The English Mind: Studies in the English Moralists Presented to Basil Wiley

309 Pages·1964·12.072 MB·English

by  Hugh Sykes Davies, George Watson (editors)

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STUDIES IN THE ENGLISH MORALISTS
PRESENTED TO
BASIL WILLEY
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EDITED BY HUGH SYKES DAVIES AND
GEORGE WATSON
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1964

CONTENTS
basil willey: a Tribute
by Herbert Butterfield page i
1 FRANCIS BACON
by Anne Righter 7
2 THOMAS HOBBES
by R. L. Brett 30
3 JOHN LOCKE AND THE RHETORIC OF THE
SECOND TREATISE
by Theodore Redpath 55
4 Shaftesbury’s horses of instruction
by J. B. Broadbent 79
5 BERKELEY AND THE STYLE OF DIALOGUE
by Donald Davie 90
6 JOSEPH BUTLER
by George Watson 107
7 david hume: Reasoning and Experience
by Raymond Williams 123
8 RADICAL PROSE IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
by Matthew Hodgart 146
9 WORDSWORTH AND THE EMPIRICAL
PHILOSOPHERS
by Hugh Sykes Davies 153
10 COLERIDGE AND THE VICTORIANS
by Graham Hough 175
11 NEWMAN AND THE ROMANTIC SENSIBILITY
by John Beer 193
vii
viii CONTENTS
12 JOHN STUART MILL
by Noel Annan 219
13 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CONTINENTAL
IDEA
by Heinrich Straumann 240
14 Joseph conrad: Alienation and Commitment
by Ian Watt 257
15 ENGLISH AND SOME CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS
by John Holloway 2 79
I
BASIL WILLEY
KING EDWARD VII PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 1946—1964
A TRIBUTE BT HERBERT BUTTERFIELD
In January 1919 Basil Willey, who three years before had been
admitted to Peterhouse as an Entrance Scholar in History,
came into residence in Cambridge to work for Part II of the
Historical Tripos. The effects seem to have built themselves
into the structure of his mind; for when he became Edward VII
Professor of English Literature in 1946, he hinted at the idea
of a ‘Cambridge Modern Greats’, and pointed out that ‘the
Tripos has always been the English Tripos, not the English
Literature Tripos’; and he identified himself with the view of
G. M. Trevelyan—‘Literature and History are twin sisters, in¬
separable.’ He tells us in his Inaugural Lecture that ‘a closer
interchange between “English” and “History” in particular
is what I should like to see’.
We are accustomed now to connect literature with life, not so much
by linking books with their authors as by viewing them in their
historical setting, in relation to their social or intellectual . . . ‘ back¬
ground ’. Literary movements . . . cannot fully be explained without
reference to forces at work outside the field of literature itself.1
From the nature of his original training, it might have been
inferred that when he moved to the study and teaching of
literature he would hold a distinctive place in the English
Faculty at Cambridge. It happened that the Faculty was pre¬
paring to receive him; for before he had come into residence
we catch the first hints of what was to be the opportunity that
helped to shape his career. E. M. W. Tillyard, in The Muse
Unchained, has described how Quiller-Couch had been working
hard in 1917 to secure that a paper on the English Moralists
should be introduced into the English Tripos. Q, had been
defeated on that occasion, chiefly by H. M. Chadwick and the
1 The d Tradition (Cambridge, 1946), p. 26; cf. pp. 27 and 29.
I
2 THE ENGLISH MIND
Rev. H. F. Stewart; but nearly ten years later, a movement for
the reform of the Tripos gave him the opportunity for a further
campaign.
Although Qdisliked giving his attention to Tripos reform, there was
one possibility he greatly minded about: that of introducing a paper
on the English Moralists. ... No one else believed in the wisdom
of inserting such a paper in the literary sections of the Tripos, where
it seemed an intruder; and Q, himself was so elusive, if you asked
him what exactly he meant by the English Moralists, . . . that our
distrust did not lessen. His usual retort to a question was a lyrical
outburst on the glories of their writings issuing into a roll-call of the
great names: ‘ Hooker—Hobbes—Locke—Berkeley—Hume ’; and
ending with an exhausted ‘ my God ’, as emotion got the better of him.
