances, to act up to it.”

“Then it would not be so strong a sense.  If it failed to produce equal exertion, it could not be an equal conviction.”

“Oh, the difference of situation and habit!  I wish you would try to understand what an amiable young man may be likely to feel in directly opposing those, whom as child and boy he has been looking up to all his life.”

“Our amiable young man is a very weak young man, if this be the first occasion of his carrying through a resolution to do right against the will of others.  It ought to have been a habit with him by this time, of following his duty, instead of consulting expediency. I can allow for the fears of the child, but not of the man.  As he became rational, he ought to have roused himself and shaken off all that was unworthy in their authority.  He ought to have opposed the first attempt on their side to make him slight his father.  Had he begun as he ought, there would have been no difficulty now.”

“We shall never agree about him,” cried Emma; “but that is nothing extraordinary.  I have not the least idea of his being a weak young man:  I feel sure that he is not.  Mr. Weston would not be blind to folly, though in his own son; but he is very likely to have a more yielding, complying, mild disposition than would suit your notions of man's perfection.  I dare say he has; and though it may cut him off from some advantages, it will secure him many others.”

“Yes; all the advantages of sitting still when he ought to move, and of leading a life of mere idle pleasure, and fancying himself extremely expert in finding excuses for it.  He can sit down and write a fine flourishing letter, full of professions and falsehoods, and persuade himself that he has hit upon the very best method in the world of preserving peace at home and preventing his father's having any right to complain.  His letters disgust me.”

“Your feelings are singular.  They seem to satisfy every body else.”

“I suspect they do not satisfy Mrs. Weston.  They hardly can satisfy a woman of her good sense and quick feelings:  standing in a mother's place, but without a mother's affection to blind her.  It is on her account that attention to Randalls is doubly due, and she must doubly feel the omission.  Had she been a person of consequence herself, he would have come I dare say; and it would not have signified whether he did or no.  Can you think your friend behindhand in these sort of considerations?  Do you suppose she does not often say all this to herself?  No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English.  He may be very ‘amiable,’ have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.”

“You seem determined to think ill of him.”

“Me!—not at all,” replied Mr. Knightley, rather displeased; “I do not want to think ill of him.  I should be as ready to acknowledge his merits as any other man; but I hear of none, except what are merely personal; that he is well-grown and good-looking, with smooth, plausible manners.”

Our modern sensibilities are inclined to sympathise with Emma’s perspective and dismiss Mr Knightley’s assessment as being unrealistic and unsympathetic.  Frank Churchill does have to struggle with his defective upbringing, and he should engage our compassion on that account; in this respect Emma’s assessment is wiser and Mr Knightley does suffer from jealousy of Frank, which would have been softened if he had, as Emma suggested, been more sympathetic towards Frank.

However, part of Knightley’s frustration is caused by the hurt of seeing Emma (whom he has tried to protect from childhood from the grosser deficiencies of Emma’s all-to-pliant father and governess) fail to accurately judge the character of Frank Churchill, for, as much as Knightley should be paying attention to Emma, Emma should be listening to Knightley—Frank Churchill does have all the defects of character that Knightley predicts and if Emma had taken this on board and been paying attention accordingly she could have avoided much grief.

Where is the objectively established Frank Churchill?  Should he arouse our compassion or censure?  Where is there a Frank Churchill to be found apart from the sum total of his conditioning?  Whether we should see Frank in a compassionate or censorious light should depend upon our the context—someone struggling with a jealous heart might find a compassionate approach may help prevent a distorting tendency to see Frank overly negatively.  If one is assessing Frank as a husband (as Emma was) then such consideration should certainly be set aside (in Austen’s view) as it is likely to distort judgement and work against an accurate assessment of his suitability as a husband.  The ‘correct’ view of Frank Churchill can’t be separated from the observer and context.  This reflects Elinor’s doctrine of both striving to see clearly and treating people properly.

The Secular Aristotelian Austen

Religion, like sex, in an Austen novel is to be found everywhere and nowhere, which has posed some problems for her critics.

