Edgeworth’s crowd psychology is not limited to scenes of party politics and violent riots. These are the most clearly labeled moments in a phenomenon that extends to all instances of group behavior. Lady Anne’s devotion to fashion and to the tastes of the fashionable crowd represent an enslavement to signifiers, as her paean to the virtues of the French “pouf” illustrates (TN, 9:46). Fashionability itself is a type of party spirit, in which Lady Anne takes the opinions of the group for her own autonomous judgments. Similarly, Lady de Brantefield’s rigid adherence to a family past is a counterpart to Mr. Harrington’s adherence to his own past doctrines. The tale reserves its most systematic exploration of party spirit, however, for the variety it locates in the relationship between art and its audience. In a series of scenes including a painting exhibition, an art auction, and a performance of The Merchant of Venice, the tale explores the reactions of spectators to the manipulation of artists in terms that evoke the relationship between a party and its leader.

The parallel treatment of crowds and audiences can be seen by comparing two related incidents: a school yard assembly, in which Mowbray raises an anti-Semitic party, and the staging of Shakespeare’s play. In the grammar school incident, Mowbray is the leader of a party raised against the Jewish vendor Jacob. As leader, his job is to create the crowd as a crowd, rather than a group of individuals. Edgeworth represents this process as a theatrical one. Mowbray asks the boys to assemble and promises to “show them some good sport,” so the crowd is immediately defined as the audience to an organized spectacle (TN, 9:23). The schoolboys form a ring, and there is an upper gallery of boys looking on, reproducing the physical space of a theatre: “[T]hey had by this time gathered in a circle at the outside of that which we had made round Jacob, and many had brought benches, and were mounted upon them, looking over our heads to see what was going on” (TN, 9:25). On the stage created by this circle, Mowbray represents Jacob as an outsider against whom the schoolboys can identify as a group. He insists that, as a Jew, Jacob cannot possibly possess the feelings of love for his Jewish father that the Christian schoolboys feel for their fathers, and the boys cohere into a group, insulted by the comparison.^[33] Mowbray’s job, as author of the crowd, is to identify the outsider that constitutes the crowd through its difference, and Edgeworth represents this process as a performative staging of the Other. In this particular instance, Mowbray’s staging is amateurish. He displays a juvenile cruelty that transforms Jacob into a sentimental icon of the victimized Man of Feeling, making him someone to be sympathetically identified with rather than antipathetically rejected.^[34] But Mowbray’s technique improves with experience, and by the time of his posting to Gibraltar, he is clearly more adept at managing his audience through the same anti-Semitic performance.

The result of a more skillful staging of the Jew as Other, in the presentation of The Merchant of Venice before an adult audience, is less equivocal. In the central role of the Jewish Other is Charles Macklin, the eighteenth-century actor who rose to fame through his performance of Shylock. Prior to the performance, the audience is atomized and chaotic; Harrington’s aristocratic companions are irritated by the middle-class vulgarians in the next box, so that the theatre is initially a setting for the reinforcement of social distinctions. But by the end of the first act, this conflicted crowd is transformed into a fascinated body with a unified voice that breaks out in sudden “thunders of applause” (TN, 9:59).

Harrington is a representative member of the audience, and his reaction explains this transformation. After the curtain lifts, he explains, “the Jew fixed and kept possession of my attention…. I forgot it was Macklin, I thought only of Shylock. In my enthusiasm I stood up, I pressed forward, I leaned far over towards the stage, that I might not lose a word” (TN, 9:59). His initial “enthusiasm” raises a question because it directly contradicts his character development. He has already learned to sympathize with Jewish characters, yet his reaction embraces the stereotype of Jewish villainy. The incident is structured as a contest between two extremes. The quintessential art object—the performance unites the greatest writer’s drama with the world’s greatest actor—competes with the matured reason of Harrington, now enlightened and apparently rid of his childhood antipathy. In the contest, his shudder resurfaces as enthusiasm, and he becomes fascinated precisely as he was fascinated at his father’s dinner party, temporarily unable to recognize the anti-Semitic content of the stereotype on stage.