. . . Q,’s most tangible service to the Cambridge English School was
in being the only begetter of the paper on the English Moralists.1
The very fact that the new subject had eluded definition
carried the consequence that its establishment would provide
somebody with a creative opportunity. Tillyard tells us that
the adoption of the Moralists paper had the effect of producing
a new teaching need and quickly rendered indispensable the
services of Basil Willey, who became a full University Lecturer
in 1934 and a Fellow of Pembroke in 1935. He says that
‘Willey made the Moralists paper and . . . the Moralists paper
made him’; and there is probably some truth and some exag¬
geration in both these statements. Yet if we measure Willey’s
achievement by the main body of his published work, we cannot
escape the view that something in his mentality, and something
in his way of experiencing life, have been almost permanent
characteristics of the man—anterior to the accidents of his
teaching career. And these are the things which have governed
both his choice and his treatment of the writers he has studied.
His handling of the Moralists paper has been his own.
He has changed little in the course of his life, and when he
was a young man at Peterhouse he was already somewhat
gentle, somewhat remote—on the way perhaps to becoming
benignant—though one learned to detect inside him a fire and
a passion that were kept controlled. One was primarily im¬
pressed by the sensitiveness of his whole structure; but though
1 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained (London, 1958), pp. 108, 118.
BASIL WILLEY: A TRIBUTE 3
one saw only the charm of a meditative man when one looked
him in the face, the profile was strong even then, becoming
more pointed and more weather-scarred by the passage of time,
but always cutting the air in a rather determined manner.
From his youth his academic interests have been combined with
a love of music and skill at the piano; and it has been a matter
of permanent significance in his intellectual development that
to him the arts are intimately associated with the innermost
parts of the personality; for him they have always answered to
something important in human experience; he could not feel
that a man was a complete human being without them. He
has been a Methodist too, still in the tradition of liberal non¬
conformity—ready as a thinker to take his stand on the validity
of religious experience, but determined, in spite of the depth
of the feelings involved, to confront with relentless honesty the
intellectual problems that Christianity presents. Similarly, he
has always had that feeling for nature which is illustrated at a
later date by his praise for Thomas Arnold and the Lake
District:
the whole course of English thought and letters in the nineteenth
century would have been different if this island had not contained
the mountain paradise of Westmorland and Cumberland. The Lake
District was part of its religious creed; as Mr Aldous Huxley has
said, for good Wordsworthians a tour through Westmorland was
‘as good as a visit to Jerusalem’. The Alps, indeed, offered their
rarer ecstasies to the leisured and adventurous, but the Lakeland
mountains, linking heaven with home, spoke more healingly and
intimately to the heart.
And he adds: ‘Mountain joy can be sacred, not profane.’1
Much the greater part of Willey’s work lies in the realm of
‘ the history of ideas ’; but as he moves over the successive cen¬
turies it becomes clear that he is following a path of his own.
There is a remarkable uniformity and continuity in the main
series of his writings. The books marshal themselves into a
great historical theme; and their internal variety makes for
comprehensiveness in Willey’s treatment of the theme. His first
publication, a prize essay on Tendencies in Renaissance Literary
Theory, appeared in 1922, before the paper on the Moralists
1 Nineteenth Century Studies (London, 1949), pp. 69-71.
4 THE ENGLISH MIND
had been established in the English Tripos. In its early pages
however, there is a passage which links even this booklet with
the main body of his published work. His treatment of an
imaginary dialogue between Petrarch and St Augustine leads
to a discussion of the decline of the medieval idea that ‘ aesthetic
gratification is a sensual sin’. In this passage some of the tones
of the later Willey are already audible. In a way that he can
hardly have realized at the time, it was a premonition of the
programme that he was to carry out.
The work which made his name in 1934, The Seventeenth
Century Background, deals with a larger aspect of the transition
from the medieval to the modern mentality. It opens with a
chapter on The Rejection of Scholasticism ’ and describes the
changing climate of opinion in the age of the scientific revolu¬
tion. Willey is interested in the effect of the change on poetry,
and still more on the religious outlook—the effect on man’s
general feeling about the world. For him the matter is not
merely a question of scholarship but an issue of real life; and he
addresses ‘not professional philosophers, but students of litera¬
ture, and not professional students merely but all to whom
poetry, and religion, and their relation to the business of living,
are matters of importance’. Previously he had discussed
aesthetic gratification’, but now it is the problem of Truth that
is at the centre of the picture. He sets out to show the kind of
Truth that the new scientific age required. But the main theme
is continued in another book, dealing with the eighteenth cen¬
tury—a further study of a transition that affects both poetry
and religion, because it alters man’s feelings about life and the
universe. Attention is now focussed on ‘the idea of Nature’.
