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T. H. GREEN AND THE ETHICAL RECONSTRUCTION
OF THE VICTORIAN "LITERARY"

BY
Mark Morning Freed

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1996

ABSTRACT

T. H. GREEN AND THE ETHICAL RECONSTRUCTION
OF THE VICTORIAN "LITERARY"

BY

Mark Morning Freed

This dissertation recovers the place of T. H. Green's
ethical and cultural thinking in a range of Victorian
literature by articulating the ethical presuppositions of
Green's positive-freedom liberalism and arguing for the
place of these presuppositions in the work of Arthur Hugh
Clough, George Eliot, Mary Arnold Ward, and May Sinclair.

Chapter I recovers Green's metaphysical foundations.
His innovative reformulation of Manchester liberalism is
grounded on the conclusions of his neo-Kantian analysis of
knowledge and the defense of free-will it occasions. In
Chapter II I discuss the ethical presuppositions of Green's
positive-freedom liberalism and relate them to contemporary
work in liberal cultural theory, specifically, John Rawls,
and John McGowan.

Chapter III treats Arthur Hugh Clough's poetry in the
context of the Arnoldean post-Romantic poetics that
deprecated it. Arnold's poetic and cultural theory is
grounded in a kind of moral intuitionism that never gets
beyond dogmatic moralism. Conversely, Clough's "ethical

poetry" hypothesizes a more speculative and modern ethical

self-consciousness which anticipates foundational features
of Green's ethical and cultural theory.

In Chapter IV I examine a discontinuity between George
Eliot's self-avowed philosophical realism and the model of
subjectivity she invokes as a resolution to Daniel Deronda.
Eliot's conception of the self's immersion in society
functions on principles very similar to those of Green's
positive-freedom liberalism. That version of liberalism is
radically different from the liberalism associated with the
Victorian realists Eliot admired: Mill, Spencer, and Lewes.

Chapter V charts the transmission of Green's religious
philosophy into English cultural thinking. Green's
distillation of F. C. Baur's Geschichte der Christlichen
Kirche provides the intellectual and spiritual example for
Mary Arnold Ward's Robert Elsmere, the best-selling novel of
the nineteenth century.

Finally, in Chapter VI I trace in May Sinclair's novels
the commitments registered in her In Defence of Idealism,
The New Idealism, and her exposition of Green's ethics in
"The Ethical and Religious Impact of Idealism." Sinclair's
novels represent important late century formulations of

Green's ethical and cultural theory.

To my father,
the philosopher who taught me to think about the world;
To my mother,

the potter who taught me to look at it.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The preparation of a doctoral dissertation is the
culmination of a long process of development. There were
many who have made that process possible and kept me going
through it. Professor A. C. Goodson provided encouragement
and guidance throughout. Professors Judith Stoddart, Robert
Uphaus, Roger Meiners, and James Hill all were instrumental
in seeing this project to completion. In addition, I want
to acknowledge the great support and encouragement of Brooke
Harrison, my wife, without whose contributions, both
technical and loving, this dissertation would not be what it
is.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ........ .0. 0000000000000 1
CHAPTER I

T. H. GREEN AND VICTORIAN ETHICAL DISCOURSE ........ ..15
CHAPTER II

FROM ETHICS TO POSITIVE-FREEDOM LIBERALISM...........35

CHAPTER III
FROM POETIC MORALISM TO ETHICAL POETRY:
MATTHEW ARNOLD, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, AND T. H.
GREEN............ ........ .............. ........ . ..... 65

CHAPTER VI
AESTHETIC GEMEINSCHAFT AND THE SOCIALLY-CONSTITUTED
SELF: GEORGE ELIOT AND T. H. GREEN..................114

CHAPTER V
FROM CRITICAL THEOLOGY TO CULTURAL THEORY:
mRYARNOLDWARDANDT. H. GREENOO0.0.0.000000000000153

CHAPTER VI
MORAL SELF-REALIZATION AS THE RECONCILATION OF
IDEAL AND REAL: MAY SINCLAIR AND T. H. GREEN.......289

CONCLUSION
BEYOND "PERPLEXED PERSISTENCE"......................220

BIBLIOGRAPHY. OOOOOOOOOOOOO 0.0.0.0....0.0.0000000000000000234

vi

INTRODUCTION

In an essay entitled "Thoughts on Poetry and its
Varieties," John Stuart Mill answers the question "What is
poetry?" by distinguishing poetry from fiction according to
the nature of the truths with which each deals:

Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and
fiction also, if it is good for anything, is
truth: but they are different truths. The truth
of poetry is to paint the human soul truly; the
truth of fiction is to give a true picture of
life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,
and come by different ways,--come mostly to
different persons. Great poets are often
proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has
come by observation of themselves: they have
found within them one highly delicate and
sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the
laws of emotion are written in large characters,
such as can be read off without much study. (6)
Embedded in Mill's distinction between poetry and fiction is
a correlative distinction between the truths of the "human
soul" and the truths of "life." The nature of poetry, Mill
is saying here, is grounded in a separation of private and
public experience. Poetry is the discourse of the private,
fiction the discourse of the public sphere.

The distinction between public and private spheres
corresponds with the general instrumental tendency of Mill's
cultural thinking. His Utilitarianism is essentially

consequentialist. It makes determinations on the basis of

2
anticipated results or effects in social space. Thus the
formula of utilitarian thinking: the greatest good for the

greatest number. The impetus to separate public and private

 

spheres, to regard the private as the realm of emotion, and
to view it in opposition to "life" comes from the inability
of Mill's instrumental logic to incorporate private
experience. His strategy is to seclude feeling in its own
domain-~the poetic--and leave it unincorporated into the
real world of the ultimate good.

Mill's treatment of poetry and its objects is
indicative of correlative problems in the liberalism now
associated with his name. The basis of Mill's
"deontological" liberalism can be found in the reasons
behind his separation of public and private spheres:

There is, in fact, no recognized principle by
which the propriety or impropriety of government
interference is customarily tested. People decide
according to their personal preferences . . . .
And it seems to me that, in consequence of this
absence of rule or principle, one side is at
present as often wrong as the other; the
interference of government is, with about equal
frequency, improperly invoked and improperly
condemned. ("On Liberty" 134)
Because there is no rational principle specifying the
conditions of society's interference with individual
freedoms, government intervention should be kept to an
absolute minimum. "The only purpose for which power can be
rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community,

against his will, is to prevent harm to others" ("On

Liberty" 135). This minimization of interference, and its

3
correlative maximization of individual freedom, constitutes
a "negative" description of freedom. On the model of
deontological liberalism, agents are free only by absence of
restraint. "On Liberty," with its component of negative
freedom, became the archetypal formulation of liberalism in
the nineteenth century. Mill's essay codified a culture of
liberalism that has remained influential ever since.

The role of negative freedom in deontological
liberalism continues to be an issue for contemporary
cultural theory.1 John Rawls's 1993 book, Political
Liberalism, marks perhaps the most recent and substantial
attempt to formulate an alternative to negative-freedom
liberalism. Rawls's concept of "political liberalism" sets
out to correct a mistaken view of society in his earlier
Theory of Justice: "A modern democratic society is
characterized not simply by a pluralism of comprehensive
religious, philosophical and moral doctrines but by a
pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive
doctrines" (Political Liberalism xvi). Rawls's "political
liberalism" is an attempt to specify a politics respectful

of these unresolvable differences.

 

1Most recent attention has come from political
scientists. Avital Simhony has two recent articles on
positive freedom, "Beyond Negative and Positive Freedom: T.
H. Green's View of Freedom" (1993) and "On Forcing
Individuals to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of
Positive Freedom" (1992). See also, John Christman's 1991
essay "Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom."

4

Although Rawls does not depend upon the term, his
"political liberalism" is recognizably a positive-freedom
liberalism. One indication of this can be found among the
fundamental principles of justice Rawls adduces: "social and
economic inequalities . . . are to be to the greatest
benefit of the least advantaged members of society" (g; 6).
This condition of justice represents a recognition that
social institutions condition agents' lives in important
ways, and that, therefore, they can and should be
purposefully adjusted to maximize all agents' potentials.

John McGowan has also recently given extended treatment
to the problems of negative-freedom liberalism and the
formation of a politics of difference in his 1991 book,
Postmodernism and its Critics. The concept of freedom is
central to McGowan's consideration of the viability of
postmodern theory as a model for contemporary political
action. On McGowan's reading postmodern theory combines a
fear that contemporary life is shaped by a monolithic social
order with a hope that that totalizing order can somehow be
resisted (x). Such resistance, conceived as "freedom" from
the monolithic order, has typically been sought in the
construction of a critical distance from the social order.
Postmodern theorists have tended to regard the individual as
constituted by social relations while viewing its freedom in
terms of independence from society. Postmodern theory has
for the most part adopted a negative description of freedom

like that espoused by Mill. McGowan's main criticism of

5
postmodern cultural theory is that "the association of
freedom with difference is too flimsy a notion on which to
build a just society" (x).

According to McGowan, positive freedom has everything
to do with the building of a just society, and postmodern
cultural theorists have not yet taken this point to heart in
their efforts to articulate a model of political action.

He contends, finally:
The social adoption of the specific goal of
democracy contrasts with deontological liberalism
and points toward the insistence that positive
action, not just the negative removal of
constraints, is required to create and sustain a
democratic society. I argue that the best ways to
promote a more democratic society lie along

holistic paths that postmodernism and liberalism
have spurned. (Postmodernism 213)

 

McGowan is not quite correct if he means, as he seems to,
that all versions of liberalism have spurned positive models
of freedom.

One nineteenth-century liberal cultural theorist
McGowan does not consider is Thomas Hill Green. Green was
Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1878
until his death in 1882. He is perhaps best known as the
founder of British Idealism, a philosophical tendency that
enjoyed a brief celebrity in England from around the 18708
until Word War I. Green also played an important role in
the transmission of German critical theology to England in
his own day. Most important for this study, however, is

that Green is the foundational figure in the regrounding of

6
British Victorian liberalism on a model of positive
freedom.2

Green received fairly constant attention from the time
of his death until World War I. Virtually all of it
concerned technical issues of his metaphysics and
epistemology, and some of it treated his relation to German
antecedents.3 Since then, there have historically been
three constructions of Green.

Melvin Richter, Green's most famous expositor, views
Green primarily as a religious or theological philosopher
responding to the "great crisis of faith precipitated by
science and scholarship" (15). In religion, Richter sees
Green as attempting to reformulate Christian truth in the

language of philosophical idealism thereby putting it on a

 

2There is some controversy about the origin of positive
freedom. Avital Simhony points out that, following Isaiah
Berlin's account of Benjamin Constant in "Two Concepts of
Liberty" (1970), conventional wisdom regards Constant as the
originator of the positive/negative freedom distinction. On
the other hand, Simhony argues that Constant distinguished
between two kinds of positive liberty, not between positive
and negative liberty. See Simhony's "Beyond Negative and
Positive Freedom: T. H. Green's View of Freedom." Simhony
treats Berlin's criticism of Green in "On Forcing
Individuals to be Free: T. H. Green's Liberal Theory of
Positive Freedom."

3Balfour (1884), Grieve (1896), Creighton (1897),
Laurie (1897), R. B. C. Johnson (1900), and McGilvary (1901)
all explicate aspects of Green's metaphysics and
epistemology. Later, attention was turned to questions of
influence, both antecedents and inheritors: see Gfinther
(1915), Smith (1931), Muirhead (1927), Cunningham (1933), A.
D. Lindsay (1933). In addition, there is May Sinclair's
1906 exposition of Green's metaphysical ethics, "The Ethical
and Religious Import of Idealism."

7
firmer foundation than dogmatic religion. In philosophy,
Richter views Green in terms of his attempt to ground moral
philosophy on a firmer basis than utilitarianism and other
materialist accounts of ethics were able to do. According
to Richter, then, Green's political thought developed from
these theological and philosophical concerns. On this
construction, Green's politics serve mainly to realize in
social space those conditions necessary for moral
development he uncovered in his analysis of morality.
Through moral philosophy, then, Green transformed
Christianity into christian citizenship.

I. M. Greengarten takes a different view of Green in
his Thomas Hill Green and the Development of Liberal-
Democratic Thought (1981), constructing him instead as
primarily a political thinker. Greengarten admits that
Green's religion made him more sensitive to certain problems
of his time, and that although it led him to "cloak his
social and political philosophy in terminology more
appropriate to theology," one of the fundamental aims of
Green's thought was "to justify the industrial-capitalist
basis of [Victorian] society" (7). Greengarten asserts,
finally, that "the definite political elements in Green's
thought cannot be understood as aspects of a theology" (7).

Against both Richter and Greengarten, there is Geoffrey
Thomas's The Moral Philosophyfiof T. H. Green (1987), which
constructs Green as principally and fully a moral

philosopher. Thomas's main effort is to repudiate that

8

critical construction of Green "which sees a total
prefiguration of Green's philosophy in his personal
concerns~-religious, political, and moral" (1). His
construction of Green as, first, a moral philosopher rests
upon four claims: "that Green is principally a philosopher,
that he is an independent thinker, that his ethical theory
and moral psychology yield a coherent body of moral
philosophy, that his moral philosophy raises important
problems neglected in contemporary discussions" (1).
Thomas's book is a sustained attempt to make Green's ethics
per se available for modern consumption by determining how
much of it is independent of metaphysical foundations.

Neither Green's metaphysics nor his epistemology
survived the antifoundationalism of twentieth-century
philosophy. His ethics have fared only slightly better.
And the religious battles he fought have long since been
decided, mostly in his favor. However, Rawls's and
McGowan's call for a cultural theory of positive freedom
occasions another look at Green, this time not as a
religious thinker, nor as a political theorist, nor even as
a strictly moral philosopher, but as a cultural theorist
whose work has important implications for English Victorian
literary culture.

To date there has been no substantial precedent for

attention to Green in literary connections. In The Moment

 

of Scrutiny (1979), Francis Mulhern briefly mention Green's

role in the cultural developments shortly before World War

9
I. He sees Green's work mainly as an "attempt to confront
and resolve the twin crises of Victorian culture: the
erosion of traditional Christian belief . . . and the
contradiction within Liberal ideology between the received
principle of individual freedom and the manifest need for
legislated social reform" (11). Mulhern discusses Green in
the context of the events leading up to the cultural crisis
of the 19208. He does not give any attention to Green's
literary inheritors.

Geoffrey Hill uses the difficulties and unreconciled
commitments of Green's work to exemplify a pervasive tension
in nineteenth-century cultural thinking between (quoting
Coleridge) "'fealty to the Reason under the servitude to an
accepted article of Belief . . ." ("Perplexed Persistence"
105). According to Hill, Green's language frequently elides.

problems of "Bona fide perplexity . . . having its origin

 

really in intellectual difficulties, not in any selfish
interest" (108). Hill's essay tells us much about how
nineteenth-century uses of language respond to intellectual
problems. It does not make Green available beyond
indicating how he struggled with unresolvable difficulties.
What this dissertation undertakes, then, is to posit a
new critical construction of T. H. Green. My view situates
Green's ethical and cultural thinking in a tradition of
English cultural theorists in the line of Coleridge, Arnold,
and Richards, and finding its latest incarnation in some

aspects of the contemporary Cultural Studies movement--

10
efforts such as Patrick Brantlinger's, which try to
appropriate for contemporary thinking elements of past
(literary) cultures. If Richter's is the theological Green,
and Greengarten's is the political Green, and Thomas's is
the philosophical Green, then my construction might be
described as the ethico-literary Green. For as I shall
argue in the following chapters, Green's ethical critique
intervened in a number of important ways in a variety of
literary treatments of Victorian cultural problems. In this
way, this dissertation recovers "moments" of a literary
culture of Victorian positive-freedom Liberalism. To do so
is to rebuild our sense of the Victorian "literary" to
include previously unrecognized lines of ethical and
cultural thinking-~lines which closely approximate
contemporary patterns of cultural theory.

In each of the following chapters I have selected a
novel or set of poems and reconstructed around it a
constellation of epiphenomenal--primarily ethical--texts in
which its signification was originally implicated. My
effort, then, is to articulate the intertexual relations
within these textual constellations in order to make a case
for the ethical character of their literary "centers."
Throughout this project my interest in so doing has been to
recover and reconstruct a Victorian conception of "the
literary" so as to include "the ethical." This is the sense
of my title:‘ T. H. Green and the Ethical Reconstruction of

the Victorian "Literary".

11

Chapter I is an account of Green's metaphysics. Here I
treat mainly Book I of Prolegomena to Ethics in which Green
constructs a defence of free will by arguing that the
activity of a self-conscious principle must be the condition
of there being for us a single, stable set of relations we
call Nature.

In Chapter II I discuss the ethical presuppositions of
Green's positive-freedom liberalism. Green argues that a
self-conscious principle is the condition of agents being
able to distinguish themselves from their several desires
and to choose which ones to realize. This describes a
process by which agents make themselves into the kinds of
agents who habitually seek permanent satisfaction where it
can actually be found. This chapter sets the metaphysical
and moral philosophical background necessary to recognize
and understand analogues of Green's thinking as they appear
in the work of his literary inheritors. For it is these
ethical presuppositions of positive-freedom liberalism, not
some fully-formed political platform, that we find in the
work of Green's literary inheritors.

Chapter III first considers the generally deprecatory
reception history of Arthur Hugh Clough's poetry at the
hands of an "Arnoldean" post-Romantic poetics. Turning the
tables, I re-examine Arnoldean poetics against the ethical
background and implications of Clough's poetry. Whereas
Arnoldean poetics never gets beyond outdated moral

intuitionism, Clough's poetry recommends a structure of

12
ethical discourse which preserves the dialogic character of
moral problems, situates them in the context of the
individual ethical consciousness, and insists that they be
resolved there. Clough's construction of ethical
consciousness and his reliance on social roles as advocated
in his poetry anticipate important features of the positive-
freedom liberalism that Green espoused.

In Chapter IV I examine the compatibility between
George Eliot's self-proclaimed realist foundations and the
kinds of resolutions she invokes in her fiction. I am
specifically interested in the models of self Eliot invokes
in her novels and compare these to the philosophical realist
foundations of her broader cultural thinking. It is my
contention that there is a severe discontinuity between
Eliot's realist predilections and the socially-constituted
models of self she invokes as a mechanism to a renewed sense

of community. In this connection, I read Daniel Deronda as

 

a critique of the possibilities for social cohesion
occasioned by the realist construction of subjectivity. The
model of subjectivity in Daniel Deronda is that of a fully
socially-constructed self closely analogous to the model of
subjectivity articulated in Green's ethics.

Chapter V reconstructs the intertexual relations among
several texts surrounding Mary Augusta Ward's Robert
Elsmere, a novel dedicated to Green, containing a thinly
disguised portrait of him, and making use of passages from

his theological writing. In this chapter I attempt to show

13
that Ward made use of Green's lay sermons and his reading of
German critical theology to model the protagonist's critique
of Anglican orthodoxy, and, more importantly, to configure
the cultural politics that replaces it. The lay sermons
Ward cites in her novel are a distillation of Green's
unpublished translation of F. C. Baur's Geschichte der

Christlichen Kirche. Ward's recurrence to Green's religious

 

writing represents a laboratory case of the translation of
German critical theology into English cultural theory.
Finally, in Chapter VI, I work out the relationships
between May Sinclair's philosophical writings and her
"idealist" novel, The Divine Fire. Sinclair's philosophical
writings display a sustained preoccupation with the problem
of reconciling the ideal with the real. Although a
philosophical idealist, she attempted in her last work on
philosophy to reformulate idealism to take more serious
account of the realities of space and time. Her most
idealist novel, The Divine Fire, uses the reconciliation of
ideal and real to pattern the protagonist's moral
development. Sinclair's understanding of idealism in
general and idealist ethics in particular is represented in
an early essay she wrote on Green: "The Ethical and
Religious Import of Idealism." The model of moral
development in The Divine Fire bears distinct relation to
Green's ethics, and, consequently, her novel can be read as

a literary effort to reconceptualize them. The Divine Fire

 

stands as a late-century representation of some of the most

14
important ethical presuppositions of Green's positive-

freedom liberalism.

Finally, my recovery of Green's place in Victorian
cultural theory occasions two possibilities for literary
studies. First, by articulating Green's place in the
literary treatment of these problems in Victorian cultural
theory, my reconstruction of Green's cultural moment makes
available a genealogy of ethical thinking eclipsed in
previous formations of the Victorian "literary." Secondly,
and to my mind more importantly, by recovering the linkages
between an ascendent ethical theory and its contemporary
literary representation, I make an historically situated
case for the appropriation of literature as specifically
ethical discourse. Such a construction allows us to draw
upon literary texts as a resource for contemporary cultural

theory.

Chapter I

GREEN'S METAPHYSICS AND VICTORIAN ETHICAL DISCOURSE

The goal of this dissertation is to read T. H. Green
back into our sense of the Victorian "literary." The
recovery of Green's liberalism and its literary analogues I
am proposing here broadens our sense of Victorian
liberalism. It also expands our sense of Victorian
literature by recovering textual "moments" in a literary
culture of positive-freedom liberalism that have not yet
been recognized in critical constructions of Victorianism.
In order to manage this recovery, it is first necessary to
understand how Green's search for cultural foundations

differed from contemporaneous alternatives.

I

The landscape of Victorian moral discourse is,a
labyrinth of conflicting motives. Religious conservatism,
several degrees of religious liberalism, natural science,
and poetic moralism were all competing for supremacy as
foundations of Victorian moral and cultural thinking.‘ Green
well understood the claims of these discourses on Victorian
sensibilities, though he found them all inadequate

articulations of moral understanding.

15

16

Poetry and religion, Green admitted, have their own
sorts of truth: the first based upon feeling, the second on
revelation. Green saw Victorian religion as being reduced
to dogma or, worse, feeling. He sharply differentiated
between religion and theology, regarding the first as
intuition and the second as merely epiphenomenal dogma. In
neither form did religion give adequate insight into the
origin and nature of morality.

Poetry Green held to be similarly inadequate. Although
he conceded that poetry did give expression to deep (i.e.
moral) convictions, these frequently conflicted with "the
inferences of popularized science" (PE 51). The cultural
significance and momentum of British poetry, however, led
many Victorians to overlook such contradictions. Green's
desire for a rational and systematic account of moral
understanding could not admit this inconsistency. Instead,
his effort was to reinvigorate traditional moral philosophy.
Its foundations, however, were not as deeply implicated in
British culture and history as those of either poetry or
religion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Green

admits, moral philosophy had fallen into ill repute.

'Poetry we feel, science we understand;' --such
will be the reflection, spoken or unspoken, of
most cultivated men. . . . 'Better trust poetry

and religion to the hold which, however illusive,
they will always have on the human heart, than
seek to explain and vindicate them, as against
science, by help of a philosophy which is itself
not only an illusion but a dull and pretentious

I'-

(I

’.

L.’

‘I'I

s
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(It

17

one, with no interest for the imagination and no
power over the heart." (BE 82)1

J. B. Schneewind has pointed out some historical
reasons for the low status of philosophy in the first half
of the nineteenth century. Up to the end of the eighteenth
century traditional speculative philosophy was being
pursued, though almost exclusively in Scottish universities,
Edinburgh especially. This was the so-called Common Sense
school led by Thomas Reid. In England the situation was
quite different. From the beginning of the 17908 until the
middle of the 18208 the social and political conflict on the
continent led the English government to repressive measures
toward all sorts of efforts at "reform." Intellectual
attention turned to more pressing social and political
issues than speculation about morality.

During this period the Church of England controlled
both English universities, and what philosophy was being
taught at Oxford and Cambridge was aimed at educating an
Anglican clergy. This narrowed the range of religious and
moral speculation considerably. When Church of England
hegemony at Oxbridge began to wane in the 18308 and 18408,
intellectual debate at Oxford was dominated by the religious
controversies of the Oxford Movement. Discussion of
morality was reduced to doctrinal disputes. During this

time there was, however, slight and gradual growth of

 

1The numbers I give for Green's quotations are to
section numbers, not page numbers, of the 1890 Oxford
edition of the Prolegomena.

18
philosophy under the leadership of William Whewell at
Cambridge. These political and religious conditions
pushed ethical speculation into new provinces. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, what remained of any
tendency to systematize morality was assimilated to the
natural sciences. Green concedes from the start that
The questions raised for us by the Moral
Philosophy which in England we have inherited, are
just such as to invite a physical treatment. If
it is the chief business of the moralist to
distinguish the nature and origin of the pleasures
and pains which are supposed to be the sole
objects of human desire and aversion, to trace the
effect upon conduct of the impulses so
constituted, and to ascertain the several degrees
in which different courses of action, determined
by anticipation of pleasure and pain, are actually
productive of the desired result; then the sooner
the methods of scientific experiment and
observation are substituted for vague guessing and
an arbitrary interpretation by each man of his own
consciousness, the better it will be. (PE 52)
Green has in mind here Hume's treatment of moral sense and,
more specifically, Hobbes's hypothesis that virtue is
"whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the
pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary"
(Essay Concerning the Principles of Morals 265). The
tendency of English moral philosophers had been to treat
moral issues as matters of physical sensation.

Green's characterization of the Victorian ethical
mainstream as an effort to "distinguish the nature and
origin of the pleasures and pains which are supposed to be
the sole objects of human desire and aversion" (PE 52)

describes the theoretical underpinnings of Victorian

19
utilitarianism. We can turn to Green's criticism of
utilitarianism in order to understand what he took to be the
inadequacies of scientific explanations of morals.

According to Green, English ethical discourse,
assimilated into natural science and supported by
evolutionary theory, attempted to produce a "natural
history" of morality--an account, modeled on the natural
sciences, of the personal and social development of moral
sentiments. Green sets the question of the possibility of
such an inquiry thus:

Can we find any scientific warrant for believing
in a process by which, out of susceptibility to
pleasures incidental to the merely animal life,
there have grown those capacities for enjoyment
which we consider essential to general well-being,
and those social interests which not only make the
contemplation of general well-being an independent
source of pleasure, but also make the pleasure of
exciting this pleasure--the pleasure of satisfying
the moral sentiment of others--an object of desire
so strong as in many cases to determine action?
If we can, it would seem that we have given to our
national system of ethics--the ethics of moral
sentiment--the solid foundation in a natural
science. (PE 54)
Green concedes that it may be possible to arrive at a
natural history of moral sentiment by looking at the
cultural artifacts (literature, legislation, and social
institutions) of human history. He also admits that the
evolutionary theory of descent holds out the promise of
being able to reach beyond the beginnings of human history
to link human moral sentiments with merely animal instincts.

In principle, natural science could give a description of

20
human moral sentiment, and perhaps even give an account of
the origins of those sentiments.

Green points out, however, that it is commonly agreed
that moral inquiry must not only describe the moral
assumptions existent in a community, but make some
prescriptive determination about what those assumptions
should be. He finds the possibility of a prescriptive
morality based on the methods of natural sciences severely
problematic. It can only be managed with a central
contradiction.

The whole tendency of the Victorian scientific
treatment of moral sentiments was to view them in terms of
natural laws. To do so, however, raises serious problems of
free will.

Now it is obvious that to a being who is simply a
result of natural forces an injunction to conform
to their laws is unmeaning. It implies that there
is something in him independent of those forces,
which may determine the relation in which he shall
stand to them. (PE 87)
Regardless of this "obvious" contradiction, the utilitarians
did pursue a prescriptive ethics based upon the assumption
that man was a product of--determined by--natural laws.
Green admits that much social reform was carried out under
the banner of utilitarianism, but this is due, he contends,
more to the character of its proponents than to the nature

of its doctrines. In fact, Green rejects the idea that

utilitarianism itself could provide any real inducement to

21
moral improvement. It is more likely to interfere with the
desire for improvement:
The Utilitarian theory of ultimate good, if
founded upon the Hedonist theory of motives, we
have found to be 'intrinsically unavailable for
supplying motive or guidance to a man who wishes
to make his life better,‘ because that theory of
motives, when argued out, appears to exclude . .
the belief that it can rest with [the agent] to
exercise any initiative, whether in the way of
resistance to inclination or of painful
interference with usage, which may affect the
result. (PE 5356)
Utilitarianism--like all materialist accounts of morality--
has other difficulties as well. By locating the origin of
motive for action in such a subjective sphere as individual
feeling, utilitarianism makes it difficult to transcend
individual desires. Consequently, an individualism
resistant to a sense of obligation is likely to develop.
Utilitarianism does regard the summum bonum as the greatest
good for theggreatest number, and in that way does
acknowledge the importance of considering other agents'
interests. However, a speculative hedonist considering the
notion of duty must answer in only one way, according to

Green:

He must conclude that he has no duty in the world,
according to the sense in which he naturally uses
the word--no duty other than a necessity of
following the inclination for that which from time
to time presents itself to him as his greatest
pleasure, or the aversion from what presents
itself as his greatest pain. (PE 5347)

Without both a belief in the efficacy of one's will to
improve one's own situation and a sense of responsibility

toward others, real moral development of any kind is not

22
likely to take place. According to Green, the gradual moral
improvement of the world is hardly likely to proceed under
the influence of utilitarianism as the popular understanding
of morality.

Green's complaint is not strictly with utilitarianism
per se but with all attempts to provide "natural"
explanations for human moral sentiments. By "natural" he
means the linking of human choice to causal laws of nature.
The possibility of a systematic account of morality depends
therefore upon severing the origins of human action from
determination by "natural" forces. This issue leads Green
to investigate the degree of independence of the human mind
from Nature. He concludes his survey of Victorian modes of
moral discourse with the observation that the grounds of
systematic moral thinking are to be found through the use of
critical philosophy:

We have to return once more to that analysis of
the conditions of knowledge, which forms the basis
of all Critical Philosophy whether called by the
name of Kant or no, and to ask whether the
experience of connected matters of fact, which in
its methodical expression we call science, does
not presuppose a principle which is not itself any

one or number of such matters of fact, or their
result. (PE 88)

Moral philosophy and cultural theory begin for Green in
determining whether mind is independent of nature or simply
an effect of natural laws.

To review, Green's chief concern is to establish a
systematic theory of morality for those people who, due to

conflicts with science, could no longer accept that offered

23
by traditional religion. In order for this to be possible,
he must first establish that human action is not determined
by causal laws of nature as the utilitarians and other
materialists claimed. In the following section I take up
Green's appropriation of Kantian transcendental critique as
a defence of free will.

II

Without free will moral responsibility is meaningless

and moral inquiry has nothing to contribute by way of
securing the foundations for culture.' As we have seen, a
large part of Green's dissatisfaction with utilitarianism
has to do with its attempt to link human choices to causes
in nature. Green's cultural theory begins with the defence

of free will he mounts in Prolegomena to Ethics. That

 

defence grounds his analysis of the conditions of moral
development. Green's political theory--particularly the
argument for positive freedom-~serves to realize in social
space the conditions of moral development he uncovers in his
ethical investigations. Because so much depends upon
Green's treatment of free will, the issue warrants careful
attention.

Utilitarianism is only one of several versions of
Victorian materialist accounts of human action. In his
recent book-length exposition of Green's ethical theory,
Geoffrey Thomas has identified two specific versions of
materialism against which Green posed his defence of free

will: reductive materialism and one-way physicalism.