Not only was Jane Austen’s ethic, if that is not too academic a word, Aristotelian in type, as opposed to Calvinistic, it was also secular as opposed to religious.  I am sure that she was personally not merely the dutiful daughter of a clergyman, but was genuinely pious.  Yet hardly a whisper of piety enters into even the most serious and most anguished meditations of her heroines.  They never pray and they never give thanks on their knees.  Three of her heroes go into the Church, and Edmund has to defend his vocations against the cynicisms of the Crawfords.  But not a hint is given that he regards his clerical duty as that of saving souls.  Routine church-going on Sunday with the rest of the family gets a passing mention three or four times, and Fanny is once stated as religious.  But that is all.  I am not suggesting that Jane Austen’s girls are atheists, agnostics or Deists.  I am only saying that when Jane Austen writes about them, she draws a curtain between her Sunday thoughts, whatever they were, and her creative imagination.  her heroines face their moral difficulties and solve their moral problems without recourse to religious faith or theological doctrines.  Nor does it ever occur to them to seek the counsels of a clergyman.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 284-7

Ryle is by no means the only one to assume that from the low profile of religiosity in the novels that, ‘whatever Miss Austen the sister of Henry may have believed, Jane Austen the novelist did not believe in God’, because

[…] she did not arrange, control or interpret her deepest experience in the light of these opinions or this piety—did not, in such a sense, believe.  It does not matter which of these we say, for they mean the same: Jane Austen the writer is an instrument for disentangling in the mind and character of Miss Austen what beliefs were on the deepest level, really accepted.

I say that Jane Austen the novelist did not believe in God because God is totally absent from her work.  A person may remain silent about a deeply held and genuine belief, but not a writer: all that exists in a writer’s work is what he creates.

Laurence Lerner, The Truthtellers: Jane Austen, George Eliot & D. H. Lawrence, pp. 23-4

We are asked to believe that that a critic’s understanding of the spiritual dimension of a writer is more important than the life-long intimate relationship of the author’s family (who nevertheless were intimately familiar with the writer’s works), also ignoring the judgement of one of her most important critics, Archbishop Richard Whately, who famously said:

Miss Austin has the merit (in our judgment most essential) of being evidently a Christian writer: a merit which is much enhanced, both on the score of good taste, and of practical utility, by her religion being not at all obtrusive.

Richard Whately, Whately on Jane Austen, p. 94

Whately was a contemporary, a co-religionist, and amply qualified to comment on literary and religious matters and he is telling us that that it is clear from his reading of the text that she was a Christian writer, reinforcing Henry Austen’s point.  From Ryle’s and Lerner’s comments it is pretty clear that their understanding of religion is not much deeper than the Crawfords.  While this shouldn’t be surprising, or wrong in itself, it is surprising to see them pontificating on Austen’s religiosity as represented in the novels.

After reminding us that Austen didn’t portray all of her parsons in the most sympathetic light, Lerner moves on to Edmund Bertram.

What is wrong with Mr Collins as a clergyman?  His selfishness, his lack of imagination, would be faults in anyone: what is more specific is that he regards religion as a social institution, not as a personal experience.  But so does Henry Tilney, in Northanger Abbey—so, even, does Edmund Bertram:

I cannot call that situation nothing which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally, which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence.[13]

How much should we read into the ‘consequently’?  Is Edmund saying that religion and morals matter in so far as they influence manners?  Certainly ‘religion’ is an automatic word here—it is not by awakening faith that Jane Austen’s clergymen will wield influence.  As we read on, the stress on manners becomes even clearer:

[I]t is not in fine preaching only that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish and his neighbourhood, where the parish and neighbourhood are of a size capable of knowing his private character, and observing his general conduct, which in London can rarely be the case.  The clergy are lost there in the crowds of their parishioners.  They are known to the largest part only as preachers.[14]

It is only as a man, we here realise, that the clergyman will be watched, not as a priest.  His manners will be better observed by country neighbours, it is true; but the depth of religious experience does not rub off in neighbourly contact—indeed it is probably better seen in preaching.  Even to Edmund, there will be nothing religious about the duties of the admirable clergyman he will (of course) make.

Laurence Lerner, The Truthtellers: Jane Austen, George Eliot & D. H. Lawrence, pp. 24-5

But this thesis is highly dependent upon a particular understanding of what it means to be religious, or to have a spiritual dimension to one’s life, and Lerner seems to believe that it is made up entirely of sentiment, of episodes of feeling, but this isn’t at all Austen’s idea of what it means to be religious.  Though Jane Austen was as discriminating about preaching as anyone,[15] the test of spiritual maturity, and the most important ‘preaching’, is to be seen in the conduct of life and this case is developed at some length in Mansfield Park; Henry Crawford’s seeing preaching as essentially a performance art is a reflection on his approach to life, and Fanny wants nothing to do with it.[16]

For Austen sentiments of the spirit and flesh are private and have no business in a novel, but it is interesting to consider what the current Archbishop of Canterbury has to say when asked to explain God.

