California Dreamin'

I've picked on this before but I think it is worth revisiting because the lyrics of the song bring out something typical of modern morality. Consider this couplet after our singer-narrator visits the church and pretends to pray:

you know the preacher likes the cold
he knows I'm gonna stay

Or this couplet from near the very end of the song.

if I didn't tell her
I could leave today

In both cases, pleasure and duty are set up as opposing forces. And that isn't surprising, really, as almost every modern moralist sets them up as opposites.

Jane Austen most emphatically does not. And that is why even a well-meaning and well-informed writer such as James Collins can get things wrong. Notice what he does in this piece excerpted in the Wall Street Journal:

How can morals, sentiments and manners help one live in the world? What should one's relations to the world be? Should one reject the world entirely as corrupt and mercenary and hypocritical and shallow? Or is there some other way, where one can keep one's integrity and sensitivity, but live in the world too? W. H. Auden stated the problem well when he wrote:

"Does Life only offer two alternatives: 'You shall be happy, healthy, attractive, a good mixer, a good lover and parent, but on the condition that you are not overcurious about life. On the other hand you shall be sensitive, conscious of what is happening round you, but in that case you must not expect to be happy, or successful in love or at home in any company. There are two worlds and you cannot belong to them both.'"

In effect, Auden is asking if life offers only the two alternatives of "Sense and Sensibility," and one can sympathize with his cry of despair, for when the dilemma is put the way he puts it, the two seem hopelessly irreconcilable.

Is is really what Austen does or is Collins so tied up with modern morality that he cannot see that Austen sees things in a very different way? Well, I obviously think so or I wouldn't be posing the rhetorical question.

For now, I'd just like to point out that Austen's two alternatives are exactly the ones that bother the Mamas and the Papas, albeit a little more elegantly phrased. And the subsequent lives of the members of that group would seem to bear out Auden's concern. They were unquestionably sensitive and conscious of what was happening around them but it is equally unquestionable that they did not lead happy lives nor were they successful in love.

More to come ...