24
Reductive materialism Thomas defines in the following way:
"Nature is wholly physical. Mental events are identical to
physical events, mental states to physical states of the
brain or central nervous system" (Thomas 125). According
to Thomas, one-way physicalism holds that "there are mental
events which are non-physical but physical events cause
mental events, mental events are causally inert and never
cause physical events" (Thomas 125). The distinction
between them comes down to this: reductive materialism
reduces all mental events to physical events; one-way
physicalism allows the distinction but denies that mental
events can cause physical events.

The general pattern of Green's defence takes the form
of arguing against physical determinism that rather than the
mind being determined by the laws of nature, the laws of
nature are determined by the mind. Green's own defence runs
generally parallel to Kant's. Kant's dictum that the
understanding (Verstand) makes (machen) Nature, but out of
matter it does not create (schaffen) is an explicit

rejection of these kinds of determinism.

Green's defence of free will can be divided into two
parts. In the first part Green tries to establish that the
synthetic activity of consciousness is the condition of our
having knowledge of the world as a single, unalterable

system of relations. In the second part Green adds that the

25
same consciousness is responsible for making those relations
we come to know as Nature.2
I begin with the first part. Green starts by asking
what is implied in determining that a thing is real. The
question, "does an impression represent anything real?"
Green takes to mean: "is the impression related to its
determining conditions as it appears to be?" A number of
important things are implied in the judgment of reality:
When we analyse our idea of matter of fact, can we
express it except as an idea of a relation which
is always the same between the same objects; or
our idea of an object except as that which is
always the same in the same relations? And does
not each expression imply the idea of a world as a
single and eternal system of related elements,
which may be related with endless diversity but
must be related still? (PE 514)
The system of relations to which the impression is related
must be single and unalterable. If there were more than one
system, then there could be no such thing as reality since
the sensation could be compared to any one of several
systems of relations. If the system were always changing,
it would be impossible to say whether it was related as it

appears to be--sometimes it might be related as it appears,

sometimes not.

 

2Thomas's analysis of Green's defence is much more
complicated than is necessary here. He distinguishes
between two aspects of Green's defence, a "free-mind"
argument directed toward one-way physicalism, and an
"ontological" argument leveled against "reductive
materialism." For present purposes it is sufficient to
consider both together under the name "physical
determinism." My discussion of the two parts in Green's
defence correspond roughly to what Thomas calls Green's
"free mind“ and "ontological" argument.

26

In addition to the idea of a single, unalterable system
of relations, the judgment of a thing's reality implies the
activity of something capable of comparing the impression to
that system of relations. This something Green terms
alternately "a principle of consciousness," "a self-
conscious principle" or just "consciousness."

The derivation of a principle of consciousness as a
condition of knowledge goes some way to Green's defence of
free will. It is a first step in demonstrating that the
human mind is not merely passive with respect to nature. It
might be objected, Green recognizes, that this activity of
comparison could be carried out in some way by nature
itself. If that were so, then the mind would still be
determined by nature and free will would be an illusion. It
is a possibility Green must reject if he is to sustain his
defence of free will.

Green's reply to this objection is that consciousness
of change (the most basic kind of knowledge of the natural
world) cannot be identical to any of the events constituting
that process of change. Similarly, consciousness of
succession cannot itself be identical to any single event in
a sequence of natural events.

All the relations under which we know [nature] are
relations in the way of change or by which change
is determined. But neither can any process of
change yield a consciousness of itself, which, in
order to be a consciousness of the change, must be
equally present to all stages of the change; nor
can any consciousness of change, since the whole

of it must be present at once, be itself a process
of change. (PE 518)

27
Green's point here, as I understand it, has really to do
with temporality. Any process of change is made up of a
series of successive events which are "in time" in the sense
that they occur and then are "gone": they have a beginning
and an end. To be aware of change, however, is to be aware
that the present state of affairs is not the same as it was
previously. In order for this kind of awareness to be
possible, all of the several events constituting the process
of change must be simultaneously presented to a single
consciousness so that they can be compared.

Consciousness of a process therefore involves a kind of
unification or synthesis of the several events. Without
such a synthesis, any single event would remain an
unrelated, single event. Nature would be static. Thus,
there must be something, "external" to the events of the
process, which objectifies them and holds them "out of
time." Because no single event has this "a-temporality" no
single event can be identical to the consciousness of
change. Conversely, events of the mind are in a sense
separate from events in nature--able to step outside of
temporality, and perform a synthetic function. This is what
Thomas has called Green's "free mind" argument:

A form of consciousness, which we cannot explain
as of a natural origin, is necessary to our
conceiving an order of nature, an objective world
of fact from which illusion may be distinguished.
(PE 519, emphasis added)

As Green would have it, then, consciousness is necessary for

there being for us an objective world. It makes possible

28

our knowledge of the single system of relations of which

 

that world is constituted. Moreover, the origin of
consciousness of nature cannot itself be a part of nature:
it is not identical with a natural event, nor can it be the
product of a succession of natural events. It must reside
outside of nature, in some sense against it. This part of
Green's argument breaks the notion that mental events are
identical to physical events as reductive materialism would
suppose. It does 293 preclude that mental events are caused
by physical events. For that Green needs another argument,
the so-called "ontological" argument.

Green begins the second part of his defence of free
will by asking: "Whether understanding can be held to 'make
nature' in the further sense that it is the source, or at
any rate a condition of there being these relations?" (PE
519). His answer is that "the derivation of knowledge from
an experience of unalterably related phenomena is its
derivation from objects unalterably related lg
consciousness" (PE 531). Consciousness itself supplies the
relations which constitute that system of relations that we
call nature.

The relations that constitute nature exist between
terms. The terms between which relations exist for
consciousness are sensations, what Green sometimes calls
"feelings." Thus, if one is going to fully account for
relations which constitute our experience of nature, one

must explain how a succession of "feelings" (sensations)

29
becomes a system of unalterable relations in consciousness.
Once again there must be a unifying principle which takes
successive objects and holds them together:
Thus, in order that successive feelings may be
related objects of experience, even objects
related in the way of succession, there must be in
consciousness an agent which distinguishes itself
from the feelings, uniting them in their

severalty, making them equally present in their
succession. (PE 532)

There is, then, a principle of unity within consciousness
which unites feelings into related objects. Green's point

is that the relations themselves that form possible objects

 

for consciousness are the product of that same unifying
principle (in consciousness) which makes possible our
knowledge of those relations:

It is such a principle that Kant speaks of
sometimes as the 'synthetic unity of
apperception,‘ sometimes simply as '
'understanding.‘ For the reasons stated, there
seems no way of escape from the admission that it
is, as he says, 'the basis of the necessary
regularity of all phenomena in an experience:' the
basis, that is to say, not merely of our knowledge
of uniform relations between phenomena, but of
there being those uniform relations. The source
of these relations, and the source of our
knowledge of them, is one and the same. (PE 533)

With the argument that consciousness itself produces the
relations we call nature, Green has completed the break of
consciousness from nature. He has shown that the mind is
not identical with natural events, and he has shown that
mental events are not caused by natural events.

Green is not completely out of the woods yet, however.

He himself points out that to oppose the "real" to "work of

30
the mind," and to recognize the necessity of the work of the
mind in the constitution of all relations, is to distinguish
between a reality of "things-in-themselves" and a reality
which is merely "empirical." This is essentially Kant's
phenomenal/noumenal distinction.

Green's grounds for denying the dualism have to do with
his definition of the "real" as a single, unalterable system
of relations against which appearances may be compared. On
the one hand, he has tried to show that the uniform order of
nature and our knowledge of that order have a common source
in a synthesizing principle existing in consciousness. To
admit, then, on the other hand, that there are really two
worlds independent of one another, both of which determine
the character of phenomena would be lead to a damaging
contradiction. Green takes Kant's point that the
"understanding makes nature" to mean that

understanding, as the unifying principle which is
the source of relations, acts formatively upon
feelings as upon a material given to it from an
opposite source called 'thingsein-themselves,'
rendering them into one system of phenomena called
'nature,‘ which is the sole object of experience,
and to which all judgments as to matters of fact
relate. (PE 551)
Therefore:

there arises the antithesis between the known or

'knowable world and the subject capable of knowing
it, as between two existences independent of each
other, or of which the former is at any rate
independent of the latter. . . . [This view]

renders knowledge, as of fact or reality,
inexplicable. (PE S34)

31
This Kantian dualism is based, Green thinks, upon the idea
of an "unaccountable residuum" arrived at when one reflects
upon the process by which knowledge is acquired. In so
reflecting, we find that any stage of knowledge "consists in
a further qualification of a given material by the
consideration of the material under relations hitherto
unconsidered" (PE 543). In other words, reflection upon the
acquisition of knowledge leads to an infinite regress, or to
the assumption of a mere "material" of sensation void of any
qualification.

Green argues that this residuum can exist neither in
the consciousness implied by a world of facts, nor in the
world of facts itself. The first would be to imply we could
feel without thinking, which cannot be the case because
feeling without thought could not produce a world of facts
for us--it would be a collection of unrelated elements. The
second thesis, that the residuum exists in the world of
facts, is equally untenable. A sensation unqualified by any
relation is no fact, and the minimum qualification of a
relation implies thought. Thus, thought and sensation are
inseparable. And Green takes their inseparability as a
refutation of the dualism which is based upon the idea of a
mere "material" of sensation unqualified by any thought:

Feeling and thought are inseparable and mutually
dependent in the consciousness for which the world
of experience exists, inseparable and mutually

dependent in the constitution of the facts which
form the object of that consciousness. (PE 550)

32

Supposing Green to have been successful in showing the
mind to be independent of nature, we might ask finally, "of
what mind is he speaking?" To put the issue in another way:
the existence of nature implies a self-distinguishing
principle in consciousness, but it is not yet altogether
clear Egggg consciousness that is. Green has yet to specify
the individual's relation to this unifying principle. The
real problem for this part of Green's metaphysics is the
threat of slipping into a subjective idealism.

It is undeniable that any individual's knowledge of the
world undergoes development. Individuals learn things about
the world and forget them. But if this is so, it might be
objected, the mind-dependent relations which constitute
nature would come into being and pass out of being as each
individual came to know these relations and later forgot
them. This hardly admits the possibility of a single,
unalterable system of relations. For if reality is a single
system of relations, and that reality is dependent upon
consciousness, then it cannot be that every individual makes
reality for itself, since that would result in a
multiplicity of realities.

Green's answer is that like any living organism,
consciousness has two aspects: its end—-the particular form
realized in its body; and its body--the complex of its
material conditions. Knowledge is no different. There is
on the one hand the set of possible objects of knowledge.

These might be considered the "end" of knowledge. On the

33
other hand, there are the particular material conditions
which consist in any individual having knowledge of those
objects. This is the "embodiment" of that end.

[W]e cannot suppose that those relations of facts
or objects in consciousness, which constitute any
piece of knowledge of which a man becomes master,
first come into being when he attains that
knowledge; that they pass through the process by
which he laboriously learns, or gradually cease to
be as he forgets or becomes confused. They must
exist as part of an eternal universe . . . during
all the changes of the individual's attitude
towards them, whether he is asleep or awake,
distracted or attentive, ignorant or informed. . .
. We must hold then that there is a consciousness
for which the relations of fact, that form the
object of our gradually attained knowledge,
already and eternally exist; and that the growing
knowledge of the individual is a progress towards
this consciousness. (PE 569)

This distinction results in the hypothesis of an eternal
consciousness which is the end of finite human
consciousness.

Green concludes his analysis of the conditions of
knowledge with the following summary observations:

If by nature we mean the object of possible
experience . . . then nature implies something
other than itself, as the condition of its being
what it is. Of that something else we are
entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-
distinguishing consciousness; because the function
which it must fulfill in order to render the
relations of phenomena, and with them nature,
possible, is one which, in however limited a
scale, we ourselves exercise in the acquisition of
experience, and exercise only means of such a
consciousness. (PE 552)

To review, Green sets out in the first book of the
Prolegomena to refute materialist arguments that would make

human behavior subject to causal determination by natural

34
laws. His approach is to show that the mind is not, in
fact, determined by nature--quite the opposite: that nature
is determined by the mind. He takes up a Kantian
transcendental analysis of knowledge to argue that the
condition of our having knowledge of nature as a single
system of unalterably related objects is the action of a
unifying principle which must exist in consciousness.
Without such a principle, individual sensations would remain
characterless because unrelated, and experience would be
inexplicable. Moreover, because the relations which
constitute the single system of unalterable relations we
call nature are likewise dependent upon the action of a
unifying principle in consciousness, this same self-
distinguishing consciousness is also the condition for there
being a nature at all. Nature and our knowledge of it have
a common source in a self-distinguishing activity of
consciousness.

Green's metaphysics is important for two reasons.
First, it secures the possibility of free will, making moral
responsibility meaningful, and making moral inquiry at least
potentially useful in identifying moral foundations of
culture. More importantly, however, it specifies the
existence and nature of a spiritual principle of
consciousness that figures importantly in Green's ethics, as

we shall see in the next chapter.

Chapter II

FROM ETHICS TO POSITIVE-FREEDOM LIBERALISM

So far we have seen that the metaphysical beginning of

Green's Prolegomena to Ethics establishes self-consciousness

 

as a condition of knowledge and of there being the related
system of objects of knowledge we call Nature. Green is
interested in self-consciousness because it grounds free
will by making human agents independent of determination by
natural causes. Free will is a condition of the possibility
of ethical theory in the sense that an agent without it has
no choice in performing or not preforming an action. Under
such conditions it is meaningless to talk about moral
responsibility or to give rational reasons for acting in
certain ways. Thus, Green's metaphysical arguments for the
necessity of a self-conscious principle serve to establish
the very possibility of a moral philosophical account of
human action. Elsewhere in Green's ethics, self-
consciousness is an even more immediate condition of an
agent's morality. In books II and III of the Prolegomena
Green explains how self-consciousness is the means by which
agents seek satisfaction. It is also the condition of their
ability to make moral discriminations--to become moral

agents.

35

36
Green is mostly read today for what he has to tell us
about liberalism. It should be noted that Green's self-
stated purpose in his political lectures is "to consider the
moral function or object served by law, or by the system of
rights and obligations which the state enforces" (Principles

of Political Obligation $1). In Green's view, government's

 

primary responsibility is to implement in social space the
conditions necessary for moral development. His ethics are
important, then, because they specify the presuppositions of
his positive-freedom liberalism.

To recognize this is not to diminish the importance of
Green's political thinking. Rather it is to be aware that
an understanding of Green's liberalism requires a prior
understanding of his ethics and the role of a spiritual
principle of self-consciousness in it. Green's ethics tell
us not only "where he's coming from," but why he took the
trip in the first place.

Liberalism is not best thought of as a fully-formed
monolithic political strategy. There has been, of course, a
body of assumptions and priorities associated with the name,
but Green's reformation of liberalism considerably altered
its look.

Green's liberalism, and that of his inheritors, is best
recognized by its ethical presuppositions, for this is where
Green's impact was felt--in the reestablishment of English

liberalism on newly articulated ethical foundations.

I‘U

37

What I want to do in the present chapter, then, is to
elucidate the ethical presuppositions of Green's positive-
freedom liberalism, explain the form they took in his
political philosophy, and to compare them to two
contemporary versions of liberal cultural theory. For it is
the ethical presuppositions that are the tokens by which a
literary culture of positive-freedom liberalism will be

recognized in the work of Green's inheritors.

I

Green approaches the problems of moral philosophy from
the side of moral psychology. He tries to provide an
account of the way agents undergo a process of development
with respect to the objects in which they seek satisfaction.
The ability of agents to develop in this way is dependent
upon the reproduction in them of the divine or spiritual
principle of self-consciousness.

Human agents, like all animals, have desires, but they,
unlike animals, can present the possible objects of their
desires to themselves and take active steps to realize them.
(Animals, conversely, might be said to act on impulse or
according to stimulus response, in which case there is no
self-conscious presentation of the object of desire to a
self.) The transition from mere desire to consciousness of
the desired object implies the presentation of the desired
object to a subject which distinguishes itself from its

desires (PE 585). This for Green is "to will": the effort

f I’-

'I’,

in

9"

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38
on the part of an agent to satisfy itself through the
presentation and realization of objects of desire. Human
agents are able to do this by virtue of the reproduction in
them of the same self-conscious principle deduced and
described in Book I of the Prolegomena:
It is in virtue of this self-objectifying
principle that [an agent] is determined, not
simply by natural wants according to natural laws,
but by the thought of himself as existing under
conditions, and as having ends that may be
attained and capabilities that may be realised
under those conditions. It is thus that he not
merely desires but seeks to satisfy himself in
gaining the objects of his desire; presents to
himself a certain possible state of himself, which
in the gratification of the desire he seeks to
reach; in short, wills. (PE 5175)
Self-consciousness makes it possible for an agent to be
motivated to action by a desire for some thing or state of
affairs that would make it more happy than at present.
Whatever satisfies that desire is (at that moment) a
personal good. However, all acts of willing are not equally
satisfying, equally good.

An agent experiences a potentially infinite sequence of
individual desires, so many that all of them can never be
satisfied. Whatever satisfaction the agent experiences
passes with the passing of each desire and is immediately
superseded by a new desire. As long as an agent identifies
its own good with an infinite series of objects of desire,
it can only experience momentary satisfactions.

Green points out that sooner or later an agent (may)

discover that it will never satisfy its infinite individual

39
desires. At this point it (may) begin to seek a
satisfaction "on the whole," what Green also calls "an
abiding satisfaction of an abiding self."
At the same time as the reflecting subject
traverses the series of wants, which it
distinguishes from itself while it presents their
filling as its object, there arises the idea of a
satisfaction on the whole—-an idea never
realisable, but for ever striving to realise
itself in the attainment of a greater command over
means to the satisfaction of particular wants.
(as 585)
When it makes this realization, the self-conscious agent
moves from being determined by the conditions of its
existence to having crucial control over them. One of those
conditions is the desire for immediate gratification. This
movement breaks the dependence of the agent on natural
forces and sets them on the road to freedom and morality.
The transition from seeking satisfaction in immediate
gratification to seeking satisfaction "on the whole" thus
involves substantially changing the object in which
satisfaction is sought from an idea of a possible pleasure
to the idea of a possible self. That is, an agent.oriented
in this way no longer seeks gratification per se, but seeks
to realize an idea of a character that habitually seeks
satisfaction where it really can be found. Thus Green's
formulation: "an abiding satisfaction Pp an abiding self."
If a personal good is that which satisfies an agent's
particular desire, then a truer or broader or more complete

"moral" good must be that which satisfies the moral agent gg

such--that which satisfies all its desires or that which

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40
satisfies it permanently. It is in this sense that morality
for Green is a matter of self-realization--realizing an idea

of a possible self.

The individual's moral self-realization is accomplished
through the activities of will and reason. As such, they
are internal conditions of moral development. As we have
seen, will is the ability of a self-conscious agent to
satisfy itself through the presentation and realization of
an idea of a possible self. In short, to will is to desire
a better state of affairs. The activity of the reason is
slightly more complicated. Green explains reason as the
ability to conceive of a possible self as an end to be
attained by action. What the reason does, in effect, is to
perceive a connection between the idea of a possible self
and the means necessary to realize it. In short, to reason
(in this context) is to organize one's desires into a plan
for action which will lead to a certain kind of life-- a
certain kind of character and a certain idea of
satisfaction:
That a man should seek an object as 'part of his
happiness,‘ or as one without which in his then
state he cannot satisfy himself,--and this is to
will--implie8 that he presents himself to himself
as in a better state with the object attained than
he is without it; and this is to exercise reason.
(BE 8178)

The point here is that the object in which the agent is

seeking satisfaction is an idea of itself as existing in new

conditions--conditions that provide a lasting satisfaction

I"
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41
on the whole. Thus, Green explains elsewhere, that the
union of the will and the reason "consists in so living that
the objects in which self-satisfaction is habitually sought
contribute to the realization of a true idea of what is best
for man" (PE 5177).

In so far as Green conceives of morality and the moral
good in terms of the individual's quest for permanent
satisfaction, the individual is for Green the primary unit
of value. This is the first ethical presupposition of
Green's liberalism. It is, in fact, what makes him a
liberal, if by liberalism is understood a prioritizing of
the claims of the individual over those of society.
Prioritizing the individual over society does not exhaust
the definition of liberty, of course. Negative-freedom or
deontological liberalism leaves it there, however.

Insisting that the individual's claims are supreme, it
stakes its claim on the idea that the individual should be
as little restricted as possible in its search for ultimate
satisfaction.

Green's positive-freedom liberalism moves beyond simply
recognizing the fundamental value of the individual to
specify further conditions of liberty and morality. For
Green, the process of moral self-realization takes place in
terms of the development of what he calls an agent's moral
capabilities. We have already seen that for Green a
personal good is whatever satisfies the agent, whereas the

moral good is whatever satisfies the agent on the whole. If

42
an agent seeks satisfaction by virtue of the capabilities
invested in it through the reproduction of the spiritual
principle of self-consciousness, then an agent's Egllggp
satisfaction must come about through the Ppllggp realization
of those capabilities.

On the one hand, Green points out, we can never fully
know the nature of a capability until it has completely
revealed itself. (This fact can be--and has been--taken by
deontological liberalism as grounds for maximizing the
individual's freedom to realize its potential for self-
satisfaction in whatever way it can.) On the other hand,
the moral capability has at least partially revealed itself
in the course of human history. We are, therefore, not at a
complete loss regarding knowledge concerning its nature or
the objects in which agents have found lasting satisfaction:

In the broad result it is not hard to understand
how man has bettered himself through institutions
and habits which tend to make the welfare of the
all the welfare of each, and through the arts
which make nature, both as used and as
contemplated, the friend of man. And just so far
as this is plain, we know enough of ultimate moral
good to guide our conduct; enough to judge whether
the prevailing interests which make our character
are or are not in the direction which tends
further to realise the capabilities of the human
spirit. (BE 8172)
The point here is that we know the moral good only as that
which satisfies the moral agent, and the moral agent has
historically sought to satisfy itself (and, in fact, has
actually satisfied itself in part) through the establishment

of institutions which tend "to make the welfare of all the

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welfare of each." This, then, is the direction in which the
moral good lies, and, in so far as it is, it offers some
indication of the direction in which human "moral
capabilities" ought to be developed. This is a crucial
point for positive-freedom liberalism: because there is
some indication of the way in which agents have realized
their moral capabilities, Green is able to put limits on the
maximization of individual freedom.
The establishment of institutions "which tend to make
the welfare of the all the welfare of each" is predicated on
or implies an act of what Green terms social identification.
Making the welfare of all the welfare of each amounts to
bringing about the social conditions in which the
individual's personal good is realized when the common good
is realized. In such a condition, the individual identifies
its interests with the interests of others. Green maintains
that social identification is an
ultimate fact of human history--a fact without
which there would not be such a history, and which
is not in turn deducible from any other history--
that out of sympathies of animal origin, through
their presence in a self-conscious soul, there
arise interests as of a person in persons. (PE
S201)

Green uses "persons" here in the sense of "subjects."

Personality for him means self-conscious subjectivity--the

capacity for a self-conscious agent to present itself to

itself as an end to be realized by action. By "interests as

of a person in persons" Green means a mutual recognition

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among members of a community of each other as a potential
moral end in themselves.

Social identification is highly important to positive-
freedom liberalism. It is the moral psychological basis of
the idea of a common good. As such it makes possible a
sense of positive obligation among members of a community.
As we shall later see in Green's discussion of rights, a
freedom is extended to all members of a society and secured
as a right only when that freedom is mutually recognized as
contributory to the good of all individuals. A network of
mutually respected freedoms makes up the moral
infrastructure of a society.

The identification of individual and common good is the
crux of Green's ethics. It is precisely the goal of moral
philosophy in general to give rational reasons for taking
other agents' interests into account. Whether Green has
actually provided such logical connection between individual
and common good is certainly open to question. Geoffrey
Thomas, Green's most recent and thorough philosophical
expositor, thinks he has. Thomas has divided Green's
treatment of the rationality of moral action into two
aspects: a "minimal argument" and a "more ambitions
argument." The minimal argument asserts that agents are
capable of taking interest in others for their own sakes.
According to Thomas, typically "this interest will mean
providing for the maintenance of a family" (Thomas 279). He

points out, however, that this argument does not really go

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far enough: "it requires in principle only the cellular
units of individual, friends, and family" (Thomas 282).
Tribal communities might consist of only such narrowly
defined groups, but modern industrial and post-industrial
society require a more extensive means of connecting its
members.

According to Thomas, Green's "more ambitious argument"
for social identification holds that "the moral life is a
dimension of the entire network of social institutions"
(Thomas 282). The idea here is that social roles are the
mechanism that converts an agent's desires into activities
that lead to the realization of its idea of a possible self.
To the extent that social roles order an agent's interests,
the self that gets realized is the product of social forces
and relations. The agent is, really, a socially-constituted
self. (As we shall see later, the socially-constructed self
is integral to a cultural theory of positive freedom because
it serves as a principle of social cohesion.)

According to Green, an important principle of social
cohesion is the reciprocal recognition of persons 2E
persons, that is, the recognition of others as agents who
present to themselves objects of their desires and seek
satisfaction in the realization of them. This kind of
social identification is necessary, Green argues, in order
to counteract the tendency to treat all other agents as

means to one's own personal satisfaction. To do so would be

46
to defeat one's own attempts at self-realization and self-
satisfaction:
human society presupposes persons in capacity--
subjects capable each of conceiving himself and
the bettering of his life as an end to himself--
but it is only in the intercourse of men, each
recognized by each as an end, not merely as a
means, and thus as having reciprocal claims, that
the capacity is actualized and that we really live
as persons. (PE 5183)
Unless an agent recognizes other agents as ends in
themselves, it not likely to be able to exercise its own
self-realizing capabilities. Thus, according to Green, the
impulse to seek a permanent satisfaction can only be
realized both "in persons, through society." Even though
the self-conscious principle must realize itself in

individuals, it is only in the context of society that the

individual can come to embody the divine idea.

It will be useful to review the ethical presuppositions
of Green's liberalism before going on to examine the form
they take in Green's explicitly political work. Green's
view of morality as a process of individual development and
his idea that the true moral good is a realization of human
potential are important presuppositions of a positive-
freedom liberalism. The quarrel between negative and
positive freedom is in one sense the quarrel over the
boundary between private and public space. It is also the
question of the range of individual freedom within society.

Green's choice to view morality in terms of individual self-

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realization means that he takes the individual's well-being
to be the focus of thinking about the good. Viewing the
moral or true good as the fullest deve10pment of the
individual's human potential suggests further that the
individual needs maximum freedom to realize its potential in
whatever direction it can be realized. For to realize
potential in some directions but not others is not to
realize full potential. However, the internal logic of
self-realization and the history of that realization
indicate the conditions under which self-realization is
possible.

The next part of Green's cultural thinking--his
political philosophy--considers these and advocates a
conception of political action that seeks to provide and

secure them.

II
Just as Green's ethics are predicated on the
conclusions of his metaphysics, so too is his political
thinking largely conditioned by his ethical investigations.
In fact, it is clear that Green viewed his political
philosophy as the practical realization of his theory of

morality. Green opens his lectures on The Principles of

 

Political Obligation with a review of the conclusion from
his ethics that the condition of a moral life is the joint

possession and exercise of will and reason.

48

The condition of a moral life is the possession of
will and reason. Will is the capacity in a man of
being determined to action by the idea of a
possible satisfaction of himself. An act of will
is an action so determined. A state of will is
the capacity as determined by the particular
objects in which the man seeks self-satisfaction;
and it becomes a character in so far as the self-
satisfaction is habitually sought in objects of a
particular kind. Practical reason is the capacity
in a man of conceiving the perfection of his
nature as an object to be attained by action. All
moral ideas have their origin in reason, i.e. in
the idea of a possible self-perfection to be
attained by the moral agent. (PPQ 56)

It will be recalled from the foregoing discussion of Green's
ethics that the conditions of moral development can only be
realized "in persons, through society." The fact that
social participation is a necessary condition of the agent's
seeking self-satisfaction provides for the complementarity
of Green's ethics and his political philosophy. Whereas
Green's ethical theory provides presuppositions regarding
the nature of the individual and its search for the moral
good, the political theory provides for the conditions
necessary to turn those presuppositions into social reality,
social opportunity. Green's political thinking is always
carried out with this moral telos in mind:
The value then of the institutions of civil life
lies in their operation as giving reality to these
capacities of will and reason, and enabling them
to be really exercised. In their general effect,
apart from particular aberrations, they render it
possible for a man to be freely determined by the
idea of a possible satisfaction of himself,
instead of being driven this way and that by
external forces, and thus they give a reality to
the capacity called will: and they enable him to
realise his reason, i.e. his idea of self-

perfection, by acting as a member of a social
organization in which each contributes to the

49
better-being of all the rest. So far as they do
in fact thus operate they are morally justified .
. . . (PPQ S7) ,

This moral telos is the foundation of the most
important things Green has to say about political and social
institutions. Melvin Richter has viewed Green's political
thinking as an attempt to rework problematic features of
traditional Liberalism. He reports that

Green saw himself as following in the succession

of the 'radical' tradition of the Manchester
School, but correcting its class bias and adding

to the groups loyal to it those persons from other
classes who acknowledged the obligation to improve
their countrymen's lot. He led a reaction against
that aspect of radicalism which made no demand for

a personal contribution to the social good. (269-
270)

Green belongs in the tradition of English Liberalism in the
sense that he continued to view the individual as the unit
of ultimate value and worked to develop that value. In
other words, what makes Green a liberal is his notion that
individuals should have free exercise to determine the most
important spheres of their lives as they choose.

The traditional liberal view of the individual tended
to maximize its independence from society by maximizing its
freedoms and minimizing its responsibilities to others. J.
S. Mill's was the most influential formulation of
traditional English liberalism in the nineteenth century.
This passage from "On Liberty" indicates the extent to which
traditional liberalism separated freedoms from

responsibilities.

50

The object of this Essay is to assert one very
simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely
the dealings of society with the individual in the
way of compulsion and control . . . . That
principle is, that the sole end for which mankind
are warranted, individually or collectively, in
interfering with the liberty of action of any of
their number, is self-protection. That the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to
others. (135)

The real force of this passage lies in the assertion that
the individual ought to be free to do as it likes so long as
it does no harm to others. Green's reconceptualization of
individuality and freedom responds to the rather narrow
conception of "harm" in the above passage. That conception
holds that whatever does not directly impede another's
pursuit of pleasure does not harm him or her. In this way,
traditional liberalism regards absence of direct

interference not only as a necessary but also a sufficient

 

condition of the pursuit of happiness. On this description
an agent's freedom is "negative" in the sense that it is
free by virtue of the absence of restraint. Its freedom is
"negative" in the further sense that any intervention on the
part of society is viewed as impinging on the individual's
personal good. The only allowance made for intervention is
to prevent one individual's good from directly preventing
another's.

It is chiefly this view of individualism that Green's
political theory addresses. His positive-freedom liberalism

is grounded in the recognition that mere absence of

51
restraint is ppp a sufficient condition to allow all
individuals to realize their moral capacity. Green states
quite explicitly that "the mere removal of compulsion, the
mere enabling of a man to do as he likes, is itself no
contribution to true freedom" ("Liberal Legislation" 371).
This statement is one of the clearest formulations of
Green's positive freedom--the idea that true freedom
requires the presence of certain abilities and
opportunities.