The mechanism by which this art object moves Harrington and, by extension, the rest of the audience follows the same logic as Harrington’s nervous shudder. In a subsequent discussion of the play between Harrington and Montenero, Harrington argues that Shakespeare did not realize what he was doing; he gives a “general apology for Shakspeare’s severity, by adverting to the time when he wrote, and the prejudices which then prevailed” (TN, 9:66).^[35] But Montenero disagrees. “[A]s a dramatic poet, it was his business…to take advantage of the popular prejudice as a power—as a means of dramatic pathos and effect” (TN, 9:66). Montenero’s Shakespeare is a more self-conscious artist than Harrington’s. Far from being controlled by the prejudice of his day, his artistic “business” is manipulating the prior beliefs of his audience, and it is on this manipulation that aesthetic effect depends. To Montenero, the critic, Shakespeare is “the greatest poet that ever wrote,” but he draws a clear distinction between “power” and “truth” (TN, 9:65). Shakespeare, he argues, reversed the characters in the original story, where a Christian demanded his pound of flesh from a Jew. Montenero notes that “we Jews must feel it peculiarly hard, that the truth of the story…should have been completely sacrificed to fiction” (TN, 9:66). Nonetheless, he concludes that “Shakspeare was right, as a dramatic poet, in reversing the characters” (TN, 9:66). Montenero, then, judges the play in two distinct ways: in terms of purely rhetorical artistic criteria, in which case the play is “right,” and in terms of factual content, in which case it is wrong. This distinction is a consistent part of Montenero’s critical commentaries on art; it recurs in his discussion of the Spanish paintings, which he collects, and again in evaluating the crude painting of torture, “The Dentition of the Jew,” which he destroys. It is exactly this distinction between aesthetic effect and content that is lacking in the popular response to the play, as well as in the other moments of crowd behavior. This implication is present within Montenero’s comment that “we poor Jews have felt your Shakspeare’s power to our cost” (TN, 9:66). The sense of “power” in this phrase is distinct from the “dramatic pathos and effect” of the play. It refers to the way Jews become defined in social life as Shylocks through the fictional representation on the stage, as the riot at Gibraltar illustrated. Whereas Montenero differentiates dramatic “power” from factual “truth,” society in general does not. When moved by dramatic power, society elevates representation to the status of truth.

This aesthetic theory operates through a conservative logic, for if art works through its appeal to prior beliefs, it reinforces ideas to which the spectator already subscribes. Rather than convincing the audience of a new idea, it brings out what is already present, convincing spectators of the justness of what they already feel. Art that appeals to emotions activates previously inscribed social attitudes, rather than natural or universal feelings, and so perpetuates the “prejudice” of party spirit.

This conservative model of art also appears in Ormond, the tale Edgeworth published together with Harrington, but there it is illustrated with the novel reader rather than the playgoer. Like Harrington, Ormond experiences the dramatic power of art first as an arrested attention.^[36] A good-hearted young Irishman but lacking a formal education, Ormond idly opens a copy of Tom Jones. Though not much of a reader, he finds he “could not shut it,” and “he read on, standing for a quarter of an hour, fixed in the same position” (TN, 9:286). His experience of reading, and that of his friend Corny, is called an “enthusiasm,” in which the power of art overcomes the reader’s ability to differentiate between representation and factuality (TN, 9:295). Ormond “believed the story to be true, for it was constructed with unparalleled ingenuity, and developed with consummate art” (TN, 9:287). When he next takes up Sir Charles Grandison, the same thing happens: “Indeed, to him it appeared no fiction, while he was reading it” (TN, 9:294). Corny’s experience as a reader is similar: “Fictions, if they touched him at all, struck him with all the force of reality; and he never spoke of the characters as in a book, but as if they had lived and acted” (TN, 9:295).

To be “touched” and “struck” in this manner is literally to experience art through the body, and it is this somatic experience that generates an intellectual belief in its truth as a representation. Ormond believes “the story to be true” and Corny that the characters “lived” for the same reason that Harrington forgets Macklin is an actor. Harrington’s momentary enthusiasm is explained by a susceptibility within his body, and a similar explanation is given for the novel readers in Ormond. Though the young Ormond attributes his experience to qualities in the art object—“ingenuity” and “consummate art”—the narrator uses the incident to illustrate a kind of readerly naïveté and points instead to qualities within the reader that produce this susceptibility. Ormond identifies with the two different protagonists because, like him, each has a basically “generous” nature, and the narrator explains that “young readers readily assimilate and identify themselves with any character, the leading points of which resemble their own, and in whose general feelings they sympathize” (TN, 9:287). The difference between Ormond’s experience and Harrington’s is the difference between sympathy and antipathy, two closely related variants on the same bodily phenomenon. As Montenero connects dramatic power with the exploitation of a preexisting antipathy, the narrator of Ormond connects it with a preexisting sympathy. The underlying mechanism is the same. Ormond and Corny’s convictions of the truth of art place them in the same position as the audience at the Merchant of Venice, and so their enthusiasm can be seen as a version of Harrington’s nervous shudder. Like him, they become convinced of the justness of their own extra-rational beliefs.

