Matthew Chapter 7 in Mansfield Park

Looking at the spectacular allusion in MP Chapter 6 to the verses in Matthew Chapter 7 about good fruit and bad fruit, led me to revisit all of Matthew Chapter 7, and it became immediately clear to me that the entirety of Chapter 7 was front and center in JA’s conception of Mansfield Park as a whole. I will briefly explain. First here is the text of Matthew Chapter 7 (copied from a Regency Era English Bible):

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considered not the beam that is jn thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye..

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Ask, and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find; knock, and it will be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them : for this is the law and the prophets.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

….Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, beat upon that house ; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell and great was the fall of it. END OF QUOTATION

The discussion of the placement of the house at Sotherton, and how the cutting down of trees “opens the prospect amazingly”, and the water meadows, echoes in multiple ways Jesus’s comparison of the wise man who not only hears but also heeds Jesus’s sayings building his house on a rock, rather than the foolish man who does not heed him as building his house on sand, which falls in a flood of rain and wind.

The first several verses of Matthew Chapter 7 are all about hypocrisy, and I have described in countless ways over the past months the hypocrisy of Sir Thomas Bertram, who punishes Fanny for “ingratitude” only to suffer enormously for the beam in his own eye that he failed to cast out. And truly Fanny is the pearl which Bertram sought to cast to the covertly swinish Henry Crawford, who, if Fanny had married him, would certainly have trampled her heart under his feet.

And then we have the metaphor in Matthew of the wide gate and the wide way to hell, but the narrow way to life, and also the knocking and the opening, are all strongly echoed in the metaphorical action relating to the gate to the ha-ha at Sotherton, in Chapters 9 and 10 of MP, and the various reactions of Rushworth, Maria, Fanny and Henry upon finding the gate locked.

And finally, connecting one more dot, I wonder if the knoll that Henry takes Maria to for his seductive purposes is the same as the hill that Rushworth talks about vis a vis the improvement of the estate, both of them being parodic versions of the mount where Jesus delivers his immortal sermon, one relating to sexual sin, one relating to the destruction of natural beauty, and both of them most decidedly not in conformity with Jesus’s teachings.
What this allusion means in its totality, well, that is an extremely complex and infinitely debatable question—but _that_ it is an intentional and significant allusion by JA is, in my opinion, clear, because there is so much textual “smoke”” there, that there must be a fire that generated it.

Cheers, ARNIE

A New Shakespeare Blog that demands to be read!

I just today became aware of the following Shakespeare blog that demands to be read by anyone who loves Shakespeare, and wants to read insightful, unpretentious, witty commentary with regard to same:

http://ourdailybard.blogspot.com/

If you're reading this, you must find my opinions worth reading, and so this is a very strong opinion, and recommendation, of mine!

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.--The blogger, Mike Zito, and I have now become friends, but that is not a cause of my recommendation, but a welcome coincidence!

A truth universally acknowledged....and a report universally contradicted!

An interesting exchange occurred in Janeites today.

First Deb Barnum responded to my earlier comments about the opening phrase of Pride and Prejudice as follows:

[Deb] "This has likely been addressed here before, but I have always thought that Austen found her "truth" words from Frances Burney [as she did a number of terms, certainly her "pride and prejudice"]... if you read Burney's "advertisement" that prefaces "Cecilia" you will find the
following: "the animation of success is too universally acknowledged, to make the writer of the following sheets dread much censure of temerity...etc, etc.." anyway, just a thought - I return now to my comfortable lurking state..."

I then responded:

Deb, of course you are correct that this was an intentional allusion by JA, how could it be otherwise, given JA's intimate knowledge of Burney's novels, and her life for that matter. But...as in my response to Anielka re the title "Pride and Prejudice", I join with Pat Rogers in saying that this was one of many allusions embedded in that first sentence--JA was sending up all the cliches, mocking the notion of anything being a "truth universally acknowledged"--that would be the truth most likely to be false!


But then, Mark Zussman challenged some of my claims in my response to Deb, and I responded as shown below:


[Mark] "Arnie, ...this idea that Deb was "of course . . . correct that this [the truth universally acknowledged] was an intentional allusion by JA, how could it be otherwise, given JA's intimate knowledge of Burney's novels" just doesn`t make any sense."