Avital Simhony has recently viewed Green's positive-
freedom liberalism as an argument that negative freedom
liberalism actually restricts, not multiplies, social
opportunities. Simhony rightly points out that Green's idea
of positive freedom holds that "as many opportunities as
possible must be secured for all in order to enable the
exercise of their capacities of will and reason" ("On
Forcing Individuals" 315). This observation has been the
basis of his correcting a common misinterpretation of
Green's positive freedom.

Simhony argues that Green's notion of positive freedom
does not simply reverse (deny) the traditional liberal
notion that absence of constraint is a sufficient condition
of self-realization. It goes beyond it in a way important
to new formulations of liberalism. Simhony finds a
distinction within Green's positive freedom between internal
and external conditions of self-realization. The internal

conditions of self-realization are the moral capabilities of

52
will and reason discussed above. The possibility of
exercising these abilities requires more than the absence of
external constraint. It requires--in addition--external
conditions that must also be regarded as positive abilities.
Simhony points out that for Green, "[o]pportunities have to
be secured for the internal power to be effective" ("Beyond
.Negative and Positive Freedom" 38). Those opportunities
come in the form of social institutions constructed in such
a way that all members of a community have equal possibility
to exercise their moral capabilities.

In Green's political thinking, the positive external
conditions of self-realization are provided for by civil
rights. Rights supply the external conditions necessary for
self-realization in the following way. For Green, a freedom
to act in a certain way only becomes a right when it is
recognized by the members of a community as contributory to

the common good.

A power on the part of anyone is so recognized
[i.e. as a right] by others, as one which should
be exercised, when these others regard it as in
some way a means to that ideal good of themselves
which they alike conceive: and the possessor of
the power comes to regard it as a right through
consciousness of its being thus recognized as
contributory to a good in which he too is
interested. (PPQ 525)

When a freedom to act in a certain way becomes a right, it
is (theoretically) secured to all members of a society.
Because only those freedoms contributory to the common good
(in which all individuals share) become rights, rights serve

as social institutions that actively promote the

53
individual's self-realization. That is, a system of rights
is part of the internal workings of a society. And the
society thus founded on civil rights works to promote the
self-realization of its members.

The whole point of Green's discussion of rights is that
rights secure the external conditions necessary for self-
realization. From the view of positive-freedom liberalism,
the basic right of deontological liberalism--the right to be
left alone--does not necessarily provide all citizens with
the external conditions necessary for the exercise of their
internal moral capacities. Conversely, Green's positive
freedom liberalism recognizes the necessity of securing

these external conditions.

III

To further contextualize the recovery of Green's
cultural theory, I want to examine briefly some ways in
which Green's positive-freedom liberalism corresponds to two
contemporary versions of liberal cultural theory.

One way to understand Green's political theory is as a
realization that because we cannot precisely specify the
content of the moral idea, sufficient freedom must be
secured for individuals to realize their moral potential as
they see fit. The internal logic of self-realization and
the history of that self-realization do allow Green to set
boundaries within which moral capabilities should be

exercised. Rights serve to secure to the individual the

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external conditions necessary for it to exercise its moral
capabilities.

With these basic features of Green's political thinking
in mind, his liberalism should be viewed as very much in
line with recent versions of liberalism specifically
designed to protect a diversity of notions of the ultimate
or moral good. Two notable instances are John McGowan's
articulation of a "postliberal democracy" and John Rawls's
concept of "political liberalism." First McGowan, then
Rawls.

McGowan's Postmodernism and its Critics is an
examination of the viability of postmodernist critical
theory asia model for contemporary political action.
According to McGowan one of the defining characteristics of
postmodernist thought is the tendency to refer the meaning
of individual units to an encompassing system of relations
in which those units exist. For Derrida that system of
relations is a system of differences that make meaning
possible, for postmodern Marxists that system is the
economic conditions that organize all aspects of society,
for Foucault that system is an inevitable network of power
relations. In all these cases and more, the meaning of an
individual unit is made possible by its location within a
system of relations. Postmodernist cultural theorists tend
to regard the nature and significance of the human
individual in the same way. That is, the model of human

subjectivity endorsed by postmodernist theorists is what

55
might be termed a socially-constituted self. Just as a unit
has no meaning apart from its location in a system, the
individual has no status or power apart from its position
within the social totality that confers its meaning.

This view of the subject leads to a limitation of the
individual's freedom. If the social monolith is as
inescapable as the postmodernist theorists claim, then there
seems no way for an individual to take a critical position
against the logic or interests of that monolith. In other
words, if the individual is completely determined by
society, then its interests and goals must also be so
determined. Whatever freedom there could be would have to
come from being able to escape determination by the social
monolith. The individual would have to be a position
outside society itself.

The possibility of postmodern freedom is thus
formulated along the lines of negative freedom, since
freedom can only come via escape, separation, or
independence. Paradoxically, a subject capable of such
freedom would be a deontological subject--it would have to
have an existence and character apart from its location in
society. Both of these conditions are denied by the
postmodernist doctrine that the social monolith is
inescapable.

This, for McGowan is the paradoxical crux of postmodern
cultural theory. McGowan's fundamental polemical point is

that "the association of freedom with difference is too

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flimsy a notion on which to build a just society"

(Postmodernism x). What McGowan is looking for is a model

 

of social cohesion that respects difference and makes it
possible. In other words, some version of positive freedom
must be incorporated into contemporary cultural theory.

What we need is an account of the self's
inevitable immersion in the social that also
explains how selves can experience themselves as
integral agents capable of dissenting from or
choosing alternative paths among the options
social situations present. (Postmodernism 211)

 

McGowan himself proposes such an account, though he does not
specifically use the term "positive freedom" to name it.
Instead, he advocates the concepts of "recognition" and
"semiautonomy" to explain how agents can be the products of
socialization and yet retain some independence from a
totalizing social monolith.

McGowan replaces the postmodernist notion of a one-way
socialization with a more dynamic view of social membership.
His concept of "recognition" recovers the fact that an
individual's position in society is not always a completely
powerless one. Normally a group recognizes an individual as
a member when the individual gives consent to the prevailing
social structure, thereby legitimizing it. There are,
however, social positions in which membership is conferred
before consent is given. (Nationality is perhaps the most
obvious and important of these.) The individual's ability
to withhold consent is the source of a power it has against

the society. The individual may not have much power, but it

57
does have some, and it is a product of a position within
society.

Thus, while recognition enhances the hold of
social power over selves in some ways, it confers
at the same time a greater potential for effective
action on the part of the recognized within the
community of which they are members.
(Postmodernism 221)

 

McGowan's notion of "recognition" does explain how an
individual immersed in a social whole can have freedom
against that whole.

McGowan admits that some would argue that all identity,
because it is conferred by society, is oppressive and serves
only to reinforce the existing social structure. To argue
this is to deny the possibility of freedom and criticism.
McGowan's concept of "semiautomony" addresses this
objection. He points out that recognition of an individual
as a member is not negotiated once and for all. It is
conferred many times and at a variety of locations within
the society. "Semiautonomy" divides the social whole into
overlapping spheres of interest and activity that are
partially--but only partially--autonomous from one another.
The concept of semiautonomy thus denies any single
monolithic conception of society or social recognition.

More importantly, the separation of spheres allows the
possibility of viewing society's interests and goals from
different perspectives within the social whole. The
possibility of critical freedom results from this

multiperspectival view of society.

58

The concept of semiautonomy allows McGowan to view the
democratic state and the interests of its capitalist
economics as independent of one another. He rejects the
notion common among postmodern theorists that the state is
only oppressive: "What these visions deny is that the state
and its legal apparatus could ever possibly serve as a
legitimate form of authority that serves to protect liberty
against encroachments by other types of power"
(Postmodernism 227). A state that is established to protect
liberty against other types of power is one grounded in a
notion of positive freedom.

There is significant general correspondence between
Green and McGowan that pertains to the cultural conditions
to which each responds. McGowan's general concern about the
possibility of critical distance is essentially an updated
version of Green's concern for free will. Whereas Green was
defending human freedom from assimilation by the forces of
nature, McGowan is defending human freedom from
determination by similarly mechanical social forces. The
goals of the two defenses are virtually identical. For
Green, denial of free will renders the idea of morality
itself meaningless and moral philosophy pointless. If there
were no way of fighting inclination there would be no use
talking about it. 'The implication of postmodern unfreedom
is the same. Without the possibility of a position outside

the perpetuating interests of the social monolith, the idea

59
of criticism is meaningless and a model of political action
pointless. »

In effect, the move from Green to McGowan is the move
from moral philosophy to political philosophy, though always
within the boundaries of positive freedom. A similar move
has been made by another important figure in contemporary
liberal theory, John Rawls. His 1993 Political Liberalism
represents a reconfiguration of moral concerns in political
form. Political Liberalism corrects a serious deficiency of
the earlier A Theory of Justice by adjusting the notion of
"justice as fairness" to allow for a plurality of
irreconcilable though reasonable comprehensive religious,
philosophical, and moral doctrines within a single society.
In the introduction to the later work Rawls explains that in
A Theory of Justice "no distinction is drawn between moral
and political philosophy" but that in Political Liberalism
"these distinctions and related ideas are fundamental" (PE
xv).

As we have seen, the general aim of Green's liberalism
is to provide the conditions necessary for all agents to
realize their ideas of self-satisfaction. Because the
content of the idea of the moral good is not precisely
specifiable, agents should have some latitude to realize
their moral potential as they choose. The internal logic of
self-realization and the way self-realization has manifested
itself in the past indicate limits to that latitude in the

form of necessary positive conditions.

'1‘

60

John Rawls's goal in Political Liberalism is very much
the same. He too wants to specify the (social) conditions
necessary for free and equal agents to pursue various
conceptions of the good laid out by irreconcilable though
reasonable comprehensive doctrines. His concept of
"political liberalism" is designed to answer the question:
"how is it possible for there to exist over time a just and
stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain
profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical,
and moral doctrines?" (PE 4).

Rawls's goal is to articulate an organizing principle
or structure of society that preserves differences. His
political liberalism should be seen as a positive-freedom
liberalism in the sense that it views society's function as
the creation and protection of institutions that allow
agents to realize their various ideas of the good. While it
does not seek to specify the content of these ideas of the
good, it does seek to make certain that the conditions of
their realization are in place and available to all members.

Rawls's political liberalism is grounded in the notion
of "justice as fairness"--this idea serves as the
organizational principle by which freedom is secured. The
content of the liberal political conception of justice is
given by three main features

first, a specification of certain basic rights,
liberties, and opportunities . . . second, an
assignment of special priority to those rights,

liberties, and opportunities, especially with
respect to claims of the general good and of

61
perfectionist values; and third, measures assuring
to all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make

effective use of their liberties and
opportunities. (PE 6)

The first feature of justice as fairness amounts to a view

of the individual as de facto having certain rights attached

 

to it. The second feature provides that the individual
remains the unit of ultimate value in society. The third
feature specifies that social institutions must take active
steps to realize the conditions specified by the first two
features.

We have already seen that Green regards the faculties
of will and reason as the (internal) conditions of moral
self-realization. The exercise of these moral capabilities
makes possible a lifeplan that organizes an agent's desires
leading to permanent self-satisfaction. Additionally, will
and reason make agents free by allowing them to be
determined by a self-generated idea of themselves as a
possible end to be attained by action. Green's main point
about freedom is that it is the exercise of these faculties
that determines human action, not natural forces.

Rawls's conception of freedom with respect to human
agency is quite analogous. Among the assumptions
underpinning "the idea of society as a fair system of
cooperation" (PE 15) is the conception of "free and equal"
persons who can be fully cooperating members of society.

The basic idea is that in virtue of their two
moral powers (a capacity for a sense of justice

and for a conception of the good) and the powers
of reason (of judgment, thought, and inference

62

connected with these powers), people are free.

Their having these powers to the requisite minimum

degree to be fully cooperating members of the

society makes persons equal. (PE 19)
Rawls has cut up the moral capabilities differently than
Green, but they remain virtually the same. The internal
conditions of huaan freedom are a sense of justice and a
sense of one's own good. We can read Rawls's "sense of
justice" as corresponding to Green's notion of a common
good--a personal interest in which the interests of others
are included. A sense of justice comprehends this very
consideration of other agents' interests.

Rawls explains that the capacity for a conception of
the good "is the capacity to form, to revise, and rationally
to pursue a conception of one's rational advantage or good"
(PE 19). This corresponds more or less directly with
Green's notion of the will: the effort on the part of an
agent to satisfy itself through the presentation and
realization of objects of desire. Also necessary is the
power of reason to operate on these senses of justice and
good. For Green, reason was the ability to conceive of a
possible satisfaction as an end to be attained by action.

That Green's positive-freedom liberalism anticipates
important features of both McGowan's and Rawls's cultural
theories indicates something quite significant about the
role of positive freedom in contemporary cultural thinking.

McGowan and Rawls arrived at their interests in positive

freedom by different paths. McGowan situates himself in

63
response to postmodernist theory, which is in the
"continental" tradition of philosophy of consciousness.
Rawls's on the other hand is working within the Anglo-
American "analytical" tradition of philosophy of language.
That both come to advocate positive freedom suggests that
Green is an important historical resource for a variety of

contemporary ways of thinking about culture.

IV

I have tried to make the case that Green's positive-
freedom liberalism is congruent with contemporary versions
of liberal cultural theory. My first purpose in doing this
has been to fill in gaps in the genealogy of contemporary
cultural theory. Green is not mentioned at all by either
McGowan or Rawls, and yet there is a strong case to be made
that Green was the first to associate positive freedom with
liberalism.

My greater purpose has been to specify grounds for
regarding Green as a resource for contemporary thinking
about Victorian cultural theory. One troubling aspect of
Green's cultural theory for present purposes is the degree
to which his ethical and political thinking rely on
metaphysical arguments. Geoffrey Thomas has tried to pry
the ethics off the metaphysics, and I shall leave it to
professional philosophers to judge the result. There may be

other avenues open, however, to recovering Green.

64

Whereas Green's positive-freedom liberalism is grounded
in transcendental foundations (the eternal consciousness),
these metaphysical foundations may not be always present in
the literary analogues of Green's inheritors. Geoffrey Hill
has noted the extent of Green's commitments to the world of
material experience and the difficulties he had in
reconciling it with his metaphysical inclinations. Many of
Green ethical and political commitments have been more
successfully captured and more fully resolved in what I
shall call "moments" of a literary culture of Victorian
positive-freedom liberalism.

The remaining chapters are an attempt to recover some
of those moments in order to extend our sense of the
Victorian "literary" to include a line of positive-freedom
liberalism. This is one example of what cultural theory has

to gain from its "literary" expression.

Chapter III
FROM POETIC MORALISM TO ETHICAL POETRY:

MATTHEW ARNOLD, ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH, AND T. H. GREEN

From the time of his poems's first appearance through
the latest full-scale re-evaluations of his work, the
reception of Clough's poetry has been preoccupied with the
issue of his failure, even doubt that he was really an
artist. Until relatively recently, when Clough was
mentioned at all, it was as a minor Victorian poet, usually
as a kind of "junior" Arnold.

What I want to argue here is that despite its
historically limited reception, when examined in terms of
its ethical background and implications, Clough's poetry
affords a generally more viable model of cultural theory
than the post-Romantic poetics which depreciated it.
Moreover, I would like to suggest that a kind of moral
intuitionism served as the domestic model for cultural
theory when Arnoldean poetics became the prototype for
literary study in English and American universities.
Because of its dehistoricized view of ethical understanding
and because it gives very little attention to material and
social experience, Arnold's post-Romantic poetics was

eventually replaced in Anglo-American universities by

65

66
Marxist or leftist versions of cultural critique. There
were, however, alternative versions of cultural theory
circulating in Victorian England which would have served
better than the Arnoldianism which managed to become
institutionalized as literary studies in England and

America. Clough's was one of these.

I

The early reviews of Clough's poetry combined praise
with denigration. While reviewers were friendly to Clough's
sincerity and conception, they uniformly complain about the
formal achievement of his poetry. In his 1849 review of Egg
Bothie for Frazier's Magazine, Charles Kingsley, for
example, acknowledged Clough's freedom and intent to
criticize the conventional privileging of meter over
thought. Nevertheless, Kingsley did charge Clough with
failing to make his verse sufficiently beautiful when he had
the talent and opportunity (Thorpe 42). John Conington's
1849 review of Ambarvalia in Frazer's Magazine is favorable
of the poetry generally, but it complains about "an
obscurity of thought, and a careless roughness of form,
which more time spent in polishing, and more exertion given
to throwing [Clough's] thoughts into a concrete and truly
imaginative form, might easily have remedied" (Thorpe 88).
Conington also misses in Clough's work "that rhythmic
inspiration, that instinctive melodiousness, which throws

all thoughts of the lyric poet into the form of a song"

67
(Thorpe 89). And while Conington thinks Clough "is meant to
be something higher than a third-rate versifier," that
something is "an earnest thinker and prose writer upon some
of the deepest questions of the day" (Thorpe 90).
In his longish 1862 Atlantic Monthly memoir, Francis

Turner Palgrave comments that

Clough's work is wanting in art; the language and

thought are often unequal and incomplete; the

poetic fusion into a harmonious whole, imperfect.

[In The Bothie] and in his other writings, one

feels doubt whether in verse he chose the right

vehicle, the truly natural mode of utterance.
(Thorpe 112)

 

And although Palgrave concedes Clough's poetry "truly
belongs to a very uncommon class," he adds that "the matter
almost everywhere much outruns the workmanship," and the
poetry finally "should be judged by the thoughts awakened,
rather than by the mode of expressing them" (Thorpe 112).
Palgrave's equivocal praise is perhaps best summed up in his
comment that "it might be truly said that [Clough] rather
lived than wrote his poems," a comment that praises the
moral vocation at the expense of the poetic achievement
(Thorpe, 118).

Mixed reviews are common enough, especially when they
register a discrepancy between quality of conception and
quality of execution in the work of a young poet. But the
pattern of Clough's reception indicates something more. It
was the formal achievement of Clough's work which was
disliked. Walter Houghton accounts for this uniformity by

contextualizing Clough's reception within Victorian,

68
essentially post-Romantic, poetic expectations, which
associated "poetry" with "sensuous diction and imagery, an
affective rhythm that was melodic, and a syntax sufficiently
straightforward to make the verse understandable at one
reading" (9). According to Houghton, it was against the
background of post-Romantic poetics that Clough's poetry
appeared inadequate. More recently, Robindra Biswas, too,
accounts for Clough's presumed failure as an "Eminent
Victorian" by explaining that "we have learnt to recognize
other kinds of success" (5).

That we do now recognize other kinds of success has
been the occasion of recent renewed interest in Clough. In
his 1992 review of the past ten years of Clough scholarship,
Patrick Scott points out that only Tennyson and Browning
receive more space than Clough in Christopher Rick's 1987
New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Clough's Amour de
Voyage is one of only four longer poems reprinted in their
entirety in Rick's anthology. There are more literary and
historical references to Clough than to Arnold in Bernard
Richard's 1988 English Poetry of the Victorian Period. This
expansion of Clough's profile in the Victorian canon has
been accompanied by an increase in critical attention.
Scott reports that "the surprise of the last ten years has
been the widespread renewal of interest in Clough as a

religious writer" (297) and that "a second focus of interest

69

has been the literary-historical issue of Clough's relation
to his Romantic predecessors" (299).1

Contemporary constructions of Clough have attempted to
recover him as a positive cultural theorist, one who
critically evaluated the viability of Romantic responses to
Victorian problems. In a review of a relatively recent book
treating Clough's poetry in connection with Victorian
religious thought, Terry Eagleton has similarly recognized
Clough as a cultural theorist, noting the interdependence of
Clough's poetry, his cultural thinking, and existing
Victorian religious and political debates.2 Clough's
response to Victorian religious problems has a great deal to

do with the legacy of the Romantics, especially as it was

 

1In connection with Clough as a religious writer, Scott
mentions, most significantly, Paul Dean and Jacqueline
Moore's treatment of Clough's "historical dilemma" in "'To
Own the Positive and Present': Clough's Historical Dilemma";
Anthony Kenny's God and Two Poets; and three very
interesting essays by R. A Forsythe: "Trudging Service--
Secularization and the "devotional religion" [sic] of Arthur
Hugh Clough"; "The 'Inmost I'--Clough's Response to Culture
and 'Mental Anarchy'"; and "Clough's 'Adam and Eve'--A
Debating Tract for the Times."

On the topic of Clough's relation to the Romantics,
Scott cites Robert Johnson's "Modern Mr. Clough"; Michael
Timko's "Wordsworth and Clough: Divine Reflections and
Obvious Facts"; William B. Thessing's "Harvesting the Past:
Arthur Hugh Clough's Estimates of his Romantic
Predecessors."

 

2Eagleton contends that "Clough's agnosticism, like his
radical politics, is not easily separable from his ironic,
open-ended, boldly 'foregrounded' poetic forms, or from a
polymorphous play of discourses which decenters any
singular, assured viewpoint. His mixture of tentativeness
and prosaic Enlightenment lucidity is a strategy for
resisting the "aesthetic," a category already firmly on one
side of Victorian religious and political debates." (725)

70
transmitted by such eminent post-Romantic Victorians as
Matthew Arnold. It is, therefore, possible and instructive
to read Victorian post-Romantic poetics against the
background of newly revived interest in Clough's poetry as
cultural theory. For to juxtapose Clough's poetry and the
ethical implications of the post-Romantic poetics that
disparaged it reveals a great deal about dominant Victorian
assumptions concerning literature and culture.

Matthew Arnold is the prototypical Victorian post-
Romantic critic, and because of the place he occupied at the
intersection of poetic and explicitly cultural theory, his
response to Clough's work affords a good place to begin this
examination of one dominant Victorian mediation of poetry
and morality.

Arnold's criticism of Clough is not completely
negative: he does praise Clough for his sincerity and for a
few other qualities (Thorpe 73). When it comes to
articulating Clough's deficiencies, Arnold confesses that he
does not have complete confidence in his judgments. Even
so, it is the grounds upon which Arnold--and others--
explicitly rejected Clough's poetry that are most revealing
about Arnoldean poetics.

Having made some few minor praises and disparagements
in previous letters, Arnold writes to Clough: "If I were to
say the real truth as to your poems in general, as they

impress me--it would be this--that they are not natural"

71

(Thorpe 73).3 This criterion of naturalness Arnold applies
specifically to Clough's expression. For although Arnold
admits that Clough's expression is congruent with the
content of his poems, there remains some doubt that the mode
of expression was not "arbitrarily adopted." (By way of
illustrative contrast, Arnold thought that when Wordsworth
was at his best, his poetry was "as inevitable as Nature
herself" ("Wordsworth" 343).) Arnold's employment of the
concepts of "naturalness" and "inevitability" indicate a
fairly typical Victorian post-Romantic notion of the
relation between form and content as "organic." Elsewhere
there is strong evidence that Arnold gave priority to form.

Arnold says, for example, that less talented poets,
with less valuable content than Clough, still find a natural
mode of expression which satisfies "the world's general
appreciation for naturalness--i.e.--an absolute propriety--
of form, as the sole necessary of Poetry as such" (Thorpe
73). "Wealth and depth of matter," Arnold adds, "is merely
a superfluity in the Poet as such." The distinction between
"Poetry as such" and the "Poet as such" complicates the

issue. But it is clear that the sine qua non of poetry for

 

Arnold is form or expression. This leads him to encourage

Clough to consider "whether you attain the beautiful, and

 

3Most of Arnold's thinking about Clough's poetry is
Fevealed in letters they exchanged. Although correspondence
is not as reliable a guide to a critic's thinking as
Published work, Arnold's judgments there do correspond with
his later, published, literary thinking.

72

whether your product gives PLEASURE, not excites curiosity
and reflection" (Thorpe 74). In fact, Arnold found
"irritating" what he derided as Clough's attempt to "gglyg
the Universe" (Thorpe 72).

The trying to go into and to the bottom of an

object instead of grouping objects is as fatal to

the sensuousness of poetry as the mere painting,

(for in Poetry, this is not grouping) is to its

airy and rapidly moving life. (Thorpe 74)
Clough's analytical tendencies led Arnold to express concern
about "a growing sense of the deficiency of the beautiful in
[Clough's] poems, and of this alone being properly poetical
as distinguished from rhetorical, devotional, or
metaphysical" (Thorpe 72). Arnold did not, of course,
completely dismiss the content of poetry as irrelevant.‘
He himself lamented how "unpoetical the age and all one's
surroundings are" (Super 281) and insisted that poetry had
to become "a complete magister vitae as the poetry of the
ancients did" (Super 286). For poetry to become such a
guide to life meant that it had mainly to take over the
moral duties of such discourses as religion, philosophy, and
moral theory. Arnold thought their broadly moral function
could be accomplished by the formal character of poetry. On

Arnold's (early) model, formal features were capable of

creating at least some of the desired moral effects:

 

‘Leon Gottfried has well pointed out that Arnold's
general devaluation of Romantic poetics was based on the

judgement that the Romantics did not know enough. See
Gottfried, 49.

73

. . . there are two offices of poetry—-one to add
to one's store of thoughts and feelings--another
to compose and elevate the mind by sustained tone,
numerous allusions, and a grand style. . . for the
style is the expression of the nobility of the
poet's character, as the matter is the expression
of the richness of his mind: but on men character
produces as great an effect as mind. (Super 282)

Arnold's method, here at least, calls for the poet to lead
by moral self-example, rather than by inculcating or
developing analytical moral thinking.

Many of these comments appear in early letters--circa

l848--and most refer to Clough's Ambarvalia. Yet there is

 

compelling correspondence between these relatively early
responses and Arnold's later, more fully developed poetic
(and cultural) theory. Arnold's 1879 essay on Wordsworth is
a good place to see more clearly the ethical background and
implications of this line of critical response.

Arnold conceived of poetry as a kind of moral
discourse. In fact, Arnold thought the essence of
Wordsworth's greatness lay in his treatment of moral ideas.
In his "Wordsworth" essay, Arnold tells us that poetry "is
at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet
lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to
life,--to the question: How to live" (46). This is the
same thing, Arnold tells us, as what Voltaire means by
"treating in poetry moral ideas" (45). "The question, Egg
to live is itself a moral idea" (45). Arnold, however, is
careful to differentiate between the treatment in poetry of

moral ideas on the one hand and "morals . . . treated in a

74
narrow and false fashion . . . bound up with systems of
thought and belief which have had their day" on the other
(46). More concretely, in the "Wordsworth" essay Arnold
rejects Leslie Stephen's effort to find in Wordsworth's
poetry an "ethical system" "as distinctive and capable of
exposition as Bishop Butler's" (48). The rejection is
significant because it registers Arnold's belief that moral
ideas are susceptible to treatment other than as "scientific
systems of thought."
Against the view of the poetic treatment of morality as
a system, Arnold's own conception ought to be recognized as
an aesthetic construction of morality. Put more simply,
Arnoldean poetics makes morality a matter of feeling. For
example, Arnold ranks Wordsworth among the greatest English
poets
because of the extraordinary power with which
Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature,
the joy offered to us in the simple primary
affections and duties; and because of the
extraordinary power with which, in case after
case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as
to make us share in it. ("Wordsworth" 51)
Precisely because Arnold does not regard poetic treatment of
moral ideas as systematic, there is the problem of how
systematic an account can be given of his own poetic
moralism. On the face of it, the passage seems to assert
that emotional comfort can be derived from moral ideas, and
this is probably what Arnold meant. But it is not at all
easy to keep these terms distinct. Leon Gottfried, for

example, pointed out long ago that "joy" and "consolation"

75
were for Arnold not simply emotional indulgences but
primarily moral ideas themselves--practical ways of coping
with the exigencies of modern crisis (56).5 Thus, both
the emotional comfort afforded by the "primary affections
and duties" and as well as those "affections and duties"
themselves are equally susceptible to being regarded as
"moral ideas."

Arnold is not a systematic thinker, something for which
he has been frequently criticized.‘ As we shall see,
Arnold gives no detailed account of how emotions and moral
ideas are linked. Nevertheless, it is clear that his
poetics relies heavily on just such a linkage. The
association of emotional experience and moral idea Arnold
has in mind is evident in poems Arnold lists as
representative of Wordsworth's moral achievement: "The
Fountain," "The Highland Reaper," and "Michael." In fact,

"Michael" so closely fits the pattern of Arnold's praise

 

sGottfried's evidence for this concerns several
instances of Arnold's "personal attempt to make use of
Wordsworth's consolatory powers" (9).

6T. S. Eliot said of Arnold that "Arnold had little
gift for consistency or for definition. Nor had he the
power of connected reasoning at any length: his flights are
either short flights or circular flights. Nothing in his
prose work, therefore, will stand very close analysis . . .
" (346). Leavis, too, denies Arnold any status as a
rigorous thinker, contending that "Arnold as a theological
or philosophical thinker had better be abandoned explicitly

at once." And F. H. Bradley calls Arnold "an intellectual
butterfly."

76

that it is easy to imagine the above passage as a gloss on
these lines from Wordsworth's poem:

There is a comfort in the strength of love;

'Twill make a thing endurable, which else

Would break the heart:--Old Michael found it 80.

(457-459)
Again, Arnold's chief praise of Wordsworth is for his
ability to show the emotional comfort afforded by moral
ideas. The title character in "Michael" is able to endure
his son's departing as well as the hard-laboring life he
leads because of the strength of his love for his son. This
love is based on the father's oft repeated "hopes" that he
will live on through his son, one of several references in
the poem to family continuity. Love binds the family
together, and it is family continuity that gives meaning to
Michael's work--and life--by transforming it into something
greater than the mere struggle for existence. Thus, when
Michael learns that Luke will not return to the farm, he
ceases to work on the sheep fold even though it is still
needed. He stops because with this rupture of family
continuity Michael's life's work has lost its meaning and
purpose, and without these the work cannot be endured. The
poem essentially asserts that love (and work) are valid
moral ideas because of their capacity to produce comfort by
making life meaningful and therefore tolerable. In effect,
the emotional sustenance derived from love and work is proof

of their validity as moral ideas.

77
This pattern of validation of moral idea by emotional
experience serves as the foundation of another equally
important aspect of Arnold's cultural theory. It
constitutes the basis of Arnold's attempt to recover the
Bible as a primary locus of moral authority. Under the dual
pressure of a positivist ethos (which demanded
"verification") and German critical theology (which
destroyed the historical veracity of Biblical miracles)
Arnold's effort in Literature and Dogma was to find for the
Bible some new, unassailable basis. According to Lionel
Trilling,
Arnold felt that by taking the emphasis off
theology, off the cognitive and intellectual, and
by putting it on the emotional and imaginative, he
was taking religion off its apex where it had been
standing and putting it on its base where it
belonged . . . . (305)
Arnold rejects dogma as epiphenomenal and instead proffers
personal experience as verification that the morality
recorded in the Bible is true. The verification Arnold
finds for the Bible is in the personal experience of the
necessity of righteousness:
The idea of God, as it is given us in the Bible,
rests, we say, not on metaphysical conceptions of
the necessity of certain deductions for our ideas
of cause, existence, identity, and the like; but
on a moral perception of a rule of conduct not of
our own making, into which we are born, and which
exists whether we will or no; of awe at its
grandeur and necessity, and of gratitude at its
beneficence. (Literature and Dogma 242)
That Arnold should use imagination and emotional experience

as a basis on which to assert the moral authority of the

78
Bible is not at all surprising given his view that "the
strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious
poetry" ("Study of Poetry, 306).

