‘Neither musical nor affecting to be so’: the question of taste in Sense and Sensibility

The question of aesthetic taste and its relationship to moral worth was a common subject of eighteenth-century moralists and philosophers. Hermione Lee quotes Shaftesbury, Burke and Hume to show that, in the eighteenth century, ‘it was felt that taste for art, taste for literature, and taste or nature, were related, and were all three suggestive of one's moral worth.’ Critics have varied in the extent to which they see Jane Austen endorsing this view. Gilbert Ryle sees a ‘prevailing correlation between sense of duty, sense of propriety and aesthetic taste. Most of her people who lack any one of these three, lack the other two as well.’But the exceptions must include the key figures of Henry and Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, who are too important to be brushed aside, and Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility, is who lacks aesthetic taste, and has only a very basic sense of propriety, but certainly is not deficient in her duty and has moreover the undoubted moral virtue of a kind and practically helpful disposition. It is true that all Jane Austen’s truly admirable characters combine all three qualities: all the heroes have them, and the heroines either attain them or have them to start with; but there are certainly many instances of characters who have one or two of these qualities without the rest. I am inclined to agree with Hermione Lee when she says that this was a "habit of thought of which Jane Austen was both aware and wary. Firmly accepting the fundamental idea of a relationship between taste