Well, we disagree strongly, Mark. I think it's obvious, given what we know about JA's strong familiarity with everything to do with Fanny Burney, and in particular Burney's very famous novels, and also that it was such a commonly used catchphrase/cliche (which answers your later point as well).


[Mark] "My idea about Jane is that she had great antennae. I have no idea what she read, beyond the obvious of course, or to what purpose. But I believe that Jane`s antennae were such that she would have known about truths universally acknowledged even if she`d never read a word. The idea -- the formulation -- was in the air."

Well, I do have a number of ideas about what she read beyond the obvious...but _nothing_ I wrote states or implies that she _needed_ to read that phrase in order to think of phrases like it--her novels are filled with as many original memorable turns of phrase as they are also filled with the memorable turns of phrase invented by other writers. She was not lacking in the ability to make all of them up if she had wished to, but she realized that her veiled quotations could be used for a higher purpose, i.e., to allude to the themes of the texts she read them in.

[Mark] "You, Arnie, seem (correct me if I`m wrong) committed to the idea that she was a great scholar, that she had (your word, not mine) erudition -- so kind of like Goethe`s Faust she was up into the wee hours poring over tomes? If I am right about your position, Arnie, then you should be even more reluctant than I am to ascribe her embrace of the idea of a truth universally acknowledged to her reading of (and making notes on?) a -- forgive me again -- mere Fanny Burney."

No, again, you've got her dead wrong. She was an omnivore who read everything, high literature, popular novels, and a wide range of nonfiction, including periodicals. But again, JA's strong familiarity with Burney is not my idea, it is common knowledge in Austen scholarly realms.


[Mark] "Now who is this Pat Rogers who finds other allusions "embedded" in PP sentence one? Is this one of the great scholars? If so, she`s working too hard. She`s making PP sentence one into a palimpsest. And it`s not that. It`s something much lighter than that. People nowadays say things like "everybody agrees that. . . ." What`s that an allusion to? A "TUA" isn`t all that different."

Pat Rogers is a "he", and he is a well respected Austen scholar, but I quoted him only because he had already done a beautiful job of summarizing the very point I wished to make. You disagree with him and with me, so be it.


[Mark] " And it is also not true that JA was "mocking the notion of anything being a `truth universally acknowledged`--that would be the truth most likely to be false!" Too simplistic, notwithstanding the QED argument-ender exclamation point."

And I continue to claim that JA was most skeptical of conventional wisdom, and loved to deploy her irony on it at every possible occasion, to puncture certitudes that were not certain. So again you and I completely disagree.

And i finish by pointing to the playfulness of JA vis a vis this most famous of lines in her novels, which I only just realized as I was composing this response, to wit:

For every truth which is universally acknowledged, there must be, in the words of that eminent philosopher Lady Catherine de Bourgh--who if she had studied philosophy, would probably have written A Critique of Pure Reason:

"At once to insist upon having such a report UNIVERSALLY CONTRADICTED."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers, ARNIE

The Sermon(s) on the top of the hill

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Mary Crawford...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/sapient-fruit-mary-crawford-offers-to.html

...in a strange but important way providing important knowledge and inspiration to Fanny Price to stand up to Sir Thomas’s bullying and refuse to marry Henry Crawford.

I entitled that post “Sapient Fruit” as a play on words from Dr. Grant’s reference to the “insipid fruit” from the apricot tree at the Mansfield Parsonage.

Today, in researching something else, I stumbled across the passage in Matthew 7:15 , which I think was also on Jane Austen’s mind when she wrote Chapter 6 of Mansfield Park.

7:15 is part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits: Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit: but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit: neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

I checked and saw that I am not the first person to point out this allusion, that honor belongs to a member of Janeites, Terry (I don’t know his last name), who wrote about this some time ago at his website (for which I cannot find the link at this moment).