Here again, in Literature and Dogma, emotional
experience is invoked as a reliable guide to moral insight.
However, in neither the poetics nor the Biblical criticism
is the exact mechanism of the linkage between emotional
experience and moral idea ever specified by Arnold. Nor is
it, I submit, precisely intelligible. As with his notorious
touchstones, Arnold was never able to account for the
qualities and relationships which were ultimately
foundational for these aspects of his critical thinking.
Both in the case of the touchstones and in his notion of the
poetic treatment of morality, Arnold relied finally upon a
leap of faith. In the case of the touchstones, Arnold was
counting on the uniformity of public school and Oxbridge
education to supply what he could not quite articulate. The
touchstone fragments were to invoke whole--though
unspecified--systems of associated belief and value. Each
fragment was designed, in effect, to take the reader back to
the lecture room where consensus about literary greatness
existed only through dogmatic assertion.

The rhetorical logic of Arnold's poetics works in much
the same way. Arnold invokes emotional experience as a
validation of moral ideas, but the connection between those
experiences and the ideas is as arbitrary as that between

the touchstones and the "greatness" of the literature from

79
which they are excerpted. In both cases, Arnold treats
enculturated associations as if they were somehow essential
or necessary. This "essentialist" attitude toward the
association of emotion and moral insight makes Arnoldean
poetics a kind of moral intuitionism. The rhetorical logic
of Arnoldean poetics replicates the essential structure of
the moral intuitionism of, for example, Thomas Reid and
William Whewell. Lionel Trilling, in fact, has found a kind

of innate moral sense argument in Arnold's St. Paul and

 

Protestantism:
There is in us, says Arnold, "a central moral
tendency," a "central clue in our moral being
which unites us to the universal order." But not
only is this central moral tendency our link with
the universal order, it is also bound to be right:

' moral knowledge (though not moral performance) is

perfectly easy for it. (Trilling 311)

In Arnoldean poetics, this innate moral sense finds its

expression through the invocation of the emotions as guides

to moral insights.

As a foundation for cultural theory, there is an
especially important feature of this poetic moralism. In
the same way that Arnold's touchstones reach back to
essentially arbitrary standards, the moral insights to which
the poetry leads via emotional experiences are of a local,
particularized kind. Certainly, the moral ideas Wordsworth
draws upon are in some sense "primary," and, by his own
admission in the preface to the Eyrical Ballads, that is his

reason for representing "low and rustic" life.

Nevertheless, the moral insights invoked by Arnold's poetics

80
are always the moral insights of a particular people living
in a particular context, despite what Wordsworth--and
Arnold--imply about the universality of "primary affections
and duties." The foundation upon which individual moral
insights are universalized is the infallibility of emotional
experience. Consequently, Arnold's aesthetic construction
of morality never really gets beyond a kind of moral
provincialism.

Arnold's cultural theory makes final appeals to
personal experience in a number of ways. I have tried to
show that Arnold's poetics and his Biblical criticism both
operate on the assumption that personal emotional experience
validates moral ideas. However, because these appeals at
bottom function much like moral intuitionism, they are no
less foundational and dogmatic than the orthodoxy Arnold was

trying to replace.

II
The key to the recovery of Clough's poetry I am

proposing is the recognition that Clough's poetry represents
and recommends a treatment of moral problems which avoids
the moral provincialism and arbitrary foundationalism of
Arnold's poetic and cultural theory. Arnold simply took for
granted that there was an essential link between emotional
experience and moral insight. His was a dehistoricized

vision of moral understanding, one which implies a belief in

81
the permanence of moral truth and the immutability of moral
consciousness to recognize it under ideal conditions. In
short, Arnold failed to recognize that the character of
ethical understanding itself was changing, and that what was
needed was a new way to understand morality, not simply new
reasons for thinking about traditional morality in the old
way. Conversely, in Clough's poetry and prose there are
indications that Clough was becoming aware of the need to
reconfigure ethical understanding.

Clough's poetry treats moral ideas in ways
fundamentally different from Arnold's. Like Arnold, Clough
was concerned about foundations of morality, but, unlike
Arnold, Clough abandons foundational questions and directs

attention to individual moral insight. It is the dialogic

 

character of Clough's poetry that distinguishes his
treatment of moral problems from Arnold's. This dialogic
character makes an object of the structure of moral dilemma,
situates moral dilemmas within the context of the individual
(ethical) consciousness, and implies the preclusion of
appeal to traditional foundational discourses. It
constitutes a new configuration of moral understanding

represented by a modern religious and ethical consciousness.

R. A. Forsythe has most recently characterized Clough's
response to the Victorian religious crisis in terms of a
process of spiritualized identity-formation. He sees

Clough's response to the "Receding Sea of Faith" in terms of

82
God's disappearance from the world and reappearance in the
individual human heart. According to Forsyth, for Clough
the only way of regaining sight of God "was to avoid the
clutter of customary doctrine and historical event by
looking within the individual human soul" ("Trudging
Service" 32).
By thus seeking out God, the modern individual is
not, in the usual Biblical sense of the term,
finding Him. Rather, he is finding himself. For
what he is really doing in offering "trudging
Service" is nothing less than the simultaneous
creation and discovery of that true identity which
ggough calls the "inmost I." ("Trudging Service"
Forsyth gleans the "inmost I" from Clough's "Adam and Eve,"
a poem in which Clough uses the myth of the Fall to
characterize the Victorian loss of faith. Clough's "inmost
I" forms the core of the individual's spiritual and human
identity. This turn inward is not simply a repeat of the
Romantic withdrawal to solipsism. Forsyth argues that
Clough took a deliberate stance of ambivalence as the only
possible position given the limits of knowledge and the
inadequacy of historical narratives to supply grounds for
knowledge. "The only appropriate response was "silence," in
Clough's particular sense of the word, meaning to hold
matters poised in a state of open-minded and self-assured

abeyance . . ." ("Trudging Service," 30). Forsyth argues

for this feature of Clough's thinking on the basis Clough's

83
"Dipsychus" and "Amours de Voyage."7 It is available in
the shorter poems as well. In fact, "poised open-minded and
self-assured abeyance" is a structural feature of Clough's
poetics in general.

Many of Clough’s poems juxtapose moral alternatives.
Although these alternatives are of various (usually
competing) kinds, they generally represent foundational
anchors of morality, either traditional moral discourses or
ideas of possible satisfactions. Orthodox religion and
morality, desire to preserve spiritual purity, the necessity
of worldly activity, duty, and self-interest are the most
common. It is generally the case in Clough's poems that
single characters or speakers comprehend a duality or
multiplicity of "voices," each one representing competing
claims in a moral dilemma. This dialogism serves first of

all to objectify and dramatize the structure of moral

 

dilemma.
In Clough's poetry, the fundamental crisis of Victorian
culture is represented as a discontinuity of ethical

experience--as a slippage between moral principle and the

 

7Paul Dean and Jacqueline Moore also have recognized a
balancing tendency in several of Clough's longer poems.
They have articulated Clough's juxtaposition of nostalgia
for the lost security of pre-lapsarian orthodoxy and
trepidation for the dangers of free thought in Clough's
"Adam and Eve." See Paul Dean and Jacqueline Johnson,
"'Paradise Come Back': Clough in Search of Eden." In
another essay Dean and Moore suggest that in "Dipsychus" and
"Amours de Voyage" Clough moves beyond trepidation about the
balancing of these two forces to a "Stoical acceptance" of
the situation. See Dean and Moore, "To Own the Positive and
Present: Clough's Historical Dilemma."

84
needs of material and social experience».8 This very
slippage becomes the primary object of representation in
"The Latest Decalogue," where traditional Mosaic morality is
juxtaposed with modern instrumental pragmatism. The poem
represents the satirical voice of a speaker endorsing the
propriety of the ten commandments for his own instrumental
reasons. One voice is that of the modern, worldly
instrumentalist, while the other represents the moral
authority of the ten commandments--literally the prototype
of orthodox Christian morality. Both voices, however, are
expressed by a single speaker, and in a way that privileges
neither:

THOU shalt have one God only, who

Would be at the expense of two?

No graven images may be

Worshipped, except the currency:

Swear not at all; for for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:

At church on Sunday to attend

Will serve to keep they world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all

From whom advancement may befall:

Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:

Do not adultery commit;

Advantage rarely comes of it:

 

8In his review of Newman's The Soul, Clough rejects
devotion as a foundation for religion, on the grounds that
devotional habits have little to offer in the way of a
solution to the problem of "reconciling the world and the
Spirit" (Poems and Prose Remains 300). Similarly, in his
"Lecture on the Development of English Literature From
Chaucer to Wordsworth," Clough writes about the late
seventeenth-century repudiation of Puritanism: "it is
impossible not to sympathize with the joy and exaltation of
people at throwing off the yoke of an iron system of morals,
proven by experience not co-extensive with facts, not true

to the necessary exigencies and experiences of life" (Poems
and Prose Remains 350).

85

Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

When it's so lucrative to cheat:

Bear not false witness; let the lie

Have time on its own wings to fly:

Though shalt not covet; but tradition

Approves all forms of competition.

The sum of all is, thou shalt love,

If anybody, God above,

At any rate shall never labour

More than thyself to love thy neighbor.

(1-24)9
There is a kind of reciprocating irony at work here which
simultaneously undermines the authority of both voices, both
positions. The instrumentalist's running gloss on each of
the commandments indicates his own moral corruption despite
his expressed compliance with the letter of the law. As
compared against the moral standard of the Ten Commandments,
his instrumental motivation betrays this corruption. On the
other hand, because such an individual can exactly comply
with each of the commandments and yet be so obviously
corrupt, the authority of the commandments themselves is
compromised.

By creating a dialogical "balance" between the voice of
orthodox morality on the one hand, and the voice of cynical
compliance on the other, Clough achieves a double critique
which undermines both traditional morality and at the same
time--in the same breath--criticizes the modern,

instrumentalist's movements between the letters of the law.

The poem, then, settles into a kind of moral stand-off in

 

9All references to Clough's poetry are from the Lowry,
Norrington, and Mulhauser edition, 1951.

86
the sense that no moral center is discernable within the
poem. Viewed structurally, the essence of the Victorian
cultural crisis is just this inability to reconcile
traditional moral foundations with the exigencies of modern
social experience.

In "Jacob's Wives," a similar dialogic balance between
the voices of two characters becomes a symbolic
representation of the structure and psychology of moral
dilemma. Here the two voices represented are those of the
Biblical characters Rachel and Leah, and once again the
balancing precludes authorization of either one. Each
character asserts the grounds of her claim for Jacob's
exclusive attention. Rachel invokes the authority of
emotional attachment, and Leah invokes the authority of
performing one's duty, in this case God's command. Yet,
neither can be wholly satisfied; neither can experience the
fullness of the position for which both are struggling.
Jacob's affections lie inevitably with Rachel even though
she cannot provide him sons. Conversely, even though Leah
can provide sons, she will never enjoy the attention and
privileges of being his wife. Each speaker's final lines
registers disappointment and resignation:

And Rachel wept and ended, Ah, my life!
Though Leah bear thee sons on sons, methought
The Child of love, late born, were worth them
all. (107-109)

and:

And Leah ended, Father of my sons,

87

Come, thou shalt dream of Rachel if thou

gélfieah fold thee in a wife's embrace. (119-

121)
Although he remains voiceless, Jacob is present in the poem
from the first stanza to the last. It is only he who could
finally decide the dilemma by recognizing one woman's claims
over the other's and directing his attentions appropriately,
yet he remains silent. His silent presence sites the
dilemma within a single consciousness while maintaining the
dialogic balance. Within the drama of the poem, the
competing voices of Rachel and Leah dramatize the
frustration, incompleteness, and dissatisfaction of
compromise, while Jacob's silence dramatizes the inertia of
true dilemma.

It is this inertia that maintains the balance between
Rachel's and Leah's claims upon him. It suspends resolution
of the dilemma by not privileging one or the other
alternative. More significantly, just as Jacob remains
silent through the poem, neither does Clough intrude to
"authorize" one or the other alternative. By maintaining
the dialogical balance and not authorizing either
perspective, Clough preserves the particularity of the
individual ethical consciousness in which moral dilemmas
appear, and in which it must be resolved. He does not make
the decision for Jacob, and so he does not make the decision

for the reader.

88

The specific dilemma represented in "Jacob's Wives"
was, of course, not a common experience of the Victorian
cultural crisis. Consequently, the general irrelevance of
the content per se shifts significance onto the poem's
structural features. In this way, "Jacob's Wives"
illustrates an essential feature of Clough's poetic
treatment of moral problems: Clough's poetry generally
situates moral dilemma in the context of the particularity
of the individual ethical consciousness.

Much like "Jacob's Wives," "Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne"
represents the moral dilemma in structural terms. It,
however, is not quite so schematic, dramatizing more
directly the psychology of moral dilemma and representing
that psychology in greater particularity. "Sa Majeste Tres
Chretienne" is a dramatic monologue representing the
frustration of a single consciousness simultaneously
committed to spiritual purity and compelled to worldly
activity. In the course of sacramental confession, the
speaker admits to "Sins, which yet I see not how I should
have shunned" (116-117). The fact that the speaker is a
king heightens the necessity and urgency of acting in the
world, yet action entails spiritual compromise:

You drive us into action as our duty.

Then action persecutes and tortures us.

To pleasures and to loving soft delights
We fly for solace and for peace; and gain
Vexation, Persecution also here. (104-108)

Some reservation is required in sympathizing entirely with

the king's implication that he has no choice: the slope may

89
not be as slippery as he indicates. Nevertheless, the poem
does assert--from the king's perspective--a discontinuity of
ethical experience. His moral ideas do not correspond in a
meaningful way to his worldly experiences.

Once again, Clough's representation of moral conflict
refrains from authorizing any perspective which would serve
as grounds for choice between the alternatives. This
authorial neutrality is achieved first by the inevitability
of the King's predicament and secondly by the careful
closure of all means of escape. The king imagines that the
priest's life of contemplation offers the kind of spiritual
repose he desires: "Ah, holy father, would I were as you"
(96). But the very next line closes this gate of escape:

But you, no less, have trials you say;
Inaction vexes you, and action tempts,
And the bad prickings of the animal heats,
As in the palace, to the cell will come. (97-
100)
Similarly, heterodoxy and skepticism prove unsatisfactory
alternatives to the king's dilemma:
[I am] Most thankful I am not, as other men,
A lonely Lutheran English Heretic;
If I had so by God's despite been born,
Alas, methinks I had but passed my life
In sitting motionless beside the fire,
Not daring to remove the once-placed chair,
Nor stir my foot for fear it should be sin.
Thank God indeed,
Thank God for his infallible certain creed.
(81-89)
The final lines are not convincing, yet the king clings to

them because they are all he has. By his own admission,

90
orthodox religious sacrament--confession--is a remedy, but
not the cure:

Without the appointed,

Without the sweet confessional relief,
Without the welcome all-absolving words,

The mystic rite, the solemn soothing forms,
Our human life were miserable indeed.

And yet methinks our holy Mother Church
Deals hardly, very, with her eldest born,

Her chosen, sacred, and most Christian Kings.
To younger pets, the blind, the halt, the
sick,

The outcast child, the sinners of the street,
Her doors are open and her precinct free:

The beggar finds nest, the slave a home,

Even thy alters, O my Mother Church--

0 templa guam dilecta. We, the while,

Poor Kings, must forth into action, as you

say;

Action, that slaves us, drives us, fretted,
worn,

To pleasure, which anon enslaves us too . . .
. (41-57)

The primary object of representation in "Sa Majeste Tres
Chretienne" is the king's mind as it works its way around
and through the conditions and alternatives of his dilemma.
The overall mode of representation in "Sa Majeste Tres
Chretienne" is still symbolic to a degree: the dilemma
represented is again not one common to representations of
the Victorian cultural crisis. Consequently, the structure
of dilemma is what is (schematically) most significant.

In "Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne" Clough utilizes the
authorial distance featured by the dramatic monologue to
achieve and maintain dialogic balance which preserves the
dilemma rather than allowing it to be resolved simply by
reference to a traditional moral foundation of some sort.

The poem has carefully closed off appeals to such

91
foundations. It situates and Eiggg the dilemma in the
individual's awareness of competing claims and the
inadequacy of traditional means of resolution.

Because the nature of moral consciousness changes,
moral insights must continually be reevaluated in the
context of that changing moral consciousness. By achieving
a dialogical balance between the alternatives, Clough
represents the competing claims of a moral problem divorced
from traditional moral discourses.

He is thus able to situate them in the modern ethical
consciousness and provide a situation in which they can be
reevaluated in that context. It is this ethical
consciousness or ethical self-consciousness which
constitutes the nucleus of Clough's poetic treatment of
morality.

In his longer poems, Amours De Voyage and,

 

particularly, Dipsychus, Clough achieves a greater
particularization of individual ethical consciousness and a
more detailed conception of it as a response to a
discontinuity of ethical experience. Dipsychus registers a
discontinuity of ethical consciousness like that of "Sa
Majeste Tres Chretienne" and "The Latest Decalogue." Here,
however, the poem goes beyond merely representing the
structure or psychology of moral dilemma to deal more
directly with the problematical nature of resolution and

possibilities of overcoming those problems.

92

Dipsychus's voice is that of the young intellectual
faced with the question of what line to take in life. His
is the essential problem of morality broadly conceived. It
is perhaps rendered most directly by Arnold's phrase: "How
to live life." For Dipsychus, that essential problem might
be better formulated as "by which principle(s) ought one
live life?" The dramatic action of the poem records
Dipsychus's primarily cognitive responses to a series of
encounters with material and social reality. In these
encounters, Dipsychus is faced with the claims of his
animal (sexual) impulses, the attraction of sensuous
pleasure, claims of personal honor, and the necessity of
participating in the social world. In each instance,
Dipsychus recoils from the baseness of the material claims
upon him, appealing instead to ideal principles and
idealized conceptions of human purpose and gratification.
The habit of his cognitive response is to try to comprehend
material experience within an ideal or spiritual framework

and then reject it for falling short of that ideal standard.

For example, when confronted with his own sexual urges,
Dipsychus initially recoils and tries to suppress the claims
of his animal nature. Finally, he tries to comprehend the
oscillation of his consciousness between desire and
conscience by situating that oscillation in a divine or

spiritual context:

Or could I think that it had been for nought

93

That from my boyhood until now, in spite
Of most misguided theories, at the moment
Somewhat has ever stepped in to arrest
My ingress at the fatal-door,
That many and many a time my foolish foot
O'ertreading the dim sill, spite of itself
And spite of me, instinctively fell back. . .
--Could I think,
In spite of carnal understanding's sneers,
All this fortuitous only--all a chance?
(IIa, 59-74)

What he is describing here is nothing more mystical than the
ordinary workings of a conscience inculcated in boyhood--an
indoctrinated categorical fear of sin.

Spirit's gloss of Dipsychus's idealized conception of
sin is the more reliable explanation of the two:

I know it's mainly your temptation

To think the thing a revelation,

A mystic mouthful that will give

Knowledge and death--none know and live!

I tell you plainly that it brings

Some ease; but the emptiness of things

(That one old sermon Earth still preaches
Until we practise what she teaches)

Is the sole lesson you'll learn by it (IIa,
20-28)

Finally, Dipsychus tries to control his sexual self by
literally domesticating it. In a movement which partially
recognizes the necessity of participation in material social

reality, Dipsychus "descends" to matrimonially-sanctioned

procreative sex:

0 welcome then, the sweet domestic bonds

The matrimonial sanctities; the hopes

And cares of wedded life; parental thoughts,
The prattle of young children, the good word
Of fellow men, the sanction of the law,

And permanence of habit, that transmute
Grossness itself into crystal. (IIa, 79-85)

94
Even here, despite the partial descent to social reality,
there remains an effort to idealize experience.

Clough is careful to manage the appeal to ideality so
that the problem of how to live does not degenerate into
manichean simplicity. Dipsychus is not simply taking the
highest (traditional) moral ground on the horizon. Instead,
he is rejecting all non-idealized principles of organizing
life. There is, for example, nothing specifically morally
appealing about the ideal sensuousness of the gondola ride,
yet Dipsychus is initially eager to have life like the
effortless glide of the gondola:

How lightly it moves, how softly! Ah,

Could life, as does our gondola,

Unvext with quarrels, aims, and cares

And moral duties and affairs,

Unswaying, noiseless, swift, and strong,

For ever thus--thus glide along! (IV, ll-16)
The ideality of perfection is what appeals here, and its
sensuousness is replaced only by another equally idealized
claim: social conscience.

The gondola is a choice image for it comes by its

fluidity only from the ever-present, ever-working, though

ever-silent gondolier:

Our gaieties, our luxuries,
Our pleasures and our glee,
Mere insolence and wantonries,
Alas, they feel to me.

How shall I laugh and sing and dance?
My very heart recoils,
While here to give my mirth a chance

95
A hungry brother toils.
The joy that does not spring from joy
Which I in others see,
How can I venture to employ,
Or find it joy for me? (43-54)
Dipsychus's encounters with the material and social
world constitute the ground of a critical examination of the
prevailing evangelical understanding of morality. In fact,
a case can be made that a modern age of ethical
understanding begins with the Victorians. It was then that
moral philosophy first separated itself from explicit
theological allegiances.1°

Recent readers of Clough's longer poems (especially

"Adam and Eve" and Dipsychus) have noted that Clough

 

understood the crisis of Victorian morality in historical
terms. Dean and Moore point to Clough's historical vision
in his use of the Fall in "Adam and Eve" as an "objective
correlative" for theories of the historical process. In a
later essay, Dean and Johnson extend this argument to
Dipsychus and Amour de Voyage where "the deracination of the
present from any historical continuum is ultimately
presented as a matter for Stoical acceptance" (59). Forsyth
echoes this reading as well, commenting that in "Adam and

Eve"

 

10This is true in several senses. As J. B. Schneewind
points out, T. H. Green at Oxford, Henry Sidgwick at
Cambridge, and Alexander Bain in Scotland were among the
first "professional" philosophers (6). That is, they were
independent of formal allegiances to religious creeds, and
they worked out moral philosophies not dependent upon
theological claims.

96
the Fall becomes a paradigm for the decline of
orthodox Christian belief among the Victorians, so
that Adam is translated by swift historical
process from Edenic perfection to a world of
revolutionary transition which is expansionist,
and increasingly scientific and secular in temper.
("'Inmost I'" 261)

In Dipsychus the discontinuity of ethical experience is
represented as the result of historically developing moral
understanding. In the poem's epilogue, characters
representing Clough and his uncle rehearse the poem's
central concern: the relative health of modern ethical
consciousness. Clough's uncle registers what might be

termed a modern or pragmatist's view of education and

morality:

What is the true purpose of education? Simply to

' make plain to the young understanding the laws of
the life they will have to enter. For example--
that lying won't do, thieving still less; that
idleness will get punished; that if they are
cowards, the whole world will be against them;
that if they will have their own way they will
have to fight for it. Etc. etc. (Epilogue)

This is ethical demystification. What might have been
conceived in earlier ages as offenses against God are
regarded here in terms of their effect on the chances of
success and happiness for the transgressor and the general
health of the society.

Clough's uncle agrees that "consciences are often much
too tender in [Clough's] generation," and attributes the

defect to Thomas Arnold:

Why, my dear boy, how often have I not heard from
you, how [Thomas Arnold] used to attack offenses,
not as offenses--the right view--against
discipline, but as sin, heinous guilt, I don't

97

know what beside! Why didn't he flog them and

hold his tongue? Flog them he did, but why

preach? (Epilogue)
The uncle doesn't have it gplpg right. Clough's fictive
self in the dialogue alternately traces the origin of the
over-sensitive conscience to "the religious movement of the
last century, beginning with Wesleyanism, and culminating at
last in Puseyism" (Epilogue). Although Thomas Arnold's
reputation was indeed chiefly for instilling moral
seriousness into the public schools, his reform was not
predicated on the spiritualized conception of transgression
typified by Tractarian orthodoxy. According to Clough's own
character, the Evangelical priority of spiritualism and
faith over the pragmatism of good works led to a fear and
rejection of material experience summed up in the
traditional Evangelical formula: "in the world but not of
it." Growing sympathy with the contradiction of this
conception of ethical experience constitutes the central
ethical problem of Victorian England, and the poem's central
tension. ‘

Dipsychus's problem is that there is no longer possible

a precise fit between ideal moral principles and material
and social experience. This slippage is represented in the
poem as a contradiction between the necessity of acting and
the unsuitability of the kinds of action afforded by modern

social life:

We ask Action,
And dream of arms and conflict; and string up
All self-devotion's muscles; and are set

98
To fold up papers. To what end? We know
Sgfier folks do so; it is always done;
And it perhaps is right. And we are paid for
:2} nothing else we can be. He that eats
Must serve; and serve as other servants do:
And don the lacquey's livery of the house.
(IX, 131-139)
Regardless of his dissatisfaction with the opportunities for
redeeming activity, Dipsychus's submission to the exigencies
of material and social living is implicit and immanent
throughout the poem. Spirit insists repeatedly:
But how meantime to live is fit,
Ask Common Sense; and what says it?
Submit, submit! (X, 189-191)
And Dipsychus finally recognizes it as well: "Be it then
thus--since it must, it seems./ Welcome, 0 world,
henceforth; and farewell dreams!" (XIII, 20-21). The poem
continually asserts that agents must live in the world in
some way. Even monastic life constitutes a fundamental
moral choice: how one is going to live one's life,
according to what principles. And, in fact, suicide would
be the only means of completely evading the claims of social
experience.

Despite the poem's Faustian overtones, however, there
is not really anything which constitutes a deal or bargain
between Dipsychus and Spirit. Precisely what Dipsychus
stands to gain or lose by submitting in never specified.
Rather, the necessity and inevitability of his submission is

implicit. We do, however, get a picture of what Dipsychus's

life might look like if he does not submit:

99

Stay at Venice, if you will;
Sit musing in its churches hour on hour
Cross-kneed upon a bench; climb up at whiles
The neighboring tower, and kill the lingering
day
With old comparisons; when night succeeds,
Evading, yet a little seeking, what
You would and would not, turn your doubtful
eyes
On moon and stars to help morality;
Once in a fortnight say, by lucky chance
Of happier-tempered coffee, gain (Great
Heaven!)
A pious rapture: is it enough?
0 that will keep you safe. Yet don't be
sure--
Emotions are so slippery. Aye keep close
And burrow in your bedroom; pace up and down
A long half hour; with talking to yourself
Make waiters wonder; sleep a bit; write a bit
of verse,
Burnt in disgust, then ill-resorted, and left
Half-made, in pencil scrawl illegible.
Sink ere the end, most like, the hapless prey
Of some chance chambermaid, more sly than
fair,
And in vain call for me. 0 well I know
You will not find, when I am not to help,
E'en so much face as hires a gondola.
Beware!-- (X, 116-139)

What is most noteworthy about the life Spirit predicts for
Dipsychus is its absence of direction, purpose, or product.
It is a life of paralysis with not even enough fortitude to
take pleasure where it may be found. This kind of paralysis
is the closest thing imaginable to amorality.

The moral vacuity of the life Dipsychus will lead if he
does not acknowledge the claims of society serves chiefly to
point up the inevitability of his submission. Such
inevitability suggests that Spirit represents nothing much
more definite than the spirit of the age--than the

inescapable requirements of Victorian living. Dipsychus

100
hears Spirit's responses long before he addresses him
directly, as though the voice were in the back of his mind
for a long while--part of Victorian consciousness itself.
When Dipsychus does finally address Spirit he already knows
what Spirit's "demands" will be. Finally, in assenting to
those demands, Dipsychus surrenders little except the purity
of his ideal principles. He is, for example, allowed--even
encouraged--to keep his religion and to pursue aesthetic
gratification. _He simply needs to put a different
construction on it.

Clough's rejection of the Evangelical code led him to
acknowledge the claims of social experience upon the
individual. The practical realization is a deferral to
social roles which have the capability of organizing the
agent's life. In the absence of moral ideals, social roles
provide the answer to the moral question: "how to live
life." For example, Dipsychus's final response to the
problem of finding ennobling action in modern experience is
to give his life over (albeit unwillingly) to social roles:

Ah, if I had a course like a full stream,
If life were as the field of chase! No, no;
The age of instinct has, it seems, gone by,

And will not be forced back. And to live now

I must sluice out myself out into canals,
And lose all force in ducts. (IX, 103-108)

The "force" (independent will) Dipsychus fears losing is
largely illusory since it has not and will not enable him to
take some positive line in life. Adoption of social roles

such as marriage, religious observance, and professional

101
life are all Spirit is really demanding of Dipsychus.
Dipsychus's immanent surrender to Spirit is indicative of
the inevitability of the claims of social roles on the

individual.

There has been much disagreement about Clough's
attitude toward duty, specifically whether or not it
constituted for him a positive theory of moral action.11
On the one hand, in "The Questioning Spirit" duty is
represented as a truly viable alternative to the despair of
skepticism. The poem ends with the questioning spirit
kneeling beside the spirit of duty:

But as the echoing chorus died away

And to their dreams the rest returned apace

By the one spirit I saw him kneeling low,

And in a silvery whisper heard him say:

Truly, thou know'st not, and thou need'st not
know;

Hope only, hope thou, and believe alway;

I also know not, and I need not know,

Only with questionings pass I to and fro
Perplexing these that sleep, and in their folly
Imbreeding doubt and sceptic melancholy;

Till that, their dreams deserting, they with me
Come all to this true ignorance and thee. (40-51)

 

11Anthony Kenny finds in several of Clough's poems
evidence that Clough's appeal to duty was not a positive
cultural theory but a way to cope with and work through
doubt and skepticism (Kenny 27-37). Conversely, Michael
Timko reads Clough's appeal to duty in light of what he
terms Clough's "positive naturalism"--a positive regard for
human goodness. Timko argues that Clough's positive
naturalism does constitute a positive cultural theory which
incorporates active service to others as a primary social
responsibility (Timko 53). Robindra Biswas thinks Clough
had, finally, no positive cultural theory (196).

102

Duty here supplies direction when true knowledge is
unattainable. In "Bethesda (A Sequel)," however, duty is
differentiated from a mechanical adherence to convention.
As Anthony Kenny points out, "duty" in "The Questioning
Spirit" has degenerated into "the work of the world" in
"Bethesda--a Sequel" (33).12 It has lost its ideality and
its appeal. The questioning spirit is among the invalids on
the stony floor still committed to the way of the world
though unable to call it duty:

'1 know not, I will do--what is it I would say?

'What was that word which once sufficed alone for
all,

'Which now I seek in vain, and never can recall?‘
'I know not, I will do the work the world requires
'Asking no reason why, but serving its desires;
'Will do for daily bread, for wealth, respect,
good name,

'The business of the day--alas, it that the same?’
And then, as weary of in vain renewing

His question, thus his mournful thought pursuing,
'I know not, I must do as other men are doing.‘
(21-30)

In so far as duty and the work of the world are not the same
things, the poem demystifies the appeal to duty in the wake
of skepticism. In addition, the highly satirical "Duty,
that's to say complying" makes a similar differentiation
between duty and compliance. And, as discussed above,

Dipsychus makes much of the notion that social roles do not

 

afford the opportunities for ennobling action one could wish

for.