God is, as one of my predecessors as archbishop of Canterbury once put it, that than which nothing greater can be thought.  In other words, the most fundamental, the most comprehensive form of agency, activity, causality.  That’s [the] bottom line; therefore not just one object among others.  And what the Christian adds to that I think is to say the nature of that agency is love, and love conceived as an outpouring of self, giving space to the other, a total focus on the other’s reality and welfare.  That’s God.  That kind of intensity of activity, presence, reality, which is focused on you John, on me, that’s what we are invited to receive and to trust. […]

I think the only way of making full sense of this [free will and the presence of evil] is to say one thing, and going back to the basic questions: God isn’t a person along side other persons, a reality along side other realities, someone on the other side of the room watching.  God is the agency that is at work in everything and has set up the world in such a was that not only is evil possible, but moments are also possible where something breaks through, of healing, of miracle, of newness.  Why it breaks through here rather than there?  We don’t know the causes that make that possible.

Archbishop Rowan Williams, Humphreys in Search of God with Rowan Williams

For this Anglican at least, God is the union of the ‘the most comprehensive form of agency, activity, causality’ and unconditional love, and God penetrates everything.  The causal nature points to the fact that things don’t happen meaninglessly but arise as a result of causes and conditions; the world is potentially comprehensible, and our actions do have effects—we will be answerable for them; if God loves unconditionally, then we should try to do likewise.  Looked at in this way Austen’s novels are saturated with faith in God, expressed through the heroine’s struggle for understanding and justice.

For Austen formal religion is but an indispensable support[17] for its true expression in the conduct of life, and of course, that is where one can generally expect to find some of the fruits (though, for a religious person, there is the afterlife to consider as well).  Although she couldn’t reveal the operation of divine justice in the novels it could be subtly represented as Gary Kelly explains.

The central doctrine of Anglican theology asserts that God has knowledge of predestination to salvation but that individuals still have free will to be saved or damned, that good works are useful but true faith matters more, and neither faith nor works can guarantee salvation without the intervention of grace, or divine power, infusing the life and actions.  Austen’s plots are resolved by neither by the protagonists rational will nor the force of systemic justice, by neither deus ex machina nor coincidence, but by a convergence of will and circumstance, or something like grace.

Garry Kelly, Religion and Politics, p. 163

This is as one should expect for ethically-true, realistic novels.  It is not the case that once good deeds are done things start turning out well, but it would be difficult to illustrate the subtle correspondence between ethical actions and their effects if there is a high incidence of freak occurrences—to use a scientific analogy the noise will swamp the effect—so, especially for the action novels, the heroine has to be patient until something occurs to resolve the blocked situation, and, as Gary Kelly says this also fits well with the Anglican (and Roman Catholic) view that salvation comes through a combination of works, faith and grace.

Ryle sees more evidence of secularism in Austen’s aesthetic vocabulary.

Lastly, her ethical vocabulary and idioms are strongly laced with aesthetic terms.  We hear of ‘moral taste’, ‘moral and literary tastes’, ‘beauty of mind’, ‘the beauty of truth and sincerity’, ‘delicacy of principle’, ‘the Sublime of Pleasures’.  Moreover there is a prevailing correlation between sense of duty, sense of propriety and aesthetic taste.  Most of her people who lack any of these three, lack the other two as well.  Mrs Jennings is the only one of Jane Austens vulgarians who is allowed, none the less, to have a lively and just moral sense.  Catherine Morland, whose sense of what is right and decorous is unfailing, is too much of an ignoramus yet to have acquired aesthetic sensibility, but the two Tilneys have all three tastes or senses.  The Crawfords are her only people who combine musical, literary and dramatic sensitivity with moral laxity; Henry Crawford reads Shakespeare movingly, and yet is a bit of a cad.  Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot and Fanny Price have good taste in all three dimensions.  Emma Woodhouse is shaky in all three dimensions, and all for the same reason, that she is not effectively self-critical.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, p. 284-7

Care needs to be taken with Austen, as she is often uses pleasing and unpleasing surfaces to gull the reader into a false judgement.  The vulgarians consistently come off better than the aesthete’s in Sense and Sensibility; we end up thinking better of Mrs Jennings and Charlotte than Lady Middleton, and commiserate with Nancy over her sister, but the reader has to cut though and reverse some initial negative reactions.  Initially Mrs Jennings comes across as horribly vulgar, Charlotte as irredeemably silly, and Nancy as both, especially in the earlier part of the novel when they are presented through the lens Marianne’s ‘irritable refinement’ (31.4), but by the end of the novel we come to, relatively speaking, prefer their simple warm-heartedness over their cold-hearted relations.