And here is a link to the text of Chapter 6, where you can find the scene easily near the start of the chapter:

http://www.pemberley.com/etext/MP/chapter6.htm

What I find noteworthy in this Biblical allusion by JA are three things, but I hope that others will find more interesting things in it:

First we have a thinly veiled allusion to the transplantation of children (or “olive branches”, to use Mr. Collins’s phrase) which I have seen as a subtext of MP since July 2006;

Second we have the connection to the highly metaphorical discussions of alterations over time in the shrubbery at the Parsonage shrubbery between Fanny and Mary, which I discussed in several posts several months ago, beginning with this one:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/hedgerows-shrubbery-and-evergreens-in.html

And third, there is the linkage (which Terry did not notice) between the Biblical line “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire” and Mr. Rushworth’s describing how “two or three fine old trees” had already been “cut down”, and “that Repton, or anybody of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton [cut] down: the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill, you know”

Note the wicked irony of Rushworth referring to “the top of the hill”, which is clearly a very sly allusion by JA, put in the mouth of the foolish, unknowing Rushworth, to Jesus standing on “the mount” delivering the greatest sermon ever delivered, and in particular warning against false (architectural) prophets like Henry Crawford! And look at Fanny’s horrified reaction, as she invokes a _true_ prophet, and quotes chapter and verse from Cowper, delivering _his_ poetic “sermon on the mount”! In Fanny, we have a sensibility that can draw upon both sacred and secular scriptures to denounce wrongdoing on multiple levels! And of course Fanny is only a thin mask concealing the prophetess who authored all of the above, Jane Austen herself!

Cheers, ARNIE

Another truth universally admitted...

Purely as a byproduct of my looking at contemporary (to JA) usages of variants on the "truth universally acknowledged" meme, I came across the following article in the January 1813 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine (i.e., a few months too late for JA to have read it before P&P was published), which actually seemed, for several reasons, to be one which JA might have noticed, or have had it brought to her attention by family who read this Magazine:

Here is the beginning:

"Support' Of The Navy: IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ADMITTED, that the power, wealth, and existence of the British Empire depend on maritime superiority. The support of its Navy is, therefore, an object of the greatest national importance; and to have the means of it within ourselves, must ensure our safety in the same degree, as to rely on foreign powers for that which is essential to our strength and prosperity must he supine and dangerous....."

Of course, having two sailor brothers who by 1813 had already made strides up the ladder of the British Navy and would have perhaps taken an interest in such broader policy matters as are discussed in the above article, it seems very possible to me that somehow JA would have read the above article right around the time that P&P was being published, and, if she did, surely she smiled at the favorable omen and coincidence of the opening phraseology of this article with P&P's.

The subject of timber was not unknown to JA, either. As I stated in my AGM presentation, in referring to Mrs. Tilson as perhaps JA's prime real-life source for the character of Mrs. Tilney, I also pointed out as follows:

"General Tilney has his “ancestry” partly in Mrs. Tilson’s brother in law, a Brigadier General who inherited a vast estate, and partly in Mrs. Tilson’s own husband, who, we know from one of Jane’s letters, was as willing to chop down beautiful old timber for profit as General Tilney was ready to demolish that snug old cottage at Woodston until Catherine expressed a liking for it. " (6 June 1811)

So I believe JA, with her omnivorous interest in so many diverse subjects, would have been especially interested in reading this article, which bore on _two_ topics where she had strong feelings, the Navy and England's forests.

And that's why I took the extra five minutes to skim that article to get its point of view, and can report that it was a remarkably astute and cogent assessment, by someone who clearly knew his stuff (yes, it sounded like a man to me!) of economic factors, and also intimations of corrupt cronyism, all bearing on the likelihood that the British Navy would run out of timber for the building of new ships within 20 years, if the country did not something drastic to prevent this catastrophe. I would imagine that the writer's concerns were either addressed quickly, or else he was too gloom and doom in his predictions, because we know that England's Navy did not run out of timber for its ships during the balance of the 19th century, until metal replaced wood, whenever that was.

A far cry from the concerns oft expressed in Austen's novels for the old growth timber cut down as part of "improvement" of great estates, but a topic that I bet was bandied about sometime at Chawton during discussions of the Navy, and that JA would have been interested in.

Cheers, ARNIE

Acknowledged truths, pride, prejudice....and Warren Hastings, again!