This body-based model of art is one of two competing aesthetic models in The other, represented by Montenero, is a critical model that exists outside the dynamics of party spirit. Montenero’s ability to differentiate “dramatic pathos” from “truth,” or experience from fact, allows him to evaluate art without becoming subservient to its dramatic power, and so Montenero is the only character in the tale entirely outside the rule of the letter. Called a man of “calm and proud independence” (TN, 9:81), he controls his acute sensibility with philosophy, and so he stands for a detached, analytical consciousness. “[C]alm had become the unvarying temper of his mind” (TN, 9:82), and thus he is able to interpret representations as personally repellent as The Merchant of Venice and The Dentition of the Jew with an unimpaired judgment. “[M]orbid sensibility…incapacitates…the exercise of independent virtue” (TN, 9:83), he lectures Berenice, complaining of her sensitivity to expressions of anti-Semitism. He himself has no such morbidity. He is the most idealized character in the tale, and his idealization lies in the way he eludes the paradox of sensibility. He is represented as capable of great sensitivity; small slights, such as the polite refusal of Mrs. Harrington to enter his house, “hurt his feelings much” (TN, 9:81). The detail is significant because it is represented as commonplace in the life of a Jew, being to Montenero one more in a long series of slights. Yet, unlike Godwin’s characters in Caleb Williams, he becomes neither inured to the slight nor constituted by it. He retains his vulnerability to the world without being written upon by it, and so he escapes the pattern of prejudice and enthusiasm that leads to the larger crowd’s immersion in party spirit. Though the crowd believes itself to be judging for itself, it is always imprisoned within the prejudice written on its body by prior representations; the crowd is always the prisoner of representation rather than its critic. Montenero’s critical ability is what sets him apart from the crowd; his judgment is “independent.” He represents the same subject-position that Harrington occupies after his last shudder, when he begins to tell the story of his emergence out of the crowd and into the space of the independent critic, able at last to narrate his body’s past without becoming implicated in it.

This independence also characterizes the implied audience of Harrington. The narrator addresses an enlightened reader who, like him, is wholly free of prejudice and enthusiasm. “We all know,” he tells the reader (TN, 9:148). His narrative presumes a wise, rather than a naive, reader, one distinctly different from the kind of reader illustrated by Corny and the young Ormond. “In our enlightened days,” Harrington apostrophizes, it “may appear incredible” that a child could be taken in by a story like Fowler’s (TN, 9:3). Though he speaks only of his own childhood, a period twenty years previous to the narrating present, he describes those unenlightened days as part of an earlier developmental stage in English social life, when it was still ruled by stories like Fowler’s: “I am speaking of what happened many years ago: nursery-maids and children, I believe, are very different now from what they were then; and in further proof of the progress of human knowledge and reason, we may recollect that many of these very stories of the Jews, which we now hold too preposterous for the infant and the nursery-maid to credit, were some centuries ago universally believed by the English nation, and had furnished more than one of our kings with pretexts for extortion and massacres” (TN, 9:3).

Like the infant Harrington, the social body of this early era was “[c]harmed by the effect” of anti-Semitic narratives (TN, 9:3), and leaders took advantage of the public prejudice. Being “charmed” in this context suggests the experience of being placed under a spell rather than merely being entertained. Harrington defines “the effect” of these narratives on him as a deprivation of agency, claiming that Fowler repeats her story “to reduce me to passive obedience” (TN, 9:2). In the same manner, this charming effect was used by “kings” in the past to control the nation. Harrington’s individual development is thus paralleled by a progressive social development that moves through these same stages from readerly naïveté to critical distance. Harrington describes a past era in which all of society functioned through party spirit, as an all-encompassing crowd, deprived of agency yet “universally” believing in the justness of its irrational beliefs. But the age of the crowd is gone, and in the narrating present the new, enlightened audience belongs more to the utopian communities described by Montenero—free from all prejudice, ruled by independent merit—than to the audience shaped by The Merchant of Venice. This narrative addresses a reader who, like Harrington, has already found a way to escape the crowd and become like Montenero.