 

12The following reading of Clough's poems concerning
duty follows though is not specifically indebted to Kenny's
analysis.

103

R. A. Forsyth has developed a compelling synthetic view
of Clough's ambivalent deferral to social roles. He argues
that Clough effected a return to "religion" by looking
inward. Through a centuries-long process of secularization,
God had disappeared from the world, though man could still
find Him in the human heart, in what Clough termed the
"inmost I." Having de-transcendentalized humanity in this
way, Clough looks to the ordinary experiences of every-day
life as the arena of spiritual activity. Forsyth uses the
concept,"trudging Service," taken from scene X, lines 11-14
of Clough's Dipsychus, to name this deliberate engagement
with the social world ("Trudging Service" 30).13 Forsyth

sees Clough as

looking on the emergent industrialized world
without recrimination or expectation, though being
well aware of "the unnumbered difficulties,
contradictions, and corruptions of the heated,
crowded, busy, vicious, and inhuman town."
However, he recognized as a matter of historical
necessity its irresistible claims, in his own
term, to Service. The term implies involvement
and it stresses that participation--which does not
mean unthinking acceptance of, or submission to,
the developing bourgeois hegemony--is the essence
of activity, and that alone would provide the
ingredients for the "inmost I." ("'Inmost I'"
261)

 

13Clough's commitment to the reality of (social)
experience has been established by other critics as well.
Michael Timko, for one, has argued that virtually Clough's
entire criticism of Wordsworth is grounded in Wordsworth's
confusion of the sentiment produced by an object and the
object itself. Clough insists Wordsworth "takes the
sentiment produced by it in his own mind as the thing; as
the important and really real fact.--The Real thing ceases
to be real; the world no longer exists." See Timko,
"Wordsworth and Clough," 413.

104

The spiritualized realm is brought down to earth. The search
for the "inmost I," Clough's process of spiritual self-
(re)creation, can only take place through participation in
the social world. In other words, Forsyth sees Clough's
cultural strategy as a kind of pragmatism which lays stress
on the individual's personal responsibility for the
realization of his own self-image ("'Inmost I'" 262).

According to Forsyth, Clough's "Service" is not simply
a form of Christian socialism. "[H]e is not . . . simply
transporting the spiritual into the realm of the political.
Rather he is expressing the one, absolutely though
undoctrinally, in terms of the other, thereby establishing a
novel politico-religious ethos" ("Clough's 'Adam and Eve'"
61). According to Forsyth, it is just this "significant
amalgamation between (real) social and political issues and
(ideal) moral and spiritual considerations that defines

Clough's modernity" ("Clough's 'Adam and Eve'" 61).

To summarize, much of Clough's poetry concerns a
discontinuity of ethical experience in terms of a slippage
between traditional foundational moral principles and the
exigencies of modern social experience. Clough's poetry
responds to this discontinuity by shifting the locus of the
dilemma away from foundational discourse, situating it
instead in the context of the individual ethical
consciousness, thus leaving resolution to take place as an

individual's own negotiation of the claims of idealized

105
moral principle and exigencies of modern social experience.
Whereas Arnoldean poetic moralism universalizes moral
insight derived from local circumstance, Clough's ethical
poetry particularizes morality in its recognition that the
nature of human ethical consciousness changes and that moral
insights must change with it. It is in this sense that
Clough's poetry constitutes a kind of casuistry. Its moral
determinations are not referred back to dogmatic principles
but are left free within the context of an individual
ethical consciousness to vary with the prevailing
conditions. Recognition that those conditions must be
attended to leads to a deliberate and active participation
in the social world. It, not the heavens, becomes the
sphere of ethical significance.
Forsyth points out that Clough was not a trained
philosopher, and whatever cultural theory is available from
his poetry and other sources does not constitute a
systematic response to the Victorian cultural crisis.
Forsyth explains that
we must compensate for the absence of systematic
documentation with the sense of authenticity and
immediacy we gain from his more informal
epistolary presentation which, together with other
occasional pieces, require us as readers to help
construct the actual building from Clough's sketch
plans. ("Trudging Service" 29)

We can complete that "actual building" by turning to T. H.

Green, who represents a painstakingly systematic

articulation of nearly all Clough's deepest commitments.

106
III
Like Clough, Green's response to the Victorian cultural
crisis incorporates a sense of the inadequacy of Arnold's
treatment of morality. In the introduction to his
Prolegomena to Ethics Green argues for a metaphysics of
morals made necessary by the inadequacy of the prevailing
Victorian models of ethical discourse. Green explains that
there exists a segment of educated Victorian society which,
having become disenchanted by "stereotyped theology," has
turned to poetry to satisfy their appetites for moral
discourse. However, Green retorts,
the highest poetry of our time--that in which the
most serious and select spirits find their food--
depends chiefly for its interest on what has been
well called 'the application of ideas to life';
and the ideas so applied are by no means sensibly
verifiable. (PE, 51)
The reference to Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" is
unmistakable. As noted above, Arnoldean poetic and cultural
theory is predicated on the assumption that the ideas poetry
applies to life have a verifiable reality or truth. In the
case of Wordsworth's poetry, for example, the ideas (primary
affections and duties) applied to life are verified as true
moral ideas which produce joy and consolation. If the
reader can experience the joy and consolation represented in

the poem, then he/she verifies that the primary affections

and duties do, in fact, produce joy and consolation.“

 

1‘For example, the feeling of the necessity of
following in the path of righteousness is the central fact
of the Bible, according to Arnold. It replaces the miracles

107
Thus, verification applies to the emotional resonances of
the moral ideas applied to life. The poetic application of
ideas means, in effect, an aesthetic (emotional) mediation
between a moral idea (deep conviction) and a lived
experience such that the poem posits a nexus between the
moral idea and the emotional consequence of its application
to lived experience. This conception of poetry constitutes
an "aesthetic mediation" of moral ideas and lived experience
in the sense that emotional experience is that category of
experience which is invoked as a means of determining the
appropriateness of the application of the moral ideas to
lived experience.

Green's phrase, "the ideas so applied," indicates his

 

belief that the method of application is what prevents the
ideas from being verifiable. For Green, the aesthetic
mediation is not an acceptable means of determining the
appropriateness of the moral ideas.” About the moral
thinking produced by Arnoldean poetics, Green has this to
say:

Presented in the rapt unreasoned form of poetic

utterance, not professing to do more than
represent a mood of the individual poet, it is

 

as the fact which guarantees the truth of its other
insights. Because readers can experience the feeling of
this necessity themselves, they can verify that the ideas
collectively referred to as "righteousness" are "true"
(moral) ideas.

15The point of contention has to do with the fact that
Arnold's notion of moral ideas as universal does not
correspond with Green's belief that the content of moral
ideas is properly only particular.

108
welcomed by reflecting men as expressing deep
convictions of their own. Such men seem little
disturbed by the admission to a joint lodgement in
their minds of inferences from popularised
science, which do not admit of being reconciled
with these deeper convictions in any logical
system of beliefs. (PE 51)
Green's comment about "the mood of the individual poet" is a
jibe at what Keats has called the "egotistical sublime" and
Clough called Wordsworth's "mawkishness"-- his
"sentimentalizing over sentiment" ("Lecture on the Poetry
of Wordsworth" 121). Green may seem overly dismissive of
poetry, but what he is dismissing is specifically the
Arnoldean model.

Green shares with this model the goal of determining a
content for these "deep convictions" worthy of becoming
foundations of morality. Arnold treated the "ideas" poetry
applies to life with much the same reverence, invoking them
as the absolute moral foundations of culture. The
difference is that for Green, aesthetic experience is not a
sufficient means of determining or verifying the truth or
reality of moral ideas. In much the same way, because moral
principles are not sensibly verifiable (in essence,
empirically derivable) the natural sciences had little to
contribute to the search for moral foundations. It is
directly in opposition to these two poles of existing
Victorian moral discourse that Green situated his ethics.
Much like Clough, Green wanted to develop a treatment of

moral issues that would answer to Victorian rationalism and

spiritualism without relying on dogma or mythology. Green

109
found the spiritualism and rationalism he was looking for
already combined in German metaphysical idealism.

For Clough, it will be remembered, God's withdrawal
meant that the individual had to become the locus of moral
authority. He thought moral authority could be
reconstructed in the individual through a process of self-
image making in which the "inmost I" was invested with
spiritual significance. Forsyth has described this part of
Clough's cultural strategy as a pragmatism which lays stress
on the individual's personal responsibility in the
realization of his own self-image ("'Inmost I'" 262). Green
found the spiritual dimension he was after in Fichte's
notion of the reproduction in the individual of eternal
consciousness.

Eternal consciousness appears in Green's ethics as a
principle of self-consciousness. It is the reproduction of
this self-conscious principle in them that allows agents to
distance themselves from their several desires, survey them,
and arrange them in a hierarchy. Moral development,
conceived of as the realization of potential, can only take
place when agents can thus take steps to realize some
desires and not others. To do so is to formulate and to
begin to realize an idea of a "possible self." Clough's
"inmost I" and Green's "idea of a possible self" represent
respectively poetic and philosophical mediations of the
notion that the individual must become the locus of modern

moral authority through internalization of a spiritual

110
principle. Clough's ethical poetic and Green's idealist
ethics represent alike secular though spiritualized versions
of how this might happen.

As we have seen, for Clough the realization of the
"inmost I" is dependent upon the individual's participation
in society--what Forsyth has termed "trudging Service." For
Green as well, social roles are a necessary condition of
moral development. Green's ethics are concerned primarily
with the moral development of the individual--which takes
the form of self-realization. Self-realization depends upon
self-conscious organization of desires into a hierarchy
designed to provide a more permanent satisfaction than the
gratification of merely transient desires. Social roles and
institutions provide agents with ideas of possible selves
they might become. In this way, they represent ideas of
extended and more permanent satisfactions. Social roles
also help to organize agents' desires and convert them into
activities that will lead to the realization of that idea of
a possible self which an agent imagines will produce a
permanent satisfactionfl

Green's recognition that agents need social roles to
organize their lives is the foundational insight of the
positive construction of freedom that characterizes his
political philosophy. Because Green regarded social roles
as necessary conditions of moral development, he insisted
that those conditions be carefully managed. According to

Green, a society is based on the recognition among its

111
members that what is in the common interest is also in each
individual's interest. If any particular freedom is
recognized by the members of a society as contributory to an
individual's or the common good, then it must, logically
that is, be guaranteed to all individuals.

In Green's view, it is, therefore, the first
responsibility of any government actively to secure to all
individuals whatever freedoms are recognized as contributory
toward the individual and common good. The notion of
freedom or liberty implicit in this model of society is
"positive" in the sense that members of society are free by
virtue of the presence of rights which secure to them
conditions recognized by society as necessary for moral
development. This is contrasted with "negative" freedom,
which conceived agents as free by virtue of the absence of
restraint.

Green's argument for positive freedom should be seen as
the political realization of his ethics and religious
philosophy. It represents the philosophical underpinnings
of what Melvin Richter has referred to as Green's "christian
citizenship." It is a secularized yet spiritual
(metaphysical) translocation of moral authority from the
celestial to the social sphere. It relocates
moral activity in the ordinary everyday experiences of

social interaction.

112
IV
Clough's Victorian critics were too desperate for a

solution to the problems of cultural dissolution to allow
Clough time and space for speculation. The judgment of
Clough's failure is perhaps mostly based upon the Victorian-
sage expectation that a poet respond to the cultural crisis
with a positive theory of some sort. Arnold told Clough
this directly:

You would never take your assiette as something
determined final and unchangeable for you and
proceed to work away on the basis of that: but
were always poking and patching and cobbling at
the assiette itself--could never be finally, as it
seemed--"resolve to be thyself"--but were looking
for this and that experience, and doubting whether
you ought not to adopt this or that mode of being
of persons ggi ne vous, valaient pas because it
might possibly be nearer the truth than your own:
you had no reason for thinking it Egg but it might
be--and so you would try to adapt yourself to it.
You have I am convinced lost infinite time in this
way: it is what I call your morbid
conscientiousness. (Norton, 523)

 

What Arnold could not seem to recognize is that Clough's
poetry does provide a coherent cultural theory.

I have attempted to show here that Clough's poetry does
respond directly to Victorian culture by configuring a new
kind of poetic ethical discourse. Clough's poetry
represents an awareness that moral understanding does and
must change, and it attempts to respond by establishing a
discourse and configuring a faculty capable of maintaining
the flexibility necessary to deal with the historical and
individual particularity of the discontinuity of ethical

experience. It does this by preserving the dialogic

113
character of moral problems, situating them in the context
of the individual ethical consciousness, and insisting that
they be resolved there.

Because of Clough's effort to construct modern ethical
understanding in a particular way, his poetry ought to be
recognized as the ethical discourse it is. In ethical
terms, the movement from Arnold to Clough is a movement from
moral intuitionism to casuistry--it is the movement from
pre-modern to modern ethical understanding. It is also the
movement from poetic moralism to ethical poetry.

Finally, Clough's treatment of ethics and religion is
an important voice in Victorian cultural thinking.
Anticipating as it does many of Green's most important
observations and arguments, Clough's poetry needs to be
recognized as an early poetic mediation of the ethics and
cultural theory of positive-freedom Liberalism. It gestures
toward the kind of liberalism that becomes in the late
twentieth century a cultural theory protective of tolerance

and ethical diversity.

Chapter IV
AESTHETIC GEMEINSCHAFT AND THE SOCIALLY-CONSTITUTED SELF:

GEORGE ELIOT AND T. H. GREEN

Recent cultural criticism of George Eliot's fiction has
included the view of her critique of English cultural
dissolution in imperialist and nationalist terms. Reading

Daniel Deronda (1876) in the context of a symbiotic

 

relationship between novelistic discourse and nation-
building, Patrick Brantlinger sees Eliot's critique of
English cultural dissolution as leading to "nationalism, but
a nationalism that clashes with merely provincial, merely
English, narrowness" ("Nations and Novels" 271). Eliot's is
"an international nationalism, and one moreover that Eliot
expresses in terms of racial unity or community, even though
no race can be pure in the physical sense, so that the only
possible unity is spiritual--that is, cultural" ("Nations
and Novels" 272). Similarly, Katherine Bailey Linehan
comments on Eliot's "vision of imperialism as a corrupting
force in English national life" (324). She argues that "the
social ideal that Daniel Deronda posits as a corrective to
imperialism is that of a non-combative, spiritually oriented
nationhood, poised for international fellowship but founded

on racial separateness" (324-325).

114

115

Both Brantlinger and Linehan, then, attempt to recover
Eliot's fiction by reference to the spiritually-oriented
sense of community she advocates as a response to Victorian
cultural dissolution. The ways in which Eliot tries to
create that spiritualized sense of community, however, are
severely problematic with respect both to her own
assumptions and to the current climate of cultural theory.
I want to suggest here that Eliot's fiction offers other and
better resources for contemporary cultural theory than the
view of her fiction as advocating a spiritualized
nationalism would provide. Eliot's later fiction contains a
critique of deontological individualism, advocates a
socially-constituted self as a response to cultural
dissolution, and even gestures toward a position of proto-
positive freedom. These cultural theoretical resources in
Eliot's fiction become evident when her imagination of
community is compared with T. H. Green's. Moreover, the
comparison reveals Eliot's later cultural thinking to be
more closely allied with Green's positive-freedom liberalism
than the negative-freedom liberalism of J. S. Mill and

Herbert Spencer whom she so much admired.

I
I want to begin by considering the compatibility
between Eliot's self-proclaimed realist foundations and the
kinds of resolutions she invokes in her fiction. I want to

examine the models of self Eliot invokes in her novels and

116
compare these with the philosophical realist foundations of
her broader cultural thinking. For it is my contention thati
there is a discontinuity between Eliot's realist
predilections and the socially-constituted models of self

she invokes as mechanisms to a renewed sense of community.1

I am not the first to perceive a split in Eliot's
work.2 It has commonly been described as a fact-value
split, by, for example, Bernard Paris. My analysis differs,
however, in an important way. Paris explains primarily how
Eliot managed to find a way to talk about values while
maintaining her realist sympathies. My analysis strives to
grasp at something deeper, something more systemic in
Eliot's notions of literature and culture. For it seems to
me that the implications of realism are at the very heart of
the cultural problems Eliot is trying to solve. There is
evidence in her last two novels that this is something Eliot

came finally to recognize.

 

1I am primarily concerned here with philosophical
Realism, although because the origins of literary realism
are in philosophical realism, much of what I have to say
about realism has implications for literary realism as well.

2 Bernard Paris makes the most of this division, but
there have been others. In his book, Man and Sociegy in
Nineteenth-Century Realism: Determinism and Literature,
Maurice Larkin formulates the split as an opposition between
determinism and moralism. See especially pages 88-97 and
179-181. Basil Willey has also alluded to a similar
distinction in his Nineteenth-Century Studies.

 

117

Eliot's affinity for realism--in art and philosophy--
has been well documented.3 Her own intellectual history
recapitulates a movement from theological to metaphysical to
positive paradigms similar to that which Comte outlines in
his General View of Positivism. And we know that Eliot
was an eager reader of Comte, Lewes, Spencer, and Mill. The
issue I want to address here is the part these commitments
to versions of realism play in George Eliot's cultural
thinking, especially the limitations they put on the kinds
of social integration she advocates in her fiction.‘

While there is considerable biographical evidence for
Eliot's attraction to realism, from, among other things,
Eliot's reading record, a good picture of Eliot's

understanding of realism can be derived from the things she

 

3Bernard Paris gives a detailed account of Eliot's
commitment to positivism by tracing her comments on the work
of G. H. Lewes, August Comte, and J. S. Mill. See specially
Chapter 2, " The Nature of Things." Suzanne Graver also
details this debt. See pages 5-8.

‘Philosophical Realism has meant different things at
different times, including simultaneous and opposite things.
In ontology, Realism names a belief in the real, non-
material existence of universals apart from any particular
manifestation of them. In this sense, Plato's theory of
Forms might be thought of as a kind of Realism. In
epistemology, however, in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, Realism means nearly the opposite.
Here it refers to a belief that knowledge is limited to what
is gained through sensory experience. In this sense,
Realism is a privileging of the "real"--i.e. material--world
over the ideal, metaphysical world. It is in this latter
sense that Positivism is a kind of Realism. It is a belief
in the ontological reality and epistemological importance of
a world external to and independent of the experience of
subjects. This philosophical position--or a version of it--
inform(s) the theoretical assumptions of George Eliot's
cultural theory.

118
herself wrote. Eliot reveals her foundations in philosophic
realism in several review essays she published on German and
English philosophers. In her 1855 review of Otto Friedrich
Gruppe's Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in
Deutschland, she registers a distinct appeal for Gruppe's
empiricist--in essence, realist--epistemology. Eliot
recommends Gruppe to English readers specifically on grounds
that he does not engage in the Germanic system building:
'The age of systems is past. . . . System is the
childhood of philosophy; the manhood of philosophy
is investigation.‘ So says Professor Gruppe in
the work of which we have given the title above,
and we quote this dictum at the outset in order to
propitiate those readers who might otherwise turn
away with disgust from the mention of German
philosophy, having registered a vow to trouble
themselves no more with those spinners of
elaborate cocoons--German system-mongers.
("Future" 148-149)
Gruppe's main goal, on Eliot's account, is the "Reformation
of Logic": the redirection of philosophical method away
from speculative idealism toward scientific, empirical
"investigation." "The true object of investigation is the
formation of ideas from judgments" ("Future" 151).
"Investigation" here signifies the scientific orientation
which privileges the particular over the general, the
concrete over the abstract. The formation of ideas from
judgments means the generation of universal ideas induced
from judgments made about and via sensory experience (Future
151).
Thus, from the simple act of judgment we ascend to

the formation of ideas, to their modification, and
their generalization. And by a series of

0rd;

119

ascending generalizations we are led to the most
comprehensive, abstract ideas. ("Future" 152)

These passages clearly indicate that Eliot was no
stranger to speculative philosophy. More importantly, they
characterize Eliot's attitudes toward realism and idealism.
We can find stronger, more specific priority given to
realism over idealism in the concluding paragraph of her
review of Gruppe:

What then, asks Herr Gruppe in conclusion, is the
future sphere of Philosophy? It must renounce
metaphysics: it must renounce the ambitious
attempt to form a theory of the universe, to know
things in their causes and first principles. . . .
These are rather abstruse subjects to enter
on in a short space, but we have at least been
able to present one point of interest to our
readers, in the fact that a German professor of
philosophy renounces the attempt to climb to
heaven by the rainbow bridge of 'the high priori
road', and is content humbly to use his muscles in
treading the uphill E pgsteriori path which will
lead, not indeed to heaven, but to an eminence
whence we may see very bright and blessed things
on earth. ("Future" 153)
Eliot's conclusion is telling in two ways particularly.
First, it marks the difference and antagonism between
Germanic speculative and English experimental philosophies.
Second, the ability and desire to "see very bright and
blessed things on earth" is represented as an
epistemological boundary, but not a lamentable one. This
realist or empirical foundation is directly indicative of
Eliot's conviction that the proper object of philosophy--
especially social philosophy--is the concrete world of

ordinary experience.

120
The strong preference for the realist's method and the
essentially empirical epistemological limit Eliot points to
in her review of Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in
Deutschland provide a theoretical justification for the
priority she gives in her cultural theory to the particular
and concrete over the general and abstract. The case for
the application of this epistemological limit as a
foundation for cultural theory is developed in her review of
Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl's Naturgeschichte des Volkes.
The privileging of observation and fact in Eliot's cultural
theory--including, especially, art--is largely entailed by
the specifically moral telos she assigns it:
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist . . . is
the extension of our sympathies. [Social and
moral a]ppeals founded on generalizations and
statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral
sentiment already in activity; but a picture of
human life such as a great artist can give,
surprises even the trivial and the selfish into
that attention to what is apart from themselves,
which may be called the raw material of moral
sentiment. ("Natural History" 270)
The passage clearly indicates the way Eliot assigns a moral
telos to art. The implication is that art has the ability,
as not all discourses do, actually to generate that sympathy
which is the sine qua non of moral sentiment--a condition of
one agent's actively taking other agents's interests into
account.

This point is most forcefully made in the famous

opening to the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede:

 

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted
as they are: you can neither straighten their

121

noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their
dispositions; and it is these people--amongst whom
your life is passed--that it is needful you should
tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or
less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose
movements of goodness you should be able to
admire--for whom you should cherish all possible
hopes, all possible patience. And I would not,
even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist
who could create a world so much better than this,
in which we get up in the morning to do our daily
work, that you would be likely to turn a harder,
colder eye on the dusty streets and the common
green fields--on the real breathing men and women,
who can be chilled by your indifference or injured
by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped
onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance,
your outspoken, brave justice. (AP 222)

If, as the passage implies, the object of morality is
realization of fellow-feeling, it is best to recognize and
accept the natures of those fellows toward whom we are to
develop sympathetic feelings. Thus, there goes with the
moral telos of art the responsibility of representing "true"
objects to which readers are to direct their sympathies. In
this way, and to this extent, Eliot's realist epistemology
is a means to a moral end:

All the more sacred is the task of the artist when
he undertakes to paint the life of the People.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in
the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so
very serious that we should have false ideas about
evanescent fashions--about manners and
conversations of beaux and duchesses; but it EE
serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys
and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the
humor in the life of our more heavily-laden
fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned
towards a false object instead of the true one.
("Natural History" 271)

Although Eliot privileges art as especially capable of

extending sympathies in order to generate moral sentiment,

122
other cultural discourses have similar moral goals, and,
therefore, also entail the moral responsibility she attaches
to artistic realism. These are the foundation of her praise

of Riehl's Naturgeschichte des Volkes:

 

If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual
breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated
by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional
point of view, would devote himself to studying
the natural history of our social classes,
especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans,
and peasantry,--the degree in which they are
influenced by local conditions, their maxims and
habits, the points of view from which they regard
their religious teachers, and the degree in which
they are influenced by religious doctrines, the
interactions of the various classes on each other,
and what are the tendencies in their position
towards disintegration or towards development,--
and if, after all this study, he would give us the
result of his observations in a book well
nourished with specific facts, his work would be a
valuable aid to the social and political reformer.
("Natural History" 272-273)

The rejection of idealism and metaphysics already noted
in Eliot's review of Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie
in Deutschland returns in Eliot's review of Riehl's book in
the context of a rejection of totalizing and deracinated
social theories.

After the notable failure of revolutionary
attempts conducted from the point of view of
abstract democratic and socialistic theories,
after the practical demonstration of the evils
resulting from a bureaucratic system which governs
by an undiscriminating, dead mechanism, Riehl
wishes to urge on the consideration of his
countrymen, a social policy founded on the special
study of the people as they are--on the natural
history of the various social ranks. . . . For,
says Riehl, the more deeply we penetrate into the
knowledge of society in its details, the more
thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal
social policy has no validity except on paper, and

123

can never be carried into successful practice.
("Natural History" 289)

There is in this passage as well a clear indictment of what
Eliot would have recognized as idealist social theories
which sought to realize a social or political ideal in
social reality. Her implicit complaint is that an a priori
idea of polity cannot successfully precede an understanding
of the actual social conditions in which that idea of polity
is supposed to take hold. Viewing these passages
together, then, we can conclude that for Eliot cultural
theory must be grounded in a realist attention to the arena
of ordinary life in order to generate fellow-feeling as the
fundamental basis of a community.

Eliot was hardly alone in her advocacy of realist-
grounded social thinking. There was a strong connection in
Victorian England between realist (empirical) philosophy and
deontological versions of individualism and liberalism. Two
of Eliot's closest connections, J. 8. Mill and Herbert
Spencer, both advocated philosophical realism as well as
deontological liberalism. Deontological liberalism
advocates a negative model of freedom which represents the
individual as an autonomous "substance" not greatly
dependent upon society for its being or moral development.
One ascendent formulation of this argument appears in J. S.
Mill's On Liberty, where, essentially, individuals are
conferred rights without responsibilities other than keeping

out of one another's way. In what is a holdover of

124
Benthamite hedonism, the stream of responsibility between
individual and society flows one way only--towards the
individual.

In the case of Herbert Spencer, the internal connection
between realist philosophy and deontological individualism
is quite clear. Spencer's foundation in evolutionary theory
led him to consider social development in the same light as
biological development. In both cases, "development" for
Spencer means increased heterogeneity, and heterogeneity is
a condition of intrinsic value because of the increased
potential for survival. According to Spencer, unlike animal
organisms, society is not more than the sum of its parts.
Whereas the parts of an animal or plant organism exist for
the benefit of the whole, the opposite is true of the social
organism where the whole exists for the benefit of its
individuals. For Spencer, heterogeneity translates into a
privileging of individuality over community, the

foundational assumption of deontological liberalism.5

II
Despite the affinities between Eliot and Victorian
realist cultural and political theory, there are elements in

her fiction that run decidedly against the typical realist

 

5Eliot's attraction to Mill's, Spencer's, and Lewes's
social thinking has been well documented. Suzanne Graver,
for one, has made a strong case for Eliot's assent to Mill
and Comte based upon Eliot's reading record, and to Lewes
and Spencer based upon long personal acquaintance (4-9).

125
conception of individuality. Tony Jackson has recently
taken a view of Daniel Deronda that sees Eliot's final novel
as a critique of the culture of deontological individualism.
Contrasting romantic fiction with realist fiction, Jackson

situates Daniel Deronda in a tradition of realist fiction

 

that seeks to establish "its moral legitimacy by attacking
the kind of personality that was being presumed and
reinforced by [romantic and sentimental] fictions" (229).
Specifically, he finds in Gwendolen's narrative realism's
critique of the autonomous self that romantic fiction
presupposes. Jackson's larger point is that whereas
Gwendolen's narrative represents the paradigmatic (literary)
realist critique of autonomous egoism, Deronda's narrative
posits as an alternative a self that "thinks of itself as a
relationship, rather than as a point of substantial being"
(236).

Daniel Deronda is indeed fundamentally concerned with
the cultural consequences of opposing models of selfhood.
Both Gwendolen's and Deronda's narratives record conflicts
that get resolved as the characters become increasingly
self-realized in different ways. The polarity of their
alternate models of selfhood is firmly connected in Eliot's
fiction with causes of and responses to moral and cultural
dissolution.

In the course of Daniel Deronda the idea of a possible
self that Gwendolen strives to realize changes dramatically.

Initially, the model of selfhood on which Gwendolen operates

126
is one that seeks satisfaction in what might be termed self-
regarding desires. Gwendolen is so accustomed to having her
own way that she conceives of her marriage primarily as a
way to maintain and even extend her capacity for self-
satisfaction:
The prospect of marrying Grandcourt really seemed
more attractive to her than she had believed
beforehand that any marriage could be: the
dignities, the luxuries, the power of doing a
great deal of what she liked to do, which had now
come close to her, and within her choice to secure
or to lose, took hold of her nature as if it had’
been the strong odour of what she had only
imagined and longed for before. . . . Gwendolen
conceived that after marriage she would most
probably be able to manage him thoroughly. (PE
173)
Marriage to Grandcourt promises gratification of a wide
range of Gwendolen's desires. Most important, however, is
her desire to maintain and assert her own will--the capacity
to imagine and realize objects of desire. Aside from the
individual desires Gwendolen thinks marriage will gratify,
she expects her marriage to provide an arena in which she
can freely and fully exercise will. To use Jackson's
typology, Gwendolen is represented in this part of the novel
as an "autonomous self" in the sense that she acts as though
she were disconnected from others's spheres of desires.
Rather than negotiating the intersection of those spheres,
Gwendolen strives to expand the scope of her will to subsume
others's.

In marrying, Gwendolen thinks she is maximizing the

scope of her will--her capacity for self-satisfaction. It

127
is just this aspect of her character that gets crushed by
Grandcourt's stronger will:

One belief which had accompanied her through
unmarried life as a self-cajoling superstition,
encouraged by the subordination of every one about
her--the belief in her own power of dominating--
was utterly gone. Already, in seven short weeks,
which seemed half her life, her husband had gained
a mastery which she could no more resist than she
could have resisted the benumbing effect from the
touch of a torpedo. Gwendolen's will had seemed
imperious in its small girlish sway; but it was
the will of a creature with a large discourse of
imaginative fears: a shadow would have been enough
to relax its hold. And she found a will like that
of a crab or boa-constrictor which goes on
pinching or crushing without alarm at thunder.