In Janeites and Austen L, Anielka Briggs posted her claim to have discovered a previously unknown allusion in the title of Pride and Prejudice to a 1791 volume of "Sermons" by The Rev. George Butt, AM, Chaplain in Ordinary to his majesty George III.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yf0TAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP32&dq=%22sermons%22+la+tournelle&hl=en&ei=-ZFbTZGuF4uPceLjpPsK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Pride%20and%20prejudice&f=false

I checked it out, and then responded thusly:

I believe that Anielka has done some good sleuthing, and has made a plausible case that Jane Austen could very well have meant to covertly point to the (pompous, hypocritical) Sermons (written by the aptly named Mr. Butt), when she came up with the title Pride and Prejudice. It is indeed a volume which Mr. Collins would have treasured and studied as a valuable resource for enhancing his own "craft" in delivering his own sermons--meaning, he would shamelessly plagiarize them! ;)

However, I do not agree with Anielka's further claim that Austen did _not_ have in mind at least _several_ other well-known books which also contained that same hendiasys Pride and Prejudice (there are hundreds of hendiasyses, by the way, in what I believe was Jane's favorite Shakespeare play--Hamlet).

Not only in Burney's Cecilia, not only some others which I have previously found to be very interesting (they are very easy to find, by the way, with Google Books), but, as Pat Rogers nicely summarized and illustrated in his intro to his 2006 edition of P&P:

"The title Pride and Prejudice has embedded itself so deeply in our consciousness that we easily forget the phrase had a life of its own before Jane Austen claimed the sole rights. In the century before the novel was published, this expression turned up at least a thousand times in printed literature, with or without minor modifications....in Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764). Jane was brought up on this book....in Charles Churchill's satire Independence (1764). Samuel Johnson had written of 'The prejudice and pride of man' in The Idler no. 5, 1758...Similarly, Lord Chesterfield wrote in his famous Letters to his son (1774) of 'that local and national pride and prejudice, of which every body hath some share. Closer in date to Austen's time as a writer, one of the items in the _Sermons_ upon Several Subjects (1790) of Johnson' friend Dr. Williams Adams had carried an allusion to 'Misrepresentations which our own pride or prejudice may make the actions of other men', a formula which fits Elizabeth and Darcy. However, the most prominent example...appears in Cecilia (1782)...a book Austen unquestionably drew on in her own writing...If that should not seem clear enough, the phrase is repeated twice more in the same speech. Cecilia may not have provided the sole basis for Austen's choice of this title, but she must have exploited the stock phrase in the full knowledge of what Burney had written."

And I would chime in to say first that I think that Austen was well aware that she was deploying a literary cliche as her title, and she was, in her characteristic way, ironically exploiting that decision--she could have stuck with "First Impressions" but she wanted to begin making her point about ambiguities in how we know the world even before her novel was opened to its first page--she wanted readers to be guessing what this title was supposed to mean--was it a religious message echoing a sermon? was it a political message echoing a social or economic critique? or was it all of the above, plus, underneath all those questions, a philosophical meditation on the nature of knowledge? You know my answer is "All of the above!"

I have argued a thousand times that attempts to claim one particular meaning for a given Austen allusion are inherently offbase, because what JA was about more than anything was to destabilize blithe assumptions and simple explanations She was about inducing people to first identify, and then to challenge their own assumptions, their own explanations, and to struggle to make them better assumptions and explanations.

Isn't that the essence of the extraordinarily tight plot of P&P in particular? It's all a concatenation of interlocking flawed assumptions and explanations -those "first impressions" which turn out not to be accurate, or, even if accurate in one sense, still incomplete in another. That is at the core of the beauty of the plot, how these dominoes fall in such an extraordinarily beautiful sequence.

So I am glad to add Anielka's discovery to the short list of the most interesting of the sources I think JA had in mind in that title, with those caveats.

But there is a serendipity that arose out of Anielka's post, which I will also share with you.

As I was quoting from Rogers's intro passage re the phrase "pride and prejudice", I noticed that later on the same page he began a similar summary and illustration with regard to the famous first _sentence_ of P&P, which in many ways has penetrated even more deeply into modern literary consciousness than the title P&P itself---of course, I refer here to "a truth universally acknowledged".