Of course, fully rounded heroine or hero of any novel is going to have good taste, and any admirable character must have a kind of sensitivity that is likely to be reflected in an aesthetic sense, but note Elinor has no real taste in music (36.11).

Ryle presents three reasons for believing that Austen’s ethics were directly or indirectly inspired by Shaftesbury.  Firstly it is claimed that orthodox moralists in the extended eighteenth century were, loosely speaking, ‘Calvinists’, believing that people came in two varieties—saints or sinners—and Johnson properly belongs in this orthodox camp, while Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler and Hume dissented and, (second point) so did Austen using a ‘variegated and many-dimensional vocabulary’ to describe her characters.[18]

However, apart from her brother’s assertion in The Biographical Notice, Lascelles (1939) and Johnson (1983) that Austen was considerably influenced by Johnson, she clearly agreed with Johnson about the importance of ethics and religion to right living.  The confusion surely lies in the extraordinary assumption that a writer and critic of Johnson’s calibre believed, in any way at all, that people were either saints or sinners.  Where Austen differs from Johnson is in eschewing both Richardson’s sentimentalism and those that ‘appeared to tread in Richardson's steps’ and the ‘hard words and involved sentences’[19] of the essayists; she has developed a far more subtle vehicle for exploring and explaining the same stoical Christian ethics.  That the philosophy of Austen’s novels should show Aristotelian influences (and Whately (1979) agrees) makes their ethics no more secular or less Johnsonian.

There is one word which Shaftesbury and Jane Austen do frequently use in their same, apparently idiosyncratic way, and that way which is alien to us and, I think, subject to correction, alien to most of the other eighteenth century writers.  This is the word ‘Mind’, often used without the definite or indefinite article, to stand not just for the intellect or intelligence, but for the whole complex unity of a conscious, thinking, feeling and acting person.  I am not here referring to the philosophico-theological use of ‘Mind’ for, roughly speaking, the Deist’s or Pantheist’s God.  We do find this use occurring now and then in Shaftesbury, as in Pope.

Shaftesbury and Jane Austen both speak of the Beauty of Mind, or the Beauty of a Mind, where they are talking about ordinary people; and when Shaftesbury speaks of the Graces and Perfections of Minds, of the Harmony of  a Mind, or the Symmetry and Order of a Mind and of the Freedom of a Mind he is talking in his jointly aesthetic and ethical manner just of laudable human beings.  Jane Austen employs a lot of analogous phrases: ‘Inferior in talent and all the elegancies of mind’, ‘delicacy of mind’, ‘liberty of mind or limb’, (all from Emma); ‘[he] has a thinking mind’, ‘… in temper and mind’, ‘Marianne’s mind could not be controlled’, ‘her want of delicacy, rectitude and integrity of mind’ (all from Sense and Sensibility).  In ‘one of those extraordinary bursts of mind’ (Persuasion, ch. VII) the word mind perhaps means ‘intelligence’ or perhaps just ‘memory’.

Gilbert Ryle, Jane Austen and the Moralists, pp. 290-1

But we were told by her brother that ‘Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse’:[20]

Me, therefore, studious of laborious ease,
Not slothful; happy to deceive the time,
Not waste it; and aware that human life
Is but a loan to be repaid with use,
When He shall call His debtors to account,
From whom are all our blessings; business finds
Even here:  while sedulous I seek to improve,
At least neglect not, or leave unemployed,
The mind He gave me; driving it, though slack
Too oft, and much impeded in its work
By causes not to be divulged in vain,
To its just point—the service of mankind.
He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
He that is ever occupied in storms,
Or dives not for it or brings up instead,
Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.

William Cowper, The Task, Book III: The Garden

This seems to sum up Austen’s philosophy of mind rather well, and it is not at all difficult to see how this poetic vision can give rise to ‘rectitude and integrity of mind’ (and its absence in the likes of Lucy Steele [22]) and so on.  If Austen inherited her philosophy of mind from Shaftesbury the evidence is that it came through Cowper but this is no argument that she was advancing a secular agenda.

Enlightenment?

For a society that has collectively achieved Enlightenment one would expect our finest philosophers to have mastered the systems of their significant forbears and be able to satisfactorily explain what was so unsatisfactory and unenlightened in their way of thinking but there is a marked tendency for modern enlightened intellectuals to make very little attempt to engage seriously with their religious philosophies and a marked tendency to see what they wish to see, be it a secular Austen or a Calvinistic Johnson.  Romanticism and faith-based reasoning—enslaving reason to the passions—as a serious intellectual doctrine, so prevalent in religion and secularism, is a peculiar product of The Enlightenment.

Copyright © 2007 Chris Dornan
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