(22 477)

Marriage proves a great disappointment, even a torment, for
Gwendolen because it does not give room enough for her to
exercise her will as she is used to doing.
The battle between Gwendolen's and Grandcourt's wills
has recently been read by Katherine Linehan as an
allegorical critique of English imperialism and the culture
it produced within English society. According to Linehan,
Eliot's
strategy then is to show a connection, both
symbolic and actual, between the self-absorbed
"small social drama" of British Establishment
private life and the "mighty drama" of national
and international politics, with the part played
by the English high-society characters in their
"puppet show" reproducing England's involvement as
a nation on the side of domination rather than
liberation and self-interested materialism rather
than idealism. (327)

In short, Linehan sees Gwendolen as "a spoiled child of a

spoiled society" (330). Eliot's "spoiled child" can be

characterized as a self that seeks to exercise its will over

128
others and in so doing creates a culture of similarly
isolated and antagonistic wills.
Others who have read Eliot's fiction as cultural
critique have commented on the representation of antagonism
of wills in her fiction. Suzanne Graver has employed

Ferdinand T6nnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft and

 

Gesellschaft conditions of societies in order to describe a
crucial polarity in Eliot's thinking about community:

[Tfinnies] uses Gemeinschaft to refer to local,
organic, agricultural communities that are modeled
on the family and rooted in the traditional and
the sacred; and Gesellschaft to denote urban,
heterogeneous, industrial societies that are
culturally sophisticated and shaped by the
rational pursuit of self-interest in a

 

capitalistic and secular environment. . . .

Thus his hypothetical construct establishes a
polarity within which to comprehend [Eliot's]
acute preoccupation with the historical transition
from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft and [her] effort

to promote in [her] world, which [she] perceived
as Gesellschaft, the mutual ties and common
interests associated with Gemeinschaft. (Graver
14-15)
Gemeinschaft names a phenomenon of human consciousness in
which agents will the same or compatible or complimentary
objects.

This alignment of wills begins with the physical and
spiritual proximity of mother and child and expands to
include agents not of the same family: Gemeinschaft of
blood (ELEE) becomes Gemeinschaft of place (933) and,
further, Gemeinschaft of Mind (Egigp)--the truly human and
highest kind of Gemeinschaft:

Denn die Gemeinschaft des Blutes, als Einheit des
Wesens, entwickelt und besondert sich zur

129

Gemeinschaft des Orts, die im Zusammenwohnen ihren
unmittelbaren Ausdruck hat, und diese wiederum zur
Gemeinschaft des Geistes als dem bloBen
Miteinander-Wirken und Walten in der gleichen
Richtung, im gleichen Sinne. Gemeinschaft des
Ortes kann als Zusammenhang des animalischen, wie
die des Geistes als Zusammenhang des mentalen
Lebens begriffen werden, die letztere daher, in
ihrer Verbindung mit den frfiheren, als die
eigentlich menschliche und héchste Art der
Gemeinschaft. (Tannies 16)

In the passage above, Miteinander-Wirken conveys a sense of

 

close correspondence in the application of energy to effect;
Walten implies consensus regarding notions of order and
control. Thus, Gemeinschaft of mind--the highest kind of
Gemeinschaft--ought to be thought of as a matter of
alignment of action and consensus regarding control or
order. The thing to note in Tannies's theory of
Gemeinschaft is that it refers to states of consciousness
aligned in reference toward a common purpose or goal. This
is the condition Eliot wanted to recover or reproduce in
what she saw as a modern Gesellschaft society.

T6nnies's concept of Gesellschaft names that condition
of culture characterized by a co-location of antagonistic,
autonomous wills.

Die Theorie der Gesellschaft konstruiert einen
Kreis von Menschen, welche, wie in Gemeinschaft,
auf friedliche Art nebeneinander leben und wohnen,
aber nicht wesentlich verbunden, sondern
wesentlich getrennen sind, und wahrend dort
verbunden bleibend trotz aller Trennungen, hier
getrennt belieben trotz aller Verbundenheiten.
(Tannies 48)

Whereas in Gemeinschaft, despite material divisions,

individuals see themselves as united by virtue of the

130

objects of desire they share, in Gesellschaft individuals
are divided with respect to consciousness despite the
material relations that connect them. Gesellschaft, then,
describes that cultural situation in which individuals
conceive of themselves as independent and antagonistically
related to one another:

[Es] finde[t] hier keine THtigkeiten statt, welche

aus einer a priori und notwendiger Weise vorhanden

Einheit abgeleitet werden k6nnen, welche daher

auch, insofern, als sie durch das Individuum

geschehn, den Willen und Geist dieser Einheit in

ihm ausdrficken, mithin so sehr ffir die mit ihm

Verbundenen als ffir es selber erfolgen. Sondern

hier ist ein jeder ffir sich allein, und im

Zustande der Spannung gegen alle fibrigen.

(T6nnie8 48)
As Tannies explains here, in true Gesellschaft societies
there are no actions undertaken by individuals that express
the unified will of the society. All agents act for
themselves and as a result there is an antagonistic tension
between all. Thus, whereas Gemeinschaft implies, for
Tannies, a compatibility of determinative wills,
Gesellschaft describes a co-location of fundamentally
antagonistic wills. Gemeinschaft describes an emphasis on
unity amid difference: Gesellschaft an emphasis on
difference amid unity.

Application of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft

distinction to the representation of culture in Daniel
Deronda reveals Eliot's sense of cultural dissolution as the

failure of deontological individualism to create and sustain

the network of intersubjective relations characteristic of

131
Gemeinschaft. In Eliot's critique of deontological
individualism, Deronda's socially-constituted self is
presented as a corrective to Gwendolen's autonomous ego.
The condition in which we find Deronda at the novel's
beginning might be described as a state of cultural
deracination:
. . . what he most longed for was either some
external event, or some inward light, that would
urge him into a definite line of action, and
compress his wandering energy. . . . But how and
whence was the needed event to come? --the
influence that would justify partiality, and
making him what he longed to be yet was unable to
make himself--an organic part of social life,
instead of roaming in it like a yearning
disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social
passion, but without fixed local habitation to
render fellowship real? (EE 413)
At the beginning of the novel, Deronda is in much the same
position as Gwendolen: isolated from the social sphere--
though for vastly different reasons. His deracination is
due to an absence of those social relations which serve to
anchor individuals in communities. His narrative records
the willful construction of those relations that Gwendolen
seeks to either control or ignore. An event or new interest
of the above description would serve to establish a new
relation to another person or people, thereby grounding his
interests in a community which would give direction to his
efforts at fellow feeling--in essence, make them real.
Throughout the novel Deronda makes the choices he does

in order to realize his idea of who he wants to become and

in so doing establish relationships to some community.

132
Eventually, however, his idea of who he wants to become
changes. Despite questions about his parentage, or perhaps
because of insecurity leading from them, Deronda first makes
a determined effort, while still young, to become an English
gentleman (220). When Sir Hugo asks him if he should like
to become a great singer, Deronda becomes indignant because
he interprets the suggestion to mean that he does not
inhabit the same social sphere as those about him. His
determination to become an English gentleman is an act of
the will directed toward self-realization. Deronda seeks to
make himself into what he thinks he ought to become, despite
the fact, unknown to him, that he exists at the intersection
of social relations that construct him quite differently.
Gradually, Deronda's desire to become an English
gentleman gives way to a more independent line of thinking.
This is first evident in the apparently insignificant
decision to quit Cambridge:
In hours when his dissatisfaction was strong upon
him he reproached himself for having been
attracted by the conventional advantage of
belonging to an English university, and was
tempted towards the project of asking Sir Hugo to
let him quit Cambridge and pursue a more
independent line of study abroad. (EE 220)
Deronda's divergence is significant for the fact that in
coming to question the propriety of his remaining at
Cambridge, he not only begins to diverge from the
traditional path of English gentlemen but he misses the

opportunity to acquire those cultural associations and

attitudes that mark the English gentleman. In other words,

133
Deronda misses an opportunity to establish the relations to
English society which are typically inculcated by education.
In giving up the university, Deronda gives up a traditional
means for acquiring foundational anchors of the self. In
this way Eliot provides Deronda an escape from the
egocentric patterns of establishment behavior.

As Deronda slowly gives up his desire to become an
English gentleman, he takes tentative though active steps to
fill in the gaps in his family and cultural heritage. His
quest for Mirah's family and his seemingly inexplicable
attendance of services at synagogues are steps toward
realizing relations to a cultural tradition other than the
one in which he was raised. Inexplicable as they initially
seem, they are implicitly accounted for by a spiritual bond
or attraction within the Jewish community.

This mystical attraction is Eliot's version of the
spiritual bond of Gemeinschaft and sharply contrasts with
"the conventional advantage of belonging to an English
university" (220). That "conventional advantage" provides
the material connections (acquaintances and opportunities)
to a commercial society in which human transactions are
mediated primarily by financial consideration. Eliot is
careful, therefore, to have Deronda explicitly reject
aligning himself with those kinds of relations, for to do so
would be to construct a self not fully implicated in a

society but standing partly against it.

134
Deronda's dismissal of Sir Hugo's encouragement to
pursue a political career is a further movement away from
integration into a Gesellschaft English culture. The
rejection of English politics as a profession becomes the
more significant in light of Deronda's later passionate
acceptance of Mordecai's political aspirations for a Jewish
national state:
'Since I began to read and know, I have always
longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel
myself the heart and brain of a multitude--some
social captainship, which would come to me as a
duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize.
You have raised the image of such a task for me--
to bind our race together in spite of heresy. You
have said to me--"Our religion united us before it
divided us--it made us a people before it made
Rabbanites and Karaites." I mean to try what can
be done with that union . . . .' (EE 819-820)
Deronda is able to find a life-purpose in this Jewish
political goal, as he could not in English politics, because
he has in the interval recognized and begun to realize those
relations which link him to a cultural tradition and,
consequently, create in him a sense of community. Eliot's
choice of Hebraism as the cultural tradition which Deronda
reconstructs is all the more significant given the priority
of family and nationality within Jewish history. It is
these features of Gemeinschaft, primarily, that supervene
issues of membership within the Jewish community.
Deronda's decision to pursue the foundation of a Jewish
nation-state doubly emphasizes the socially-constituted

nature of his self. Throughout his narrative, Deronda loses

then slowly gains those kinds of social relations that

135
define a self and give it meaning by giving it purpose.
Finally, his decision to pursue the foundation of a Jewish
state represents the reciprocity of those very same social
relations. As Deronda makes sense of himself by coming to
recognize and striving to realize the social relations that
define him, he, in turn, realizes those relations by making
them material, as manifested in the creation of a Jewish
nation state, giving political reality to a cultural ideal.
In effect, neither Deronda nor the Jewish state can exist
without the other. Conversely, as the individual recognizes
those relations that constitute it, the society itself
becomes increasingly realized. More precisely, both come
into existence simultaneously and depend upon one another
for their continued being and development.

Whereas Deronda's narrative represents the nature of
the self and the basis of community Eliot is advocating,
Gwendolen's narrative represents the application of these
principles to particular facts of social experience. The
socially-constituted model of the self that is dramatized by
Deronda's narrative provides a template for the sense of
community that serves as the resolution to Gwendolen's
problems--problems that have resulted from her activity as
an autonomous ego.

Gwendolen's repeated seeking of advice from Deronda
dramatizes Eliot's belief that some version of the socially-
constituted self is the remedy for English cultural

dissolution. Deronda suggests that Gwendolen's remorse

136
might be the violent shock necessary to shake Gwendolen out
of her habit of autonomous egoism. In effect, she is
confronted with the consequences of her egoism every time
she sees Grandcourt. Because of his dominating, brutal
nature, she is unable to redress her wrongful treatment of
Glasher through him, and she is unable to go around him.
Deronda's advice is to use the guilt to rise above the moral
isolation imposed by her troubles:
'Look on other lives besides your own. See what
their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try
to care about something in this vast world besides
the gratification of small selfish desires. Try
to care for what is best in thought and action--
something that is good apart from the accidents of
your own lot.‘ (PE 501-502)
Deronda is suggesting that Gwendolen seek to realize a new
idea of a possible self--one that seeks satisfaction in the
realization of social relations. This is what he is finally
able to do, and in so doing finds purpose, direction, and
importance for his life. The parallel between his effort at
self-realization and what he advises Gwendolen to do is
evident in passages, such as the following, which gesture
toward a more integrated sense of social experience--toward
a sense of Gemeinschaft:
'The refuge you are needing from personal trouble
is the higher life, the religious life, which
holds an enthusiasm for something more than our
own appetites and vanities. The few may find
themselves in it simply by an elevation of
feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our
wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which

the affections are clad with knowledge.‘ ( PE 507-
508)

137
Knowledge here is knowledge of the lives and concerns and
troubles of other individuals. This epistemological
requirement refers back to Eliot's insistence on realism as
the only appropriate philosophical basis of cultural theory.
Knowledge of others's lives is something Gwendolen has
little of, and in a later conversation, Deronda tells
Gwendolen that once she begins realizing social relations
the horizon of her world will expand:
'Other duties will spring from it. Looking at
your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of
things at a distance; but it cannot really be so.
What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but
once beginning to act with that penitential,
loving purpose you have in your mind, there will
be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-
opened needs--continually coming to carry you on
from day to day. You will find your life growing
like a plant.’ (PE 839)
The organic growth of Gwendolen's life will be the
spontaneous and simultaneous spreading of roots into the
community and the extension of branches reaching out to
other individuals. The larger point here is that the
resolution to Eliot's novel has the leading characters
recognize and realize relations between themselves and the
community to which they belong, in which they exist. It is
not until they do so that their characters become

constructed in ways that are satisfying to themselves, to

the problems of the novel, to the author, and to the reader.

Individuals seeking satisfaction in the realization of

social relations are, in effect, seeking it in the

138

realization of society itself. When this idea of a possible
satisfaction is universally promulgated, the members of the
community share an idea of personal good which has, in fact,
become a common good. The idea of the reification of
society itself becomes an idea of a good common to all
members of the society. This is Gemeinschaft, and it is
Eliot's antidote to what she saw as a pervasive condition of

Gesellschaft.

III

Although Daniel Deronda registers Eliot's sense that
English cultural dissolution (Gesellschaft) is closely
associated with deontological individualism and that a
socially-constituted self is the means to recover a lost
sense of Gemeinschaft, the means by which the socially-
constituted self is actually to be recreated in Victorian
society remains severely problematic for Eliot.

Forest Pyle has recently argued that "'sympathy' is the
means which Eliot employs to provide the solution to the
ideological predicament she inherits from Romanticism; it is
. . . the means by which the romantic wound opened by the
imagination is to be sutured" (5). Imagination, for Pyle,
is the driving force of novels. It is associated with
individual desire and points to a difference between what is
and what could be, or what one wants to be but is not. Pyle
reads imagination in Eliot's works in terms of a collision

between internal desire and external fact. As long as

139
individual agents identify themselves with the objects of
their egoistic imagination, they can only co-exist as
independent and antagonistically oriented wills. Sympathy
is the mechanism by which this antagonism is overcome.

Pyle points out, however, that "no individual character
in Eliot's novels can make sympathy work," and therefore
"the effective work of sympathy must be assigned--
'transferred'--to the act of narration itself" (12). His
point is that Eliot tries to create sympathy among her
characters in order to bind them into communities. But this
sympathy is not in fact a part of the Gesellschaft cultures
she represents in her later fiction. It is not, therefore,
available on the realist premises of her narrative/cultural
theory. Because the problems of Eliot's Gesellschaft novels
entail Gemeinschaft resolutions, and because her realism
cannot easily provide for such an internal principle of
social cohesion, she is left to other,-essentially aesthetic
means. This is what Pyle refers to as the failure of
sympathy in Eliot's story but its revival in the narration.
Pyle observes that "the drama of the narrator involves most
directly the eliciting, the naming and the making of that
which remains lacking in the events and actions of the
story: a sympathy forged out of the romantic conditions of
the imagination" (12).

I want to extend Pyle's observation by pointing out
that Eliot's own effort to re-create a sense community, her

effort at Gemeinschaft, is "aesthetic" in the further sense

140
that she is left finally to create only the sensation of
community in her audience by stirring in them "sympathy" and
"fellow feeling." This is, according to Eliot, the most
important effect of art in general. It is the sense of the
famous passage from Adam Bede quoted above, and of Eliot's
insistence that the role of the artist is to create
sympathy. Moreover, sympathy and fellow feeling are the
foundations upon which she constructs Gemeinschaft gpgpg
characters, within her novels. "Fellow-feeling" is what
binds the members of Middlemarch together, as, for example,
Lydgate and Dorothea, Dorothea and Rosamond, Ladislaw and
Dorothea, and Lydgate and Bulstrode. Sympathy is what
brings Deronda and Mirah together, and, consequently, what
sets Deronda about realizing his cultural heritage.
Sympathy is what reverses Deronda's repulsion of Gwendolen,
and what initiates Gwendolen's remorse with respect to
Glasher.

Whereas Eliot recognized Victorian England as a
Gesellschaft society, the principle of social cohesion she
adduces (sympathy) is neither a functional part of that
society nor consistent with the Gesellschaft concept of the
individual. Furthermore, although sympathy is for these
reasons a tenuous principle of social cohesion, it is
perhaps the only one available in truly Gesellschaft
societies. Terry Eagleton raises this very point in IE2
Ideology of the Aesthetic. Understanding "the aesthetic" in

its original sense as referring to a discourse of internal

141
experience, Eagleton points out that the economic and
political spheres of Gesellschaft provide few if any real
possibilities for social cohesion:
The question therefore arises as to where
[bourgeois society] is to locate a sense of unity
powerful enough to reproduce itself by. In
economic life, individuals are structurally
isolated and antagonistic; at the political level
there would seem nothing but abstract rights to
link one subject to the other. This is one reason
why the 'aesthetic' realm of sentiments,
affections and spontaneous bodily habits comes to
assume the significance it does. Custom, piety,
intuition and opinion must now cohere an otherwise
abstract, atomized social order. (PE 23)
This is why, Eagleton explains, the aesthetic is such an
important concept in bourgeois thinking: "the alarming
truth is that in a social order marked by class division and
market competition, it may be finally here, and only here,
that human beings belong together in some intimate
Gemeinschaft" (PE 75). Eagleton thus reads the rise of the
aesthetic as a last ditch effort to provide for a sense of
social cohesion in a social situation that regards
individuals as atomistic and antagonistically competing for
scarce goods and services in the market place.

The implication I want to address here is that a theory
of culture that purports to provide a principle of social
cohesion will have to find something more substantial and
more integral to the actual workings of society than mere
fellow-feeling adduced from the outside. What that

something is, I propose, is a conception of the individual

that conceives of its interests as fully implicated in the

142
interests of others, and both in the actual workings of
society. Eliot's combined literary and cultural theory
points to the solution to Gesellschaft cultural dissolution,

but she is not quite able to provide it.

IV

As I have tried to show, Daniel Deronda represents
Eliot's critical view of deontological individualism and the
cultural dissolution it occasioned. As such, it suggests a
reading of Eliot's final novel as a critique of the realist
cultural theory she proposed in her early review essays.
The socially-constituted model of the self she advocates as
the foundation of Gemeinschaft contrasts sharply with the
atomistic self that is the basis of deontological liberalism
such as Mill's and Spencer's. Eliot's effort to provide a
principle of social cohesion comes down, finally, to
aesthetic means which were not ultimately up to the task.

There were, however, other critiques of deontological
individualism/liberalism grounded on conceptions of a
socially-constituted self contemporaneous with Eliot's.
Green's positive freedom liberalism was among these. Like
Eliot, Green advocates a socially-constituted self, but
rather than relying on aesthetic means for creating it, he
conceives of the individual's immersion in society in a way
that makes Gemeinschaft a natural result of the internal
workings of culture, not simply something adduced upon it.

The essential identity of the individual good with the

143
common good provides that Gemeinschaft is deeply imbedded in
the intersubjective practices and institutions that make up
society.
We can begin to see the correspondence between Eliot
and Green by looking first at Green's conception of the true
or unconditional good. Geoffrey Thomas has extracted from
Green's scattered writings on the topic five criteria for
the true or unconditional good. On Green's model, the true
good
(i) is achievable only as an object of pursuit;
(ii) contains a constructive element; (iii) is
imperatival; (iv) is non-exclusive and non-
competitive; and (v) is a social or common good.
(Thomas 249-250)

Although Green's ethical theory is primarily concerned with

the individual moral good, what he takes to be the true or

 

absolute good for the individual must be a good in which
other members of a society share. According to Green, the
absolute good can only realize itself "in a system of social
requirements and expectations" (PE 8199). Criteria (iv) and
(v) above specify the essential Gemeinschaft character of
Green's cultural theory. According to Thomas, Green's
supposition about non-competition must be "that anything
which could be endangered or frustrated by competition
between agents, anything of which one agent's possession
would exclude its possession by another, would be an

imperfect candidate for the true good" (Thomas 252).

144
Criteria (v) further specifies that the true good is a
common or social good. This is a crucial feature in Green,
for it is the precise point at which his ethical theory
(concerned with the individual's self-realization) becomes
cultural theory (concerned with the formation of
Gemeinschaft). This criteria provides, in effect, the
identification of the personal good with the common good.
The identity hinges on what Green calls "the ultimate fact"
of social interest (PE 5199). An agent's idea of something
that is absolutely good for itself derives from its
consciousness of itself as an end to itself. This
consciousness is the same thing as an idea of a self it
might become, since the best possible self is what would be
absolutely good for itself. The very idea of a possible
self contains within it something very much like the seeds
of Gemeinschaft.
It is a self already affected in the most
primitive forms of human life by manifold
interests, among which are interests in other
persons. These are not merely interests dependent
upon other persons for the means to their
gratification, but interests in the good of those
other persons, interests which cannot be satisfied
without the consciousness that those other persons
are satisfied. (PE 5199)
Elsewhere Green explains that the idea of a best possible
self includes an interest in other "persons as persons,"
where "person" means personality or subjectivity--the
ability of a subject to present itself with objects and seek

to realize those objects. In other words, the idea of a

possible self includes an interest in other persons who are

145
likewise ends in themselves. An interest in "persons as
persons" requires an interpenetration of consciousnesses,
and an alignment of wills.

We have already seen that self-consciousness
constitutes an agent's capability of seeking the absolute
good through regarding itself as an end to itself. This is
also the very same capability an agent has for entering into
another agent's consciousness of itself as an end to itself.
Given the social interest, an agent finds its own
satisfaction is dependent upon others' satisfactions. In
order to realize its own satisfaction, then, it must enter
into the gEEgg agent's consciousness of themselves as ends
to themselves. When this happens, the expression of these
two consciousnesses corresponds in choosing the objects they
seeks to realize. Their wills may then be said to be
aligned. This is the sense of Green's contention that
"Will, not force is the basis of society" (PPQ, title of
chapter 6). Gemeinschaft is another name for this
synchronization of individual and common wills.

This so-called "social interest" Green regards as an
"ultimate fact of human history" because without it is
impossible to explain the development of society as we know
it:

Some sort of community, founded on such unity of
self-consciousness, on such capacity for a common
idea of permanent good, must be presupposed in any

groupings of men from which the society that we
know can have been developed. (PE 5202)

146
It is of course debatable in what sense this social interest
is really a "fact." Certainly it is not a fact for the
whole of humanity. Otherwise moral philosophy and cultural
theory would be unnecessary. Even though it may not be a
universal fact that agents take other agents's interests
into account, Green's task as a moral philosopher is to give
rational reasons for doing just that. A descriptive
discrepancy on this point, then, is not an impeachment of
the argument. Rather, Green ought to be regarded as trying
to show that the true good for individuals is something that
is simultaneously good for all members of the society.

The larger point here is that Green's account of the
self's quest for satisfaction provides for an idea of a
common good that is identical with the absolute (individual)
good. In this way, the individual's search for lasting
satisfaction leads to a principle of social cohesion,
addressing the very conditions of Gesellschaft by resolving
a plurality of isolated wills into a unity of aligned wills.
This is due to the fact that in seeking to realize its own
satisfaction, the self-conscious agent enters into the
consciousness of other agents as being ends in themselves.
In this way, individual self-realization leads to
realization of the common good, to the reification of what
is best for the society.

This interpenetration of wills, this identity of
individual and common good, is precisely the Gemeinschaft

condition Eliot was after though could not extract from her

147
realist representation of social reality. If Eliot and
Green were nearly aligned in their belief that social
dissolution was a consequence of deontological
individualism, they were even more closely aligned in their
recognition that the nature of social experience has crucial
implications for individual self-realization. There is,
then, another equally important and close correspondence
between Eliot's and Green's imaginations of the individual's
immersion in culture. This second point of correspondence
has to do with the individual's dependence upon society for
moral development, and is best seen by examining Eliot's
penultimate novel.

Middlemarch is the only one of Eliot's novels named
after a community not a character. The title as well as the
narrative itself suggest that the novel is about the‘
community itself, as much as it is about anything quite that
specific. One of the most significant observations Eliot
makes about the Middlemarch community is the severe
limitations which that community places on Dorothea Brook's
attempts at self-realization. '

Like Deronda and Gwendolen, Dorothea tries to realize
an idea of who she thinks she can and ought to become. This
idea provides the content of what might be called her moral
potential. It takes the form of a strong desire to engage
in socially redeeming activities, represented initially by
her desire to build improved cottages for neighboring tenant

farmers. Without money of her own, however, she cannot

148
undertake such activities. Sir James Chattam presents the
first opportunity to realize her moral inclinations. He has
the willingness and financial means to allow Dorothea to
pursue her social projects. However, Dorothea rejects him
for Casaubon on the assumption that the latter's scholarship
and piety are more closely aligned with her own moral ideal.
This turns out to be a faulty perception, and she is
disappointed and frustrated when she realizes the self-
serving character of his intellectual activities. Moreover,
because of his dominating nature, he narrowly prescribes and
proscribes the ways in which she can organize and direct her
own social and intellectual pursuits.

Prior to marriage Dorothea had no means of realizing
her moral potential. During it she has no freedom to apply
those means. Nor is she much better off after Casaubon
dies, for, although she then has the means and freedom
lacking before, she has become aware of the need to
acknowledge the claims of her emotions. In marrying
Casaubon Dorothea denied the claims of self-regarding
(emotional) desires in order to satisfy her other-regarding
desires. In marrying Ladislaw in order to realize those
self-regarding desires, Dorothea is forced to give up the
financial means necessary to realize her other-regarding
desires.

Middlemarch represents Eliot's awareness of a socially
devastating incompatibility between individual self-

realization and what I shall call full social participation.

149
Dorothea cannot realize her full potential as an individual
and an engaged member of society because society does not
provide adequate avenues for her simultaneously to
acknowledge the self-regarding and the other-regarding
claims upon her. This incompatibility alienates the
individual from society, forcing it to choose between its
own interests and those of the society. Thus, Middlemarch
ends problematically with the novel's most sympathetic
characters (Dorothea, Ladislaw, and Lydgate) all choosing in
effect against Middlemarch: they all pursue their lives
elsewhere. In so far as Eliot's penultimate novel is
critical of the inadequate opportunities Middlemarch
provides for Dorothea's self-realization, it gestures toward
what might be called proto-positive-freedom. That is, it
points to the need for social institutions that contribute
positively to the individual's realization of a best
possible self.

Green's positive-freedom liberalism also conceives of
the individual's immersion in society in a way that regards
social institutions as contributing factors to individual
moral self-development. In fact, this aspect of Green's
thinking constitutes his most important contribution to
Victorian cultural theory: his argument for positive-
freedom. Green contends that the realization of personal
perfection (self-satisfaction) can only take place E5
persons, through society. The idea of a possible self,

which is a condition of moral self-realization, depends upon

150

an agent's ability to be self-consciously an end to itself.
In other words, the idea of self-perfection is identical
with self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is something
that can only inhere in individuals. In Green's language,
the idea of personal perfection can only realize itself in
"persons," where "persons" means "the quality in a subject
being consciously an object to itself" (PE 5182).

At the same time, however, it is only as members of
society that the idea of realizing personal potential--and,

identically, human perfection--has any practical hold over

 

us (PE 5183). According to Green,
. . . human society presupposes persons in
capacity--subjects capable each of conceiving
himself and the bettering of his life as an end to
himself--but it is only in the intercourse of men,
each recognized by each as an end, not merely a
means, and thus as having reciprocal claims, that
the capacity is actualized and that we really live
as persons. (PE 5183)

In order to realize an idea of personal perfection, agents

need to have definite ideas about what the possibilities for

human perfection are. These ideas of who/what agents might

become, and the social possibilities for realizing those

ideas must come from somewhere. According to Green, they

come from society itself in the form of social roles.

Social roles present agents with ideas of possible selves

and structure opportunities to realize them.

This is the sense of Green's contention that society

constitutes the external conditions necessary for individual

moral development. It is the foundation of his argument for

151

positive freedom. Positive-freedom points to the moral
necessity of society providing social roles adequate to the
ideas of possible selves of its citizens. As an
acknowledgment of this necessity, positive freedom shifts a
significant portion of the responsibility for the
individual's moral development onto social organization
itself.

In this way, Green's liberalism is a more detailed and
systematic version of one of the main objects of social

representation in Eliot's Middlemarch. Eliot's critique of

 

society in that novel recognizes a tension between the
conditions of moral self-realization and the conditions of
social membership and full integration. The novel gestures
beyond its own conclusion toward a conception of social
participation that resolves or avoids this tension. Green's
positive freedom is the recognition that social
opportunities are a necessary condition of individual moral
development. His cultural theory provides that social
opportunities (social roles and rights) are distributed in
ways that all members have equal possibilities to exercise
their capacities for self-satisfaction.

If we recognize that social organization has a role in
conditioning moral development, society as a whole has a
responsibility to each of its members. Moreover, it has the
£233 responsibility to each of its members. In so doing,
positive-freedom liberalism strives to replace the

competitive atmosphere of Gesellschaft with a collaborative

152
one, making Gemeinschaft part of social reality. In other
words, Green's positive-freedom liberalism accomplishes what
Eliot's novels fail to do: it imagines a configuration of
society in which alignment of wills is the natural outcome
of the individual's immersion in ordinary social

transaction.

Chapter V
FROM CRITICAL THEOLOGY TO CULTURAL THEORY:

MARY WARD, ROBERT ELSMERE, AND T. H. GREEN

 

The best selling novel in the nineteenth century was
written not by Dickens or Thackery or Trollope. It was
written by Mary Augusta Ward. Robert Elsmere was published
February 1888, and by the first week in June, 3,500 copies
of the triple-decker edition had been sold to lending
libraries. By November it is estimated that 100,000 copies
had sold in America alone; that by March 1889 between 30,000
and 40,000 copies of various editions had been sold in
Britain, with sales continuing at the rate of 700 copies a
week. Mary Ward estimated in 1909 that nearly one million
copies of the book had been circulated in English-speaking
countries.1

Despite its supreme Victorian celebrity, Robert Elsmere

is hardly known at all now and rarely read. Its popularity

 

1 Later there were 1,000 copies of a two-volume library
edition, and 20,000 copies of a half-crown edition had sold
before the end of 1890. That adds up to about 128,000
copies in three years. Two decades later, still another a
cheap edition sold 50,000 copies in two weeks, and 100,000
copies within a year. For a fuller account of sales see
Peterson 221. The edition I cite is the authorized one-
volume American edition (Macmillan and Co: London and New
York, 1888), reprinted from the seventh London edition.

153

154
in the nineteenth century reflects the currency of its ideas
and its formulation of cultural problems and cultural

solutions. Robert Elsmere deals directly with the common

 

Victorian problem of a crisis of faith, though Ward's
treatment of that problem is rather uncommon, or better: her
treatment is not typically English.

