The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

376 chapter 34pretense, equal pain, now nothing, horror, in an agony of silence, despair, inthe bitterest agony, [a] slight [curtsey], late, reluctant, ungracious, inferior[in circumstances], [the] poor [one], [my] poor [Charles], inferior situationin society [ironic, in free indirect speech, as so often in Austen], disrespectful,hypocrite, unkind, ignorant, giddy, desirable, affected, poor [man],hard-hearted, cruelty, so alarmed. It is an ethical world in which the twoprinciples of private worth and social standing sometimes clash and sometimesdance together across the Octagon Room at Bath.Look at the density of ethical evaluations, about eight on each smallformatpage, implying about 2,300 in the 290 pages of this edition. This is notnaturalism, a Zola or an Ibsen or a Frank Norris or a Louis Couperus examiningcharacters as “human beasts.” It is the opposite, an ethicism in literature,emphasizing choice. The author sits always at our elbow urging us withgentle irony to look on this person or that behavior with or without approbation.Social virtue, as exhibited in Anne Elliot of Persuasion, requires oneto be amiable, comforting the afflicted and allowing for fools. In Emma theethical turning point comes when the heroine lashes out at the tediouslygarrulous but harmless fool Miss Bates. And one must have or acquire alsosome modest standing by rank or fortune, a competency. Private virtue, asalso in Anne Elliot—the most loveable, literally “amiable,” it is said, ofAusten’s heroines—is to have both sense and sensibility. Anne’s, andAusten’s, concerns are steadily ethical.But, I repeat, the ethical evaluations, though exhibiting a balance ofautonomy and connection, moral courage and sociable love, are not systematic.In the daughter of a clergyman in an officially Christian age andsociety one is very surprised not to see more concern with the transcendent.In an Austen novel, as a friend put it to me, you can’t spit without hitting aclergyman. But God or his system of virtues is literally never present.Or take George Orwell. Again it’s hard to name a more ethically concernedwriter:A curious cunning virtueYou share with just the few who don’t desert you.A dozen writers, half-a-dozen friends.A moral genius. 18Orwell praises Charles Dickens, for example, as “generously angry,” andtakes sides with him. Dickens, like Orwell himself, was “hated with equal