In the eighteenth century, we learn:
Nature was the grand alternative to all that man had made of man;
upon her solid ground therefore—upon the tabula rasa prepared by
the true philosophy—must all the religion, the ethics, the politics,
the law and the art of the future be constructed. ... It was not the
ambiguity of‘Nature’ which people felt most strongly; it was rather
the clarity, the authority, and the universal acceptability of Nature
and Nature’s laws.1
These two volumes both ended in chapters on Wordsworth,
The Eighteenth Century Background (London, 1940), p. 2.
BASIL WILLEY: A TRIBUTE 5
and the first of the two volumes of Nineteenth Century Studies
(I949_5®) opens with an important account of Coleridge as a
thinker. In the discussion of the writings of these two men—
the poetry in the one case, the philosophy in the other, but in
both cases the treatment of human experience at something like
the religious level—Willey’s historical work seems to find its
culmination. If J. S. Mill, writing in 1838 about Bentham and
Coleridge, could say that ‘ there is hardly to be found in
England an individual of any importance in the world of mind
who did not first learn to think from one of these two’, there
can be no doubt that Willey—himself one of the lovers of the
Lakeland—found Coleridge the one who touched his sym¬
pathies. This is apparent in the two volumes of Nineteenth
Century Studies, which deal more directly with the conflict be¬
tween science and traditional religion. Of the second volume
we are told in the Preface: ‘Its central theme is “the loss of
faith”, or . . . the reinterpretation of current orthodoxy in the
light of nineteenth century canons of historical and scientific
criticism.’
Predominant therefore throughout Willey’s main work is the
question of the confrontation of Christianity with modern
thought since the Renaissance, and particularly since the rise
of modern science. The same issues are treated in a more
general way—and from an avowedly personal angle—in
Christianity Past and Present, which appeared in 1952. Here is no
mere question of the past seen at a distance and examined
impersonally—dissected in cold blood. The works of Willey
are not merely books about books: they are studies of a whole
aspect of modern experience by a man who has traversed and
re-traversed the field in his own life. He recaptures some of the
momentousness which the conflicts had for people intimately
concerned in them. He has the right imaginative sympathy
for the men who just missed being Christian or, while retaining
their faith, conducted a lonely campaign against orthodoxy.
He deals with In Memoriam because ‘ it goes behind Christianity,
confronting the preliminary question which besets the natural
man, the question whether there can be any religious inter¬
pretation of life at all’. And constantly his own ideas break
through as he makes his comments on the successive writers
6
THE ENGLISH MIND
whom he discusses. It is reported that Tennyson, when he saw
the wonders disclosed by the microscope, said: ‘Strange that
these wonders should draw some men to God and repel others.
No more reason in the one than in the other.’ Willey’s comment
on this remark is interesting; he says: ‘I suspect it was at
variance with his [Tennyson’s] own subconscious feeling.’
He has moved with modesty in a world of scholars, and has
quietly pursued an independent course. As a lecturer he is
helped by happy phrases and an eye that twinkles; by a gift
for quiet irony and a touch of humour. He has never been
greatly interested in administration and prefers to avoid con¬
troversy that he cannot pacify by the exercise and example of
charity. And so he achieves a certain remoteness, but avoids
giving the impression that it is unsympathetic. Nothing could
exceed in warmth the encouragement he has given to young
scholars and the help he has brought to teachers of English in
other universities. Some lively works in the study of the English
Moralists John Holloway’s The Victorian Sage {1953), Raymond
Williams s Culture and Society iy8o—iyyo (195^) <ind Dorothea
Krook s Three Traditions of Moral Thought (1959)—have owed
much to him. It was peculiarly fitting that he should be invited
to work with the panel of English language experts who helped
in the New English Bible. Those who have contributed to the
present volume rejoice to have the opportunity of expressing
their admiration and their indebtedness.