In his 1989 essay on the relationship between
nineteenth-century biblical criticism and Victorian fiction,
Stephen Prickett leads us to Hans Frei's observation of the
difference between English and German biblical scholarship:

In [eighteenth-century] England, where a serious
body of realistic narrative literature and a
certain amount of criticism of the literature was
building up, there arose no corresponding
cumulative tradition of criticism of the biblical
writings, and that included no narrative
interpretation of them. In Germany, on the other
hand, where a body of critical analysis as well as
a general hermeneutics of the biblical writings
built up rapidly in the latter half of the
eighteenth-century, there was no simultaneous
development of realistic prose narrative and its
critical appraisal. (Frei quoted in Prickett 1)
According to Frei, the relative lack of narrative prose
criticism in Germany created a tendency to recognize the
narrative realism in the Bible as a species of history, not
literature. Conversely, the relative underdevelopment of an
historical hermeneutical tradition in eighteenth-century
England lead to the nineteenth-century treatment of biblical
narrative in more literary than historical terms.
Frei's observation is corroborated, for example, by

Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma. Arnold's effort in

that work is to redirect attention away from the historical

155
nature of biblical miracles to the emotional experiences
represented by them. In short, Arnold urges replacing the
historical understanding of the New Testament with a
metaphorical one. Despite this shift in perspective, Arnold

aimed at preserving the Bible as a locus of moral (and

 

therefore cultural) authority. In this way, his biblical
criticism is essentially conservative. It is an attempt to
provide new foundations for old Christian truth.

Mary Ward--Matthew Arnold's niece--departed
significantly from her famous uncle's approach. Ward, like
Green, had a much more radical response. Ward's Robert
Elsmere is dedicated to T. H. Green, and, in addition to
containing a thinly disguised portrait of him, makes use of
direct quotations from his works.2 By the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, Green's name was firmly associated

with the transmission of German idealism in England.3 The

 

2I am not the first to comment on Green's presence in
Robert Elsmere. Among the most significant are Lionel
Trilling, Melvin Richter, William Peterson, Roesmary Ashton,
Bernard Lightman, Robert Lee Wolff, John Sutherland, and
William Peterson. While Richter gives the most detailed
attention to Green's philosophy, he says very little about
the novel itself. Conversely, the others, while mentioning
Green in passing, give no serious attention to Green's
ethics and religious philosophy and their political
implications as they are represented in the novel.
Moreover, none gives any treatment of the way(s) in which
Robert's critique of dogmatic theology prefigures the
alternatives he pursues after he abandons orthodox
Christianity.

3While there are other English writers familiar with
German idealism, especially Coleridge and Carlyle, none of
these gave the same kind of explicit and sustained
systematic treatment of English cultural problems on
idealist premises as Green. Nor can any of them be regarded

156
most important aspect of his German connections for this
study is his close textual links to the German biblical
criticism and his development of them. Green's work on the
Bible is fundamentally different from Arnold's. It is
German and historical as opposed to English and literary.
Glossing Frei's observation, Prickett agrees that it is not
difficult to see how German historical critics "judged the
prose narratives of the Bible by their own standards of
history and found them of such dubious value" (Prickett, 7).
Working in this same historical tradition led Green also to
search for alternative articulations of spiritual and moral
truth.

On the one hand Green was looking for a cultural
discourse which did not oppose reason and spiritualism the
way orthodox religion tended to do. At the same time,
however, he was intent on finding a (rational) alternative
to utilitarianism, which, because of its reliance upon
hedonism, he regarded as incapable of supplying adequate
inducement to moral improvement. These aspects of Green's
religious, ethical, and social critique get picked up and

developed in Ward's Robert Elsmere in ways that domesticate

 

his German idealist religious, moral, and political
philosophy for English consumption. These various
discourses are condensed, so to speak, into a single

(literary) mode.

 

as starting a "school" in the sense of having disciples.

157

My chief contention here is that Mary Ward's EgEggp
Elsmere represents and advocates what might now be
recognized as the cultural theory of British philosophical
idealism. Many of the central features of Robert Elsmere
are prefigured by inside connections between German critical
theology and idealist ethics, and again between idealist
ethics and a positive-freedom Liberalism. The answer to the
question "How does German theology become domesticated as
English cultural theory?" might be: "Via a cultural politics
of science and imagination." For as I shall try to show, a
cultural theory of science and imagination accounts for the
generation and resolution of the major conflicts in Robert
Elsmere: the protagonist's abandonment of orthodox
Christianity, and the positive cultural theory and cultural
politics he figures as an alternative to it."5

A second and less specific contention of this chapter

is that the way religious controversy was formulated at

 

‘A second and less specific contention of this chapter
is that the way religious controversy was formulated at
Oxford has a great deal to do with the nature of the secular
modes of ethical discourse which emerged from that debate.
Robert Elsmere demonstrates how, primarily through Green,
German critical theology becomes transformed into English
post-Anglican cultural theory.

5I use the term "cultural theory" to refer discourses
which cross between theology, ethics, and politics. Thus, I
reserve the term "cultural politics" to refer to the
mediation of power and authority in the realization of an
idea of culture--of what the intersection of private and
social experience ought to look like.

158
Oxford has a great deal to do with the nature of secular
modes of ethical discourse which emerged from that debate.
Robert Elsmere represents in part how that secularization of
Christian ideology took place in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. This topic has been treated by new
historicists, Jerome McGann in particular. McGann's
Romantic Ideology examines some of the ways in which early
nineteenth-century English literature initiates and embodies
a secularization of Christian ideology. But McGann has to
dig relatively deep into the structures of meaning and
feeling in order to tease out a romantic secular ideology.
My recovery of Green's place in Ward's very popular novel
objectifies a cultural moment at which that secular impulse

goes public--becomes a functional part of Victorian culture.

II

The great crisis of Robert Elsmere is the title
character's crisis of faith. Despite his largely agnostic
upbringing, Robert takes holy orders at Oxford and accepts a
rural living in Surrey. It is through contact with
Wendover, a local landowner and scholar, that Robert begins
to question the historical veracity of the New Testament.
Wendover's scholarship, and Robert's critique of Christian
orthodoxy are patterned on German critical theology.

Wendover's thirty years of scholarship have produced
two of three proposed volumes treating the conditions which

govern the correspondence between testimony and facts. The

159
chief results of Wendover's inquiry into the nature of
testimony convinced him that testimony has "developed" in
the sense that "man's power of apprehending and recording
what he sees and hears has grown from less to more, from
weaker to stronger, like any other of his faculties" (317).
Wendover's sense of the developmental character of testimony
is coupled with an urgent advocacy of "what is meant in
history and literature by "the critical method," which in
history may be defined as the "science of what is credible,"
and in literature as "the science of what is rational"
(317).

Bernard Lightman has recently written about the
biographical basis of Ward's own commitment to historical
scholarship. He finds a precedent for Wendover's
historicism in Ward's contribution to Henry Wace's
Dictionary of Christian Biography. Ward writes to her

friend Mandell Creighton:

'what convinced fig [of the difficulties raised by
historical considerations] finally and irrevocably
was two years of close and constant occupation
with the materials of history in those centuries
which lie near to the birth of Christianity and
were the critical centuries of its development. I
then saw that to adopt the witness of those
centuries to matters of fact, without translating
it at every step, into the historical language of
our own day--a language which the long education
of time has brought closer to the realities of
things--would be to end by knowing nothing
actually and truly, about their life.‘ (Ward
quoted in Lightman 295).

160
Lightman also finds that Ward's own work in history "led
directly to the writing of Robert Elsmere" (Ward quoted in
Lightman, 296).

Taken together, what Wendover advocates is what might
be called a "scientific" understanding of sacred writing,
which treats sacred documents as historically conditioned,
and, consequently, as texts which must be historically
understood. Given his pre-existing passionate interest in
historical scholarship, Robert found the logic of Wendover's
"scientific" approach compelling. It is principally
Wendover's scholarship that puts into motion changes that
dramatically alter Robert's life: changes in the very
foundations of Robert's conception of Christ and
Christianity. Robert's interest in history had led him to
church history before he met Wendover, but at that time
Robert had been able to defeat the beginnings of religious
skepticism. Wendover, however, proves to be the catalyst
that precipitates the cataclysmic change in Robert's view of
Christianity.

The narrator in Robert Elsmere describes Wendover's
decisive influence on Robert's beliefs this way:

By the end of their conversation that first period
of happy unclouded youth we have been considering
was over for poor Elsmere. In obedience to
certain inevitable laws and instincts of the mind,
he had been for months tempting his fate, inviting
catastrophe. Nonetheless did the first sure
approaches of that catastrophe fill him with a
restless resistance which was in itself anguish. .
. But now at every step the ideas, impressions,

arguments bred in him by his months of historical
work and ordinary converse with the squire rushed

161

in, as they had done once before, to cripple
resistance, to check an emerging answer, to
justify Mr. Wendover. (317)

The questioning spirit bred in Robert by Wendover's

scientific method leads to an imaginative revolution in

Robert's conception of Jesus. Thinking about his

conversations with Wendover, Robert begins to refigure his

image of Christ:
In the stillness of the night there rose up
weirdly before him a whole new mental picture--
effacing, pushing out, innumerable older images of
thought. It was the image of a purely human
Christ--a purely human, explicable, yet always
wonderful Christ. It broke his heart, but the
spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we
see all the familiar objects of life in new
relations and perspectives. (EE 321)

What is most significant in this passage is that Wendover's

introduction of a scientific point of view brought about an

 

imaginative change in Robert's conception of Christ. This,
in turn, precipitates what Robert describes as a "failure of
feeling" for the habits of Anglican worship.

The final break with Anglican orthodoxy comes when
Robert begins to consider the implications of critical
scholarship a propos of St. Paul's witness to the
Resurrection.

Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the
fiery fallible man of genius--so weak logically,
so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral
passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a
free and temperate criticism--[Robert] knew, in a
sort of a dull way, that his choice was made. The
one picture carried reason and imagination with
it; the other contented neither. (330-331)
[emphasis added]

162
Robert's newly modified understanding of Christian documents
is characterized by the combined faculties of science and
imagination. Science (reason in the form of historical
scholarship) establishes new perspectives toward sacred
texts, which, in turn, precipitate a reconception--a
reimagination--of Jesus and other central biblical figures.
Linked together, reason and imagination drastically change

the nature of Christian belief.

III
The reconception of Christianity presented in Robert
Elsmere elicited a variety of textual responses from various
readers, including numerous sermons and reviews and one
especially long and critical piece by then ex-Prime Minister

William Gladstone entitled "Robert Elsmere and the Battle of

 

Belief." Gladstone's main dissatisfaction with the novel is
what he took to be the inadequate representation of Anglican
apologetics. Ward does, in fact, give little opportunity
for Anglican orthodoxy to defend itself. It is generally
true, as Gladstone charges, that in Robert Elsmere "there is
a great inequity in the distribution of arms. Reasoning is
the weapon of the new scheme; emotion is the sole resource
of the old" (778).
A creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries
at its back, cannot find an articulate word to say
in its defence, and the downfall of the scheme of
belief shatters also, and of right, the highly
ordered scheme of life that had nestled in the

Rectory of Murewell, as it still does in thousands
of other English parsonages." (Gladstone 769)

163
Additionally, Gladstone did not think Ward knew enough about
Christian apolegetics to do it justice:
There is nowhere a sign that the authoress has
made herself acquainted with the Christian
apologists, old or recent; or has weighed the
evidence derivable from the Christian history .
. . (Gladstone, 778)

In response, Ward wrote a long fictional dialogue for
The Nineteenth Century entitled "The New Reformation: a
Dialogue." In this piece two old college friends debate the
relative merits of Anglican and German critical theology.
Ward's ostensible first purpose was to defend herself
against Gladstone's charge that she did not know enough
about Christian apologetics or about critical theology to
have treated them satisfactorily in her novel. The command
of the history and development of German and French critical
theology she evidences in "The New Reformation" is
impressive. In addition to defending herself, however, Ward
uses the occasion of "The New Reformation" to explicate and
defend Robert's assent to critical theology and the critique
of Christian orthodoxy it occasioned.

In "The New Reformation," Ward argues energetically
that the real advancements of critical over Anglican
theology are attributable to an improvement in, what she
terms, "historical scholarship." She characterizes the
advent of critical theology as the combination of scientific
and imaginative faculties in the consideration of Christian

documents. In the dialogue, her advocate for critical

theology describes its "advances" this way:

164

'The older books had had certain statements and
products of the past to render into the language
of the present. And they had rendered them
inadequately with that vagueness and generality
and convention which belong to bad translation.
And the result was either merely flat and
perfunctory, something totally without the breath
of life and reality, or else the ideas and speech
of the past were hidden away under what was in
truth a disguise--often a magnificent disguise--
woven out of the ideas and speech of the present.
But the books since Neibuhr, since Ranke, since
Mommsen! There you found a difference. At last
you found out that these men and women, these
kings and bishops and saints, these chroniclers
and officials, were flesh and blood; that they had
ideas, passions, politics; that they lived, as we
do, under governing prepossessions; that they had
theories of life and the universe; and till you
understood these and could throw yourself back
into them, you had no chance of understanding the
men and their doings. . . . And all this was
brought about by nothing in the world
fundamentally but improved translation, by the use
of that same faculty, half scientific, half
imaginative, which in the rendering of a foreign
language, enables a man to get into the very heart
and mind of his author, to speak with his tones
and feel with his feelings.‘ (E5 457)

This "historical faculty," "half scientific, half
imaginative," correlates precisely with the representation
in Robert Elsmere of Robert's "conversion" as occasioned by
a combination of reason and imagination.

According to Ward's dialogue, among the consequences of
improved historical translation is a more complete
recognition of the historical contingency of testimony--of
the significance of what in the above passage are termed
"governing prepossessions." As Ward points out in "The New
Reformation," critical theology began in 1835 with Strauss's
Leben Jesu, which reasserted the Hegelian distinction

between Begriff and Vorstellung:

165

The particular system of dogmas put forward by any
religion is the Vorstellung or presentation, the
Begriff or idea is the underlying spiritual
reality common to it and presumably other systems
besides. Why in Christianity have you gone so far
towards identifying the two? . . . Examine
[Christian evidence] carefully and you will see
that the particular statements which it makes are
really only Vorstellung as in other religions, the
imaginative mythical elements which hide from us
the Idea or Begriff. (EE 470)

 

 

For Ward as for Strauss, recognition of the distinction
between that which in Christianity is simply Vorstellung and
that which is Begriff leads to an understanding of Christian
dogma as historically contingent.
Ward objects, however, that Strauss's method was overly
speculative and a prior : "Strauss criticized the contents
of the Christian literature without understanding the
literary and historical conditions which had produced it"
(471). She goes on to explain that it was Ferdinand
Christian Baur who made the final breakthrough to a
conception of Christian documents and Christian evidences as
thoroughly historically contingent:
Baur, that veteran of knowledge, was struck, in
the first place, with the fact which Strauss's
book revealed, that a scientific knowledge of
Christian sources was as yet wanting to theology;
in the next he was imbued with the conception that
the Gospels had been till then placed in a false
perspective both by Strauss and New Testament
criticism generally--that not they, but the
Pauline Epistles, represent the earliest and
directest testimony we have to Christian belief.
(471)

Ward's advocate in "The New Reformation," attributes his own

progress in theological understanding to a reading of Baur's

Geschichte der Christlichen Kirche:

166

I began to read one of his chief books, and I can
only describe what I felt in the words lately
attributed by his biographer to Professor Green:
"He thought the Church History the most
illuminating book he had ever read." (PE 460)

 

This is a precise moment at which the orbits of Ward's
fiction and Green's philosophy intersect. Though he does
not get the quotation quite right, Ward's character is
correct in attributing large significance to Green's reading
of Baur. Green's biographer, R. L. Nettleship, reports
Green as having said in regard to Baur: "'I have found him .
. . nearly the most instructive writer I have ever met
with'" (see Nettleship, "Memoir" xxxvii). Green, in fact,
began a translation of Baur's Geschichte der Christlichen
Kirche by the end of 1863. And although he abandoned the
project to undertake a solicited translation of Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics, he did make explicit and significant
use of his partial translation of Baur in the form of a
piece entitled "Essay On Christian Dogma."6
In Green's religious philosophy, the distinction

between Christian Begriff and Christian Vorstellung takes
the form of a distinction between immediate consciousness of
divinity on the one hand and systematic articulations of
that consciousness on the other. The first is religion; the
second is theology:

Christianity, in its simplest primary form, is

involved in the divine consciousness of Jesus and

in that of St. Paul . . . Now this consciousness
of the divine, as it existed in these two parents

 

6See Nettleship, "Memoir" xxxviii.

167
of our faith, was essentially an immediate
consciousness. It was one which penetrated to its
object, as was then said, by revelation, as we
should say, by intuition, without the intervention
of any system of ideas. It was, therefore,
according to the definition we have given, no
theological consciousness, nor could its
utterances constitute a theology. ("Essay on
Christian Dogma" 164)
Theology, for Green, is "a connected system of ideas, each
qualified by every other, each serving as a middle term by
which the rest are held together" ("Essay on Christian
Dogma" 164). Further, Green distinguishes between faith ("a
certain condition of spiritual consciousness") and dogma
("the expression of this consciousness in terms of the
understanding") ("Essay on Christian Dogma" 181). For
Green, religious consciousness is the essential fact of
Christianity, while dogma and theological consciousness are
derivative. The development of dogmatic theology, and its
gradual separation from religious consciousness, corresponds
to the successively reduced imaginative presence of Christ
in subsequent church documents ("Essay on Christian Dogma"
168, 170).

As the personal intuitive consciousness of Christ faded
with the passing of successive generations, Christians began
to feel the need for a fresh assertion of Christian truth.
Because not yet fixed by conventional interpretation, New
Testament scripture was unable to supply adequate evidence
for controversial purposes. Thus the apostolic churches

intervened to resolve ambiguity and establish canonical

interpretation. This, according to Green, accounts for the

168
origins of the creeds, and although they do not contradict
anything in the New Testament, "they convey it in a
different form, and the difference, primarily one of form,
becomes one of substance" ("Essay on Christian Dogma" 163).
[In the creeds] christian truth is no longer the
immediate expression of the highest possible
spiritual life; it has become a theology, which
inevitably reacts on the canonical writings, whose
deficiencies it was originally introduced to
supply. ("Essay on Christian Dogma" 163)
Gradually, theological (in essence, rational) articulation
of Christian truth replaces the immediate religious
consciousness of the divine. Religious experience thus
devolves into theological dogma. Most importantly, this
dogma is derivative, not essential. Green regards it as an
historically conditioned representation (Vorstellung) of
Christian truth.

Having determined that dogmatic theology is contingent
Vorstellung rather than essential Begriff, Green turned to
idealist philosophy for a fuller, less contingent
articulation of spiritual and moral truth. He chose
idealism because it alone could represent and contain a
fundamental dualism he recognized in orthodox religion: that
between spiritualism and rationalism. As has been
explained, on the one hand Green regarded the fundamental
fact of christianity as an immediate intuition of the

divine. On the other hand, however, he was convinced that

such an intuition was not at odds with reason:

169
Christianity is cheaply honoured, when it is made
exceptional: God is not wisely trusted when
declared unintelligible. . . .
God is for ever reason; and his
communication, his revelation, is reason; not,
however, abstract reason, but reason as taking a
body from, and giving life to, the whole system of
experience which makes the history of man. . . .
The divine mind touches, modifies, becomes the
mind of man, through a process of which mere
intellectual conception is only the beginning, but
of which the gradual complement is an unexhausted
series of spiritual discipline through all the
agencies of social life. ("The Witness of God"
239-240)
Put another way, spirituality is identical and coextensive
with rationality. In both its aspects, religion for Green
is a matter of consciousness. As the consummate philosophy
of consciousness, philosophical idealism is an exquisitely

appropriate mode of articulating spiritual and moral truth.

Green's acceptance of the conclusions of critical
theology led him, in the way I have described, to develop an
alternative (idealist) articulation of spiritual and moral
truth, one which preserves and combines reason and spiritual
intuition. As we have seen, Robert's "conversion" in Robert
Elsmere is predicated on an "historical faculty" conceived
of as a combination of science and imagination. This same
historical impulse in critical theology occasions Robert's

development of an alternative to Christian orthodoxy.

III
As I have tried to show, Green's appropriation of

critical theology is the background for Robert's abandonment

170
of orthodox Anglicanism. Green's place in Robert Elsmere
goes beyond merely explaining the protagonist's skepticism.
The real gravity of Ward's appropriation of Green has to do
with the implications his critical theology has for English
cultural theory. In addition to occasioning Robert's doubt,
Green's theology serves as the foundation for the positive
alternative Robert later espouses. As an alternative to
Anglicanism, Ward's Robert Elsmere represents an ideology
grounded in thesame faculties of science and imagination
responsible for Robert's abandonment of orthodox
christianity. Robert's alternative "religion" articulates a
connection between spirituality and citizenship that Green
attributes to the exercise of "will" and "reason" in the
individual.

After giving up an ecclesiastical living in Surrey,
Robert's desire to effect some social good carries him to
London, where he channels his efforts into a Workmen's
Institute. In a speech he delivers to its members, Robert
gives a succinct articulation of his reformed "religious"
beliefs. His primary purpose in addressing the Workmen's
Institute is to give reasons for a reformed Christian belief
in the existence of God and "eternal goodness." However,
Robert's speech is couched in the unmistakable language of
philosophical idealism. Moreover, Ward has selected for it
topoi and language'from Green's religious philosophy which
bear directly on the viability of idealism as a foundation

for social reform.

171

'My friends, . . . the man who is addressing you
to-night believes in Egg; and Conscience, which is
God's witness in the soul; and in Experience,
which is at once the record and the instrument of
man's education at God's hands. He places his
whole trust, for life and death, "in God the
Father Almighty,"--in that force at the root of
things which is revealed to us whenever a man
helps his neighbor, or a mother denies herself for
her child; whenever a soldier dies without a
murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in
the darkness to rescue the perishing; whenever a
workman throws mind and conscience into his work,
or a statesman labours not for his own gain but
for that of the State! He believes in an Eternal
Goodness--and an Eternal Mind--of which Nature and
Man are the continuous and the only revelation. .
. .' (PE 494)

 

In this explicit statement of his reformed religious
position Robert registers a transformation of the orthodox
idea of spirituality into an idea of citizenship. "Eternal.
Goodness" is in apposition to "Eternal Mind." Robert
identifies God (spirituality) with that force which makes
agents sacrifice themselves in deference to an idea of a
good which is not merely a personal good. The acts of self-
sacrifice Robert lists imply an identification, on the part
of the agent, of his own personal good with the common good.
It is only such an act of identification which can account

for the agent doing what is apparently not in his personal

 

interest--risking his well-being or even his life. Robert's
transformed "religion" is thus formulated in such a way as
to make social identification paramount. An agent's
obligation to the community becomes identical with ultimate
spiritual fact. The novel's central (religious) conflict is

resolved by transforming Christian mythology into a

172
metaphysically-grounded citizenship, thus reconciling

Robert's demands for rationality and spirituality.

The novel's other main conflict--that between Robert
and Catherine, his wife--is resolved very much to the same
effect. His Oxford tutor remarks of Robert's devoutly
Anglican wife that "she is the thirty-nine articles in the
flesh." Catherine's own moral vocation fulfills a promise
to her dying father to take care of her mother and sisters.
Consequently, she is initially reluctant to marry for fear
of deserting that obligation. Out of the same respect for
her father's beliefs, she is unwilling to allow Robert to
explain his changed religious opinions or even to know about
his work in the East End.
'Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,’ she
cried, again clinging to him. "Oh, think for me!
You know what I feel; that I dare not risk what is
not mine!‘ (PE 405)

The passage continues:
She did not attempt a reply, but the melancholy of
an invincible resolution, which was, so to speak,
not her own doing, but rather was like a necessity
imposed upon her from outside, breathed through
her silence. (EE 405)

Catherine here reveals that her religious notions are
not her own but her father's: "I dare not risk what is not
mine." Robert has employed his reason to decide what part
of Christianity belongs to miracles. Catherine is
unprepared and unwilling to take this step, maintaining

instead a deference to her father's religious opinions. She

173
does not allow her reason to be brought to bear in the
problem. Thus represented, Catherine's position is a
dogmatic one. While there is no lack of deep personal
commitment, it relies primarily upon an unexamined
acceptance of another's formulation, on second-hand evidence
so to speak. This difference of opinion, Robert's effort at
reconciliation of reason and spirituality and Catherine's
dogmatism, threatens "that exquisite homelife of theirs,
that tender, triple bond of husband, wife, and child."

The quasi-resolution of their disrupted married life
comes when Catherine discovers that what Robert has been
doing in the East End in the way of social work corresponds
exactly with his activities as a parish minister in
Murewell. In Murewell, among Robert's chief accomplishments
were the establishment of a Naturalist's Club and a story-
telling group. These are exactly what Robert succeeds in
establishing in the East End. This discovery is the
occasion of the greatest moral crisis of Catherine's life
(520) because she is confronted with a contradiction between
her orthodoxy (or, rather, her father's) and her lived
experience. What appeared as a relaxation of moral fiber
she associated with Robert's heretical ideas turns out to be
the same energy and moral commitment that characterized
Robert's work as an Anglican minister.

Forced thus to reconsider her reluctance to acknowledge
Robert's newly formulated religious position, Catherine

makes the following explanation :

174
'You were right--I ygglg not understand. And, in
a sense, I shall never understand, I cannot change
. . . My Lord is my Lord always; but He is yours
too. Oh, I know it, say what you will! IEEE is
what has been hidden from me; that is what my
trouble has taught me; the powerlessness, the
worthlessness, of words. It is the spirit that
guickeneth. (530)
Finally Catherine says "I am past thinking. Let us bury it
all, and begin again. Words are nothing" (530).

On the negative side, in its assertion that "words are
nothing," the novel rejects dogma. On the positive side,
however, the novel has important implications for the re-
conceptualization of spiritual truth. By devaluing the
linguistic--in essence doctrinal--differences between Robert
and Catherine, and by re-grounding their new beginning on a
shared social commitment, the novel transfers the locus of
spiritual significance from the Bible and orthodox religion
to moral and social practice. Catherine's final acceptance
of Robert's heterodoxy acknowledges morality and social
commitment as Egg essential representation of spiritual
truth. As with Robert, so eventually with Catherine:
religion has become citizenship--an idea of an eternal,
absolute good to be realized through intersubjective
relations. In a quasi-allegorical way, then, Anglicanism is
brought finally to recognize philosophical idealism as a
viable expression of its paramount moral and social
commitments.

In resolving the novel's conflicts in this way, Ward

appeals to and advocates an ideology which transforms

175
religion into citizenship. Just as Robert's critique of
Christian orthodoxy was predicated on a conjunction of
scientific and imaginative faculties she adapted from
critical theology, his alternative to orthodox religion also
expresses a latent reliance on faculties of science and
imagination. This becomes evident when Robert's speech to
the workers and Catherine's recognition of his East End work
are viewed in relation to Green's ethics. For it is in
Green's moral philosophy that the nexus between spiritualism
and citizenship is most carefully worked out. That nexus
has primarily to do with the exercise of reason and will.

In the Book III of Prolegomena to Ethics Green
considers the practical value of utilitarianism as compared
with that of his own theory of the ultimate good as human
perfection. He strongly criticizes utilitarianism because,
relying as it does on a hedonist account of the origin of
human action, it is not capable of supplying any inducement
to be better, nor is it capable of accounting for any sense
of obligation to others. Conversely, his idealist ethics
does account for these fundamental moral phenomena:

The action of [an idea that an agent has of
himself as becoming that which he has it in him to
become] in the individual accounts for two things
which, upon the Hedonistic supposition, are
equally unaccountable. It accounts for the
possibility of the question, Why should I trouble
about making myself and my neighbors other than we
are? and, given the question, it accounts for an
answer being rendered to it, in the shape of a

real initiation of effort for the improvement of
human life. (PE 5352)

176
Because his ethics configures human perfection as the
ultimate good, it provides an agent interested in pursuing
the ultimate good with an inducement to realize its full
potential, its full capacities. Moreover, according to
Green's ethics, an agent's own well-being is materially
bound to the well-being of others in whom he takes an
interest. Thus, progress to one's own perfection
specifically entails the perfection of others. It is by
including this social aspect in the individual's idea of its
personal good that Green's idealism supplies a new
foundation for the social reform he--and Ward--were looking
for. Both these features of Green's ethics are made
possible by the exercise of will and reason in the
individual agent.

By virtue of the activity of self-consciousness in
them, agents have the ability to differentiate themselves
from their desires and to choose to realize those ideas of
possible satisfactions which will produce permanent
satisfaction. To do so is to "will" an object. Character
or "self" is a propensity to will certain kinds of objects.
A "moral" self is one which habitually wills objects which
really do provide the most lasting satisfaction. Reason
provides the practical connection between an idea and its
realization. It is in this sense that morality, for Green,
is a matter of realizing an idea of a possible self through

the exercise of will and reason:

177

By will is understood, as has been explained, an
effort (or capacity for such effort) on the part
of a self-conscious subject to satisfy itself: by
reason, in the practical sense, the capacity on
the part of such a subject to conceive a better
state of itself as an end to be attained by
action. . . . In this most primitive form they are
alike modes of that eternal principle of self-
objectification which we hold to be reproducing
itself in man through the medium of an animal
organism, and of which the action is equally
necessary to knowledge and to morality. (PE
8177)

It is, however, only in social space, through an act of
social identification, that an agent can give reality to an
idea of a best possible self. It is only through an act by
which the individual takes as its objects of desire those of
the other agents in whom it takes an interest that the moral
self develops. This social identification Green regards as
a "primary fact." An agent interested in bettering its own
condition, Green argues,
cannot contemplate himself as in a better state,
or on the way to the best, without contemplating
others, not merely as a means to that better
state, but as sharing it with him. (PE 5199)

Put another way, an agent's complete and fullest self-

satisfaction includes with it the self-satisfaction of

others in whom the agent takes an interest.
So human society presupposes persons in capacity--
subjects capable of each conceiving himself and
the bettering of his life as an end to himself--
but it is only in the intercourse of men, each
recognized by each as an end, not merely a means,
and thus as having reciprocal claims, that the
capacity is actualized and that we really live as
persons. (PE 5183)

By "persons" Green means self-conscious agents with the

ability to conceive of themselves in a better condition than

178
at present--i.e., agents in whom the spiritual (self-
conscious) principle begins to realize itself.
Green goes to some length to explain that the self-
conscious principle realizes itself only in persons, not,
for example, in nations or in a national spirit. At the
same time, however, it is a fallacy to suppose that
individuals "could have their moral and spiritual qualities,
independently of their existence in a nation" (PE 5184).
Only through society is anyone enabled to give
that effect to the idea of himself as the object
of his actions, to the idea of a possible better
state of himself, without which the idea would
remain like that of space to a man who had not the
senses either of sight or touch. Some practical
recognition of personality by another, of an 'I'
by a 'Thou' and a 'Thou' by an 'I,' is necessary
to any practical consciousness of it, to any such
consciousness of it as can express itself in act.
(22 8190)

The real import of the notion that the moral idea can only

be realized in social space is that it locates in the very

nature of individual moral development a positive obligation

 

on the part of that individual to other individuals. This
positive obligation serves as the rationally articulated
ground for social reform Green--and Ward--are looking for.
He expresses it as the exercise of will and reason. She
expresses it as a cultural politics of science and
imagination. Green's will and reason become Robert's
imagination and science. In so doing, Ward has translated--
and transformed--foundational topoi of German critical

theology into English cultural theory.