The serendipity in this is that as I quickly scanned down the page, what name did I see but "Warren Hastings"! It turns out that this famous phrase "truth universally acknowledged" ties back directly to my recent postings about Warren Hastings, and in particular his impeachment trial, as a pervasive allusive source for JA's novels.

First here is what Rogers wrote in that section of his Intro which made me smile:

"Slightly adapted, the turn of phrase appears in books such as "Civis', Letters, Political, Military, and Commercial, on the Present State and Government of the Province of Oude and its Dependencies" (1796), a work which refers to the Austens' close family friend Warren Hastings, whose highhandedness in Oudh figured in the impeachment proceedings against him. The author writes, 'It is a truth universally admitted, that the subjects under all arbitrary governments are happy or miserable in proportion to the wisdom or depravity of their rulers' (p. 8)."

That passage was, to my mind, written in 1796 by its author as an unmistakable homage to the equally aphoristic hendiadys coined by Sheridan in his _very famous_ 1795 closing argument (as to which, by the way, Hastings's "highhandedness in Oudh" did not merely "figure in" the impeachment proceedings, it was as central to those proceedings as a blue dress, a cigar and the wording of certain sworn statements about same, were central to _another_ famous impeachment!) which I cited in my earlier blog post....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/lady-middletons-delicacy-mrs-jenningss.html

....i.e., in which Sheridan famously referred to Hastings's (alleged) evil chicanery vis a vis the Oudh, in turning son against mother:

“Filial Piety-It is the primal bond of society. It is that instinctive principle, which, panting for its proper good, soothes, unbidden, each _sense and sensibility_ of man.”

I think no further explanation is necessary, to show how that is really was a remarkable serendipity.

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen's Deployment of Ambiguity

Nancy Mayer's response in Janeites to my recent posts about Warren Hastings's trial give me the opportunity to clarify one crucial aspect that I see in Jane Austen's repeated covert allusions to Warren Hastings in various of her novels, i.e., the deployment of ambiguity for thematic and didactic purposes:


[Nancy] "He wasn't convicted though. Arnie, you do have a habit of using pejorative adjectives about people you dislike , against whom no charges have been proved. The charge of corruption was brought, it is said, by a man with whom he had fought a duel. A great many of the charges were political and had to do with the East India Company and other interests. Hastings had the support of the east India Company."

And do you doubt, Nancy, that politics played an equal, if not more decisive, role in his acquittal? The crucial point in all of this is _not_ to know for certain whether Hastings really was guilty or not, but that there was, and still remains to the present day, very serious doubt about Warren Hastings's role in India-and that doubt, that ambiguity about whether Hastings was a tragically maligned hero, or a monster who got off the hook for monstrous crimes, or something in between, is _precisely_ what drew JA to use him as a real life source!

Look at Shakespeare's history plays, which JA knew very well. They are all in exactly the same vein--was Prince Hal/Henry V a villain or a hero? was Richard II a victim or deserving of his fate? JA, like Shakespeare, was acutely aware of how power and such ambiguity walked hand in hand.


[Nancy] "This does not mean I approve of all his actions, nor am I condoning all that the British did in India , just observing that in the case of Hasting, they didn't prove anything."

In a nutshell, the Warren Hastings his _defenders_ saw was the Sir Thomas Bertram and the Colonel Brandon (I will not address Hastings's _other_ representations in JA's novels) _you_ see in MP and S&S, respectively. The Warren Hastings his _accusers_ saw, however, was the Sir Thomas Bertram and the Colonel Brandon I see in the _shadows_ of MP and S&S, respectively.

So that those who do see the allusions to Hastings in MP and S&S will also see those allusions as being consistent with their beliefs about Hastings. JA's perspective was one step up the logical chain, i.e., her goal was to assist her readers in attaining that higher perspective, the one in which _both_ opposing points of view would be recognized and fully taken into account as a dialectic. Again, an epistemologically-informed perspective.

In my opinion-indeed at the center of my entire approach to JA's writing--that was JA's m.o., repeatedly exploiting such ambiguity for complex thematic and didactic purposes.

Cheers,
Arnie