179
IV

My main argumentative point thus far has been that the
appeal to critical theology in both Ward and Green provides
a reconfiguration of divine spirituality as social
commitment. The attempt to effect this reconfiguration in
social space takes the form of a cultural politics designed
to secure to the individual the external conditions
necessary for moral development. In Ward's novel, Robert's
social work serves to inculcate the conditions of morality
by developing the faculties of science and imagination. In
Green's case, the ethics of philosophical idealism gets
worked into the view that protection of the exercise of will
and reason is the sole justification of governmental
intervention. The result is a cultural politics of
positive-freedom liberalism in Green, and something very
much like it in Ward's novel.

At Murewell, in addition to improving tenant housing,
Robert's chief successes were the establishment of a
naturalist's club and a story-telling group. These two
achievements stand out as Robert's only specifically
reported efforts at social work. About the naturalist's club
itself little is related, though its effect on one local
inhabitant is given some important attention. Robert
explains that after one member was expelled for brutality
toward his grandmother, his despondency at being rejected
apparently caused him to reform his behavior. This

civilizing Robert ascribes to the club: "It's extraordinary

180
what a rational interest has done for that fellow!" (179).
Robert describes the aim of his story-telling group in this
way:
My story-telling is the simplest thing in the
world. I began it in the winter with the object of
somehow or other getting at the imagination of
these rustics. Force them for only half an hour
to live some one else's life--it is the one thing
worth doing with them. That's what I have been
aiming at. (180-181)

When he relocates in London's East End, Robert resumes
both the scientific education and the story-telling
sessions. Here again, apart from a series of lectures on
the New Testament, these two endeavors constitute the
totality of Robert's systematic efforts in the way of social
work. In London the Naturalist's Club takes the form of a
scientific Sunday-school. And although Robert attributes
this particular instantiation of his commitment to science
to one of T. H. Huxley's lay sermons, the aim is essentially
the same as in Murewell--the inculcation of rational
interest for the purpose of moral development.’ Similarly,

Robert regards the aim of his London story-telling group as

"the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the

 

7The sermon to which Ward apparently is referring is
the April 1869 address entitled "Scientific Education: Notes
of an After-Dinner Speech." There Huxley contends that a
scientific Sunday school would provide scientific education
for those who have no other opportunity for it. In a
previous lay sermon, "On the Advisableness of Improving
Natural Knowledge," Huxley argues that the benefit of
scientific education is two-fold: it provides practical
assistance in "getting on," and it introduces ideas which
put human actions and concerns in perspective. Thus, it
serves both a practical and an abstract moral function.

181
imaginative power pure and simple" (473). Just as in
Murewell, Robert's efforts at scientific education and his
story-reading group serve actively to inculcate and develop
the faculties of science and imagination, which are, once
again, analogues for the conditions Green regards as
conditions of moral development.

In Green's own work, the recognition that moral
development depends upon reason and will (science and
imagination) prefigures the nature of his specifically
political commitments. In his commentary on Green's
political milieu, Melvin Richter has pointed out that
"Liberalism in theology leads to Liberalism in social and
political life, a connection inherent not in logic but in
the special conditions of the Oxford controversy" (29). He
goes on to explain that those special conditions have to do
with the way lines of allegiance were drawn at Oxford: "the
alliance between reform in politics and modernist theology
on the one side, and between Toryism and orthodoxy on the
other" (29). These intimate Oxford connections between
liberal theology and liberal politics were not lost on Mary
Ward.

In this passage from her memoir, she approvingly
identifies Balliol's most famous liberal religious thinkers
with their liberal politics:

[Jowett], Green, Toynbee--their minds were full,
half a century ago, of the "condition of the
people" question, of temperance, housing, wages,

electoral reform; and within the University, and
by the help of the weapons of thought and

182

teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural

allies of the Liberal party which was striving for
these things through politics and Parliament. (E

Writer's Recollection vol I, 177)

 

This affinity between religious liberalism and political
liberalism has much to do with Green's evangelical impulse
to social reform, as does, certainly, Ward's sympathy with
his cultural and political theory.
It is difficult to determine precisely whether Green
thought his philosophy served primarily to supported his
religious convictions or his commitment to political reform.
Whatever Green's actual intellectual priorities were, that
he viewed these concerns as interdependent and mutually
supporting is certain. It is clear from the opening remarks
in his "Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation"
that Green explicitly viewed his political philosophy as a
practical realization of the conclusions of his ethics.
Nettleship, for example, comments in his memoir of Green
that Green regarded political and social life as intimately
related to ethics in this way:
The Prolegomena to ethics must be read in
connexion on the one side with the addresses on
The witness of God and PEEEE, on the other with
the lectures on Political obligation, if the
solidarity of the writer's life is to be
appreciated. ("Memoir" cxlii).

This leads Nettleship to conclude that "the lectures on Egg

principles of political obligation form in some degree an

illustrative commentary on the Prolegomena to ethics"

("Memoir" cxlix).

183
Green's stated purpose in "Lectures on the Principles
of Political Obligation" is "to consider the moral function
or object served by law, or by the system of rights and
obligations which the state enforces, and in so doing to
discover the true ground or justification for obedience to
law" (PPO 51). There immediately follows this initial
statement of intent a review of the conclusions of his own
lectures on the nature of moral goodness and how it is
possible that there is such a thing; "in other words, what
are the conditions on the part of reason and will which are
implied in our being able to conceive moral goodness as an
object to be aimed at . . ." (PPO 52).
It is with this moral telos in mind that Green works
out the conditions under which the moral function of laws is
to be realized:
The value then of the institutions of civil life
lies in their operation as giving reality to these
capacities of will and reason, and enabling them
to be really exercised. In their general effect,
apart from particular aberrations, they render it
possible for a man to be freely determined by the
idea of a possible satisfaction of himself,
instead of being driven this way and that by
external forces, and thus they give reality to the
capacity called will: and they enable him to
realise his reason, i.e. his idea of self-
perfection, by acting as a member of a social
organization in which each contributes to the
better-being of all the rest. So far as they do
in fact thus operate they are morally justified .
. . . (PPO 57)

When "laws" is substituted for "institutions of civil life"

in the above passage, the ground of Green's advocacy of

positive-freedom becomes clear. Generally speaking, the

184
only moral justification for intervention, in Green's
opinion, is to secure to individual agents the conditions
necessary for moral development--that is, according to the
ethics, the ability to exercise their will and reason.

A single example illustrates this particularly well.
Because acquisition of material objects provides scope for
the exercise of will and reason, and therefore for moral
development, Green is generally in favor of what he terms
freedom of contract--"the freedom in all forms of doing what
one will with one's own". However, because not all agents
entering into contracts have adequate conceptions of objects
in which lasting satisfaction can be realized, it is
irresponsible of the government to allow them to enter
freely and self-destructively into certain kinds of
contracts. Green has in mind here members of the
proletariate entering into sub-sustaining labor contracts in
order to get any income at all. Government intervention in
the form of legislation in such a case results in what Green
terms "positive" freedom because the government actively
secures to the individual the conditions necessary for its
moral development--here, the minimum rate of pay necessary
to sustain a worker and his family.

In this case, the intervention prevents the realization
of an object of desire (any income at all) which does not
contribute to lasting satisfaction but to further personal

and economic degradation (in essence, by depressing further

185
the state of wages generally). Thus Green is willing to
contend:
Our modern legislation then with reference to
labour, and education, and health, involving as it
does manifold interference with freedom of
contract, is justified on the ground that it is
the business of the state, not indeed directly to
promote moral goodness, for that, from the very
nature of moral goodness, it cannot do, but to
maintain the conditions without which a free
exercise of the human faculties is impossible.

("Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of
Contract" 374)

V

In the preceding sections I have tried to show that
there are closely corresponding analogues to Robert's
science and imagination in Ward's understanding of critical
theology as represented in "The New Reformation."
Additionally, I have tried to show that there are close
textual linkages between her understanding of critical
theology represented there and Green's own reading of
critical theology, specifically F. C. Baur. Moreover, I
have tried to show that Green's philosophical idealism does
support a cultural politics of social reform, and that that
cultural politics takes the shape of a positive-freedom
liberalism.

Certainly, Green's insistence that reason and religion
(spiritualism) are compatible figures importantly in Robert
Elsmere. Robert's "conversion" is facilitated--in some
sense precipitated--by a preexisting interest in historical

scholarship. More important, however, is the idea that

186
philosophical idealism provided both Green and Ward with
rational grounds for social reform. Because Robert engages
in a cultural politics of positive freedom even Egggpg he
comes to acknowledge the claims of critical theology, E92253
Elsmere does not represent critical theology as leading to a
cultural politics of science and imagination. There is not
this teleology built into the novel. I would like to
postulate, conversely, that Ward came first to regard
science and imagination as conditions of moral development,
perhaps having run across them in Green, and that she set
out in Robert Elsmere to articulate the adequacy of (his)
philosophical idealism as a theoretical foundation for a
cultural politics designed to inculcate these conditions of
morality. One of the things Ward's appropriation of
critical theology does is to register the (at least)
potential commensurability of critical theology (and
philosophical idealism) with a domestic evangelical
enthusiasm for social reform. It is primarily in this way
that Robert Elsmere domesticates German critical theology as

English cultural theory.

Finally, I want to conclude with an observation about
the role of narrative fiction in this process of
domestication. As we have seen, Hans Frei noted that there
was no strong domestic historical hermeneutical tradition in
England at the time biblical criticism was developing there.

Mary Ward acknowledges this in her own way when she points

187
out in "The New Reformation" that the "advance" of Egpggp
critical theology was an improvement in historical
translation. Furthermore, she explains that critical
theology could not have developed in England, where
theological discourse was controlled by Anglican-run
universities:
what possibility is there in this country of a
scientific, that is to say an unprejudiced, and
unbiased study of theology, under present
conditions? All our theological faculties are
subordinate to the Church; the professors are
clergymen, the examiners in the theological
schools must be in priest's orders. ("The New
Reformation" 467)
The point I want to make here is that only someone outside
the English theological establishment would have the
opportunity and freedom to domesticate German theology for
English consumption.

As an Arnold and particularly as a woman novelist
living on the fringes of Oxford university, Mary Ward was
perhaps uniquely positioned to draw upon Oxford scholars
(Green, Jowett, Pattison) and Oxford culture without being
subjected to that university's most severe institutional
theological restraints. Ward was not subject to the same
pressures of religious conformity expected of students
enrolled at Oxford--all of whom at that time were men.

Given Anglican control of English theological
discourse, one could well argue that imaginative literature

is the primary discourse in England by which the conclusions

of critical theology could become incorporated in English

188
cultural theory. Other domestic rational alternatives to
orthodox religion--utilitarianism and other materialist
accounts of human action--lacked necessary components of
imaginative experience. Over and above these materialist
accounts, Green's idealism contributes an imaginative or
spiritual component to English cultural thinking at this
time, and so makes a half-step between religion and purer
forms of materialism. Ward's novel propagates the
importance of this imaginative component both in the details
of its plot and in the very fact of its being a piece of
imaginative literature.

It is primarily in this kind of historical religious
fiction that one finds the combination of scientific and
imaginative faculties Mary Ward associates with the advances
of critical theology. In this way, Robert Elsmere bridges
the gap Frei articulates between German historical and
English literary biblical commentary--and the cultural

theory it occasioned.

Chapter VI
MORAL SELF-REALIZATION AS THE RECONCILATION
OF IDEAL AND REAL:

MAY SINCLAIR AND T. H. GREEN

Between 1893 and 1927 May Sinclair wrote twenty-four
novels, two novellas, five volumes of short stories, two
volumes of verse, numerous essays on literature and
psychology, two technical books on philosophical idealism,
and a translation of Rudolph Sohm's Outlines of Church
Histopy. Sinclair began her career with an exposition of T.
H. Green's metaphysics and ethics ("The Ethical and
Religious Import of Idealism") followed by two novellas (2E2

Cosmopolitan and Superceded) and a novel (The Divine Fire)

 

written on explicitly idealist ethical premises. The
chronology and the range of her writing across literary,
moral philosophical, and religious issues firmly situates
Sinclair as an immediate inheritor of Mary Arnold Ward's
ethical-literary hybrid of cultural response. Like Ward,
Sinclair draws directly upon Green's ethics. And like Ward
again Sinclair developed narrative representations of
Green's moral analytic. There is, however, an important
difference represented in the move from Ward to Sinclair.

Whereas Ward's response to Victorian doubt directly engages

189

190
the religious alternatives (if only to dismiss them), the
cultural viability of religious ethical discourse is a moot
issue for Sinclair. She has moved into wholly secular modes
of ethical discourse.

Sinclair's most overtly idealist novel, The Divine Fire
(begun in 1897 and published in 1904), is flanked
chronologically on one side by her 1893 explication of T. H.
Green's metaphysics and moral philosophy ("The Religious and
Ethical Import of Idealism") and on the other by her later
two full-length books on philosophical idealism (A Defence

of Idealism, 1917 and The New Idealism, 1922). This

 

chronology indicates that she was already familiar with
idealist ethics when she wrote her first novels, The

Cosmopolitan, Superceded, and The Divine Fire.

 

Hrisey Zegger, for one, has argued that although
Sinclair began her novelistic career in a programmatically
idealist mode, after the publication of her first two novels
she became dissatisfied with idealism as a philosophical
background for fiction (34). Passing over the earlier
novels, Zegger turns instead to Sinclair's later,
"psychological" fiction. While there is undoubtedly a
change in Sinclair's fiction of the kind Zegger describes,
publication of A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New
Idealism (1922) strongly suggests that Sinclair remained at
least philosophically if not novelistically committed to
idealism long after the shift Zegger hypothesizes. Zegger's

de-emphasis of Sinclair's earliest novels is part of a

191
general dismissal of the role of philosophy in Sinclair's
fiction. The result of this reception history is that the
relation between Sinclair's philosophy and even her earliest
fiction has yet to be fully accounted forl.

Careful analysis of the correspondence between
Sinclair's philosophy and her early fiction reveals that her
work shares commitments closely analogous to those of T. H.
Green's ethical and cultural thinking. Her novel, 2E3
Divine Fire, dramatizes foundational ethical presuppositions
of Green's positive-freedom liberalism. The conversion of
Green's moral analytic into Sinclair's fiction is controlled

by a pervasive and sustained theme of the reconciliation of

 

1Sinclair's fiction has received little sustained
attention, and her philosophical works even less. There is
no detailed account of the relationship between her
philosophical writings and her fiction.

Most recent commentary has dealt with her fiction from
a feminist perspective or in some other way dealt with
gender issues. For example, Janice Harris has discussed the
treatment of marriage in Sinclair's The Helpmate, Kitty
Tailleur, and The Creators. There have been two recent
dissertations dealing with Sinclair's novels as
Bildungsroman: "The Modern British Bildungsroman and the
Woman Novelist" by Janis Maria Richard and "Literary
Viragos: Late Victorian and Edwardian Female
'Bildungsroman'" by Catherine Elizabeth Hoyser.
Additionally, Laura Stempel Mumford has written about
feminism and war in her essay, "May Sinclair's Tree of
Heaven: The Vortex of Feminism, the Community of War."

Book-length studies include Hrisey Zegger's EEy
Sinclair, which treats mainly the later psychological and
psychoanalytic novels, and Theophilus Boll's biography Miss
May Sinclair: Novelist. While Boll's biography does mention
Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism, he does not discuss its
relation to the fiction, instead leaving "an adequate
description of her A Defence of Idealism . . . to come from
those who have made formal philosophy their life's work"
(258). Similarly, Boll treats Sinclair's The New Idealism
in terms of the "elements in it that any student of
literature may enjoy" (304).

 

192
ideal and real. While Sinclair's early exposition of Green
makes clear the origins of her most important moral
philosophical commitments, those commitments are most fully
and systematically articulated in her two later books, E

Defense of Idealism and The New Idealism. Both works remain

 

 

closely congruent with her earlier treatment of Green.

In addition to Sinclair's adoption of Green's moral
analytic, there is a more general correspondence between the
qualities of their responses to Victorian culture.
Sinclair's life-long interest in the reconciliation of ideal
and real corresponds to Green's assertion that moral
development--as a basis of society--depends upon
simultaneously acknowledging that there are both internal

(cognitive) and external (material) conditions of morality.

After first recovering Sinclair's debt to Green, I look
at the philosophical articulation of her effort to reconcile
ideal and real, and then turn to consider her novelistic
treatment of this reconciliation as an essential problem for

ethics.

I
Sinclair explains in her 1893 exposition of Green's
ethics that Green found himself "in a world in which logic
was divorced from metaphysics, metaphysics was regarded as
an implicit contradiction in terms, and ethics installed at

the head of the physical sciences" ("Ethical and Religious

193

Import" 695). Against the trend of contemporaneous
materialist accounts of morality, Green contended that a
metaphysical principle was the only possible foundation for
a system of ethics. The general effort of Sinclair's
exposition of Green is to explain the nature of the
"metaphysical principle" and to argue for its importance as
a condition of morality.

Sinclair explains first that according to Green some
kind of synthesizing principle is necessary to stabilize a
multiplicity of relations and to unify experience.

It is obvious that the world of our experience
presents itself to us, not as a flux of unmeaning
sensations, but as a system of intelligible
relations, the "infinite variety" of which cannot
disguise from us its essential unity. That the
many should be related implies that they are in
some sort one. But such a unity in difference is
only possible in and for thought. Only a subject
or self, as we said before, is that which truly
maintains its identity in the midst of change.
The individual self cannot be the source and
upholder of that order which, as revealed to his
reason, stretches before and after, beyond the
date of his finite days, but a self-consciousness
which is higher than his individuality is the key
to his limited experience. ("Ethical and
Religious Import" 698)

 

Following Green, she identifies this synthetic principle
behind the unity of experience as thought or, more
specifically, (self-) consciousness. Like Green, and like
Kant before him, Sinclair maintains that the synthetic
activity of self-consciousness is a necessary condition of
all our knowledge of the external world.

Additionally, Sinclair explains, the activity of self-

consciousness is a condition of moral development. It makes

194

it possible for an agent to differentiate itself from its
desires, thus allowing it to survey them and choose which to
realize and which to defer or ignore completely. In this
way, self-consciousness is behind an agent's choice of which
ends to pursue.

The essential characteristic of man's action as

distinct from that of animals is not that it is

action directed to some end, but that its end is

one inseparably related to his self-consciousness.

("Ethical and Religious Import" 699)
The point here is that the self-conscious agent selects an
object or end, the realization of which will produce a
satisfaction, and acts to realize that object or end. Such
a process requires the activity of the self-consciousness
to differentiate one's self from one's desires, objectify
them, and recognize them as an end worth being realized--
i.e., as an end that when realized will lead to
satisfaction. Human satisfaction thus depends upon the
activity of self-consciousness.

The step from satisfaction to morality is made across
the threshold of freedom. Because self-consciousness allows
an agent to take a critical position with respect to its own
desires, self-consciousness makes it possible for the agent
to be self-determined with respect to its ends. The self-
conscious agent is no longer subservient to its merely
animal instincts or desires:

Green here follows Kant. According to the
"Critique of Practical Reason," the will is
independent of the chain of natural causes so far

as it can be determined by a law presented to it
by reason, which as "noumenal" is totally distinct

195
from the "phenomenal" law of causality. This
independence of the will constitutes its freedom.
But further, man's action, as we have seen, is
always directed to an end which he chooses as EEE
own, with which he "identifies himself." In
Hegel's words, "Als sich selbst den Inhalt gebend
ist der Wille, bei sich, frei fiberhaupt." This
autonomy of the will is the sole conceivable basis
of morality. ("Ethical and Religious Import"
700).
For Sinclair, as for Green, freedom--and morality--is a
matter of rationally determining one's own ends and seeking
to realize them. In Green's language, this is the combined
activity of the will and reason, where will is an agent's
effort to satisfy itself through the presentation and
realisation of objects of desire, and reason is the ability
to conceive an ideal self as an end to be attained through
action.

The salient point of Sinclair's exposition of Green is
that morality begins in the application of a law which the
agent applies to itself. Without this kind of self-
determination, an agent is the object of external compulsion
and consequently has no freedom. Because the self-conscious
agent can set its own ends, its will is free. Thus,
Sinclair concludes: "This autonomy of the will is the sole

conceivable basis of morality" ("Ethical and Religious

Import" 700).

II
As we have seen, morality for Sinclair hinges upon

self-conscious self-determination, upon a process of self-

196
development or self-realization. For Green, self-
determination is the process of making an iQEE of a possible
self into something 532;. Sinclair was similarly committed
throughout her life to reconciling ideality and reality,
though this commitment took shape in a number of forms. Her
most thorough and systematic (i.e., philosophic) effort to
reconcile ideal and real is revealed in her attempt to
reformulate absolute idealism to take more adequate account
of the "realities" of space and time than idealists up to
that time had done.

In the introduction to The New Idealism, Sinclair
explains that she is not there defending her earlier E
Defence of Idealism but remedying that work's chief
shortcomings:

The worst of these were its failure to realise the
supreme importance of Space-Time in the problem of
consciousness, and the bearing of Values on the
moral problem. (The New Idealism ix)
Sinclair's remedies take the shape of adapting absolute
idealism to some of the conclusions of such New Realists as
G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alford Whitehead, and Samuel
Alexander. She takes particular heed of their various
insistences that Space and Time are the ultimate elements of
reality and need to be directly dealt with as such.

Sinclair approvingly paraphrases the general argument
of Samuel Alexander's Space, Time, Deity (1920):

The simplest, ultimate elements are Space and
Time. To these all things, life and mind

included, are reducible "without residue." Not to
Space and Time as separate entities, but to Space

197

and Time taken together. For Space and Time are
not really two entities, but two aspects of one
entity. Space and Time by themselves are unreal
abstractions from the one indivisible reality
which is Space-Time. Space-Time is the a priori
stuff from which all things are made, the
universal "matrix" in which matter "crystallises"
and from which, when it has reached a certain
appropriate complexity, the empirical qualities
emerge; to be followed in their turn, when they
too are suitably compounded, first by life, then
by consciousness. (The New Idealism 164)

Sinclair acknowledges here that the New Realists in general
and Alexander in particular have made a strong case for the
seriousness of Space-Time, and, in so doing, have made a
genuine challenge to older Kantian and Hegelian versions of
idealism.

Sinclair agrees that Kant does not treat space and time
adequately by giving them special ontological status as E
priori categories.

[Kant] gave Space and Time a doubtful status
somewhere between thought and sense. The schemata
are amphibious organisms, hovering between two
realms, and unfitted to survive. Kant did not go
down into the thick of Space and Time and show
that the presence or absence of consciousness made
a difference. On the contrary, it was notoriously
Kant who saddled idealism with his antinomies, and
insisted on thought's powerlessness to solve them.
(New Idealism 223)

Nor, according to Sinclair, does Hegel deal adequately with
space and time by subsuming them under the Absolute:

As for Hegel, he contented himself with proving
that Space and Time were as good categories as any
other; and though in his system their
contradictions follow all other contradictions to
sublimation in the Absolute, the Absolute cannot
be said to have extinguished them here and now.
(New Idealism 223)

 

She concludes that Alexander and the New Realists have

198
shown us how to "take space and time seriously";
shown that Space with Time cannot just be shoved
away among the categories and left there, and
that, when criticism has done its worst, their
status remains only one step removed from that of
ultimate and supreme reality. (New Idealism 223)
Although Sinclair acknowledges the "seriousness" of
accounting for Space and Time, she herself strongly rejects
Alexander's (and other New Realists's ) claim that Space and
Time are ultimate. That is, she rejects the implication
that consciousness has nothing to do with the generation and
maintenance of ultimate reality. In the summary to her own
book she asserts that she finds it
impossible to reduce quality and all the
categories to mindless Space-Time, or
consciousness to compresence, or mind to its
neural basis; impossible to conjure life and
consciousness and Deity out of the lifeless and
the unconscious. (New Idealism 312)
If Space and Time are not, as Alexander holds, ultimate
forms of (unminded) reality, they are for Sinclair at least
"penultimates, the simplest forms of consciousness." Not
surprisingly, then, Sinclair argues through the second-half

of The New Idealism that, if reformulated, idealism can

 

provide an adequate account of Space and Time while
maintaining the ultimate primacy of consciousness.

The details of Sinclair's own reconciliation of
idealism and realism (of ideal and real) need not detain us
any longer here than to recognize that she manages it by
distinguishing between primary and secondary consciousness.
Thus, although Sinclair maintains consciousness to be the

necessary foundation of ultimate reality, she acknowledges

199
the claims of space and time by positing a distinction
between infinite (primary) and finite (secondary)
consciousness. These two consciousnesses correspond

respectively to a world of reality and world of appearances.

The most succinct articulation of Sinclair's account of
primary and secondary consciousness comes in the
introduction to The New Idealism:

I have tried to show both that consciousness is
ultimate and that there is consciousness and
consciousness, and that the realist attack bears
hard, not on primagy consciousness which
perceives, feels, wills, remembers, conceives and
imagines, but on consciousness which returns on
itself, on that secondary supervening
consciousness which reflects, judges, infers and
reasons. (The New Idealism viii)

 

What Sinclair has done is to divide ultimate and
experiential reality. Primary consciousness holds the world
together, so to speak, and the secondary consciousness holds
individual experience together. It is via this bifurcation
of consciousness that Sinclair manages the reconciliation of
ideal and real in metaphysical terms.

Reconciliation of ideal and real in the domain of the
ethical becomes for Sinclair the problem of the reality of

good and evil as abstract Universals. In her Defence of

 

Idealism Sinclair agrees with the Realist treatment of moral
phenomena as realities of human experience:

There is one side of the New Realism which is not
directly touched in these essays --its Ethics.
This ground is covered by what had been said about
its theory of concepts or "universals"; the
"Platonic Ideas." But I believe that Ethics owe a

200

greater debt to the New Realism than to any other
philosophy that has been its forerunner in modern
times. If "Goodness" and "Justice" are not
eternal realities, irreducible and absolute,
"moral sanction" is a contradiction in terms;
there will be no ethical meaning and no content
that distinguishes "goodness" from "usefulness,"
or "pleasantness," or "justice" from "expediency."
The work of Mr. G. E. Moore is a perfect exposure
of the fallacies and sophistries of Hedonism,
Utilitarianism, Pragmatism, and Evolutionary
Ethics. The clearest and strongest statement of
the case for "Absolute" Ethics is to be found in
his Principia Ethica and in Mr. Bertrand Russell's
Philosophic Essays. (Defence xvi)

Sinclair's insistence that good and evil need to be treated
as real Universals comes mainly from her concern for the
relative emotional or psychic comfort afforded by accounts
of morality that do and do not treat them as real. Sinclair
insists that evil and pain are real things that affect
people's real lives, and must therefore be dealt with
seriously by any philosophy that presumes to give an
adequate account of the "facts" of human experience.

It is on this point about the reality of good and evil
as Universals that Sinclair's New Idealism departs
significantly from traditional idealist ethics. In
particular, she rejects the conventional idealist argument
for the correlative nature of good and evil.

[T]he dependence of goodness upon evil, the
endurance of evil for the sake of good--was the
old Idealism's solution to the moral problem. Not

a bad solution, as far as it went, whenever you
could get it to go. . .

Yes, it is all very soul-stirring and
uplifting; but it is not true in the world where
its truth matters; this tragic world of space and
time. The pleasant fancy of evil as negation is
no more convincing to the logical mind than it is
consoling and satisfying to the unreasoning heart;

201
It won't work. It won't wash. Go to the victims
of war and pestilence, and tell them that their
torment is only the opposite of rapture. . . tell
a mother who has just lost her only son that
bereavement is simply the negation of possession,
and see how it works and washes. (Egggpgg 340)
However, despite her interest in accommodating idealism to
the claims of the New Realists, Sinclair is not completely
willing to follow their habit of treating pain and suffering
as things ontologically independent of subjects who happen
to run into them from time to time. For Sinclair, such a
Realism withholds the emotional comfort of possible escape
from these things by regarding pain, suffering, and evil as
permanent features of human experience. Furthermore, if
evil is regarded as eternal and, therefore, inevitable,
there may be no incentive to resist, avoid, or destroy it.
Additionally, Sinclair wants to acknowledge that what
agents experience as good and evil are culturally and
historically relative. Her solution to maintaining the
joint ideality and reality of these moral phenomena follows
the pattern of her metaphysics:
[The idealist] is dead right about the relativity
of the evil that we know. The goods and evils of
our earthly life are purely relative both to each
other and to human conditions. They are even
interchangeable. Goodness may be sought for, now
in this set of actions, now in that. It may be
attached to things once accounted evil. Evil may
be attached to things once accounted good.

Goodness itself remains as an eternal immutable
Idea. . .

Badness also remains an eternal and immutable
Idea. (Defence 341) [emphasis added]

 

The distinction between moral phenomena "that we know" and

moral phenomena as "eternal immutable Ideas" corresponds to

202
the distinction Sinclair made in the metaphysics between
infinite primary and finite secondary consciousness. Here
again, the primary consciousness maintains the eternal
reality of the Idea of good and evil, yet in the
individual's knowledge of them they remain relative to one
another.

Even though Sinclair recognizes that the Realists made
important advances in moral theory over traditional idealism
by treating good and evil as real Universals, she maintains
one serious reservation about the New Realist treatment of
ethics:

The reader must judge whether Absolute Ethics and
the moral sanction are securer on a basis of
Spiritual Monism or on the Pluralistic theory of
the "outside" realities. They will remember that
a purely external sanction is no sanction at all.
The metaphysical basis is crucial in the ethical
question. (Defence xvii)
Necessity is the form of moral or any other sanction, and
even if the good is a real Universal, it must have some
direct connection with the individual--the individual must
be able to participate in the good if it is to have any
necessary bearing on that agent's life.
How can a man be bound by a law which he does not
recognize as his own? (The question sounds
paradoxical, we admit.) But if, on the contrary,
the moral law is the expression of his own highest
nature, then in the deepest sense he is bound by
the "instinct of self-preservation" (which some
moralists tell us is the root of the idea of duty)
to obey it. ("Ethical and Religious Import" 701)
It is the identity of the infinite primary and the finite

secondary consciousness which provides that the sanction

203
will not be external only. In her exposition of Green's
ethics, Sinclair articulates the (Kantian) point that when
an agent subordinates itself to a law of its own making it
is following a law of its own nature. Whatever sanction it
imposes on itself in this way will be "internal."

Internally generated moral sanctions are necessary for
free will, for without them there is external compulsion and
morality (moral responsibility) is meaningless.

Furthermore, the free will is a fundamental condition of
positive-freedom liberalism in the following way. Positive-
freedom liberalism is the recognition that there are
external as well as internal conditions of moral
development. It seeks to secure to all agents the
conditions necessary for each agent to realize its 933 idea
of personal and absolute good. As such, positive-freedom
liberalism depends upon agents being self-determined with
respect to the objects with which they identify themselves
and in which they seek satisfaction. To will is just this
process of self-determination, and, consequently, positive-

freedom presumes that agents' wills are free.

To conclude this discussion of the correspondence of
Sinclair's and Green's moral thinking I want to point out an
important congruence in the quality of their responses.

For Green moral development depends upon the "internal"
conditions of will and reason as well as the "external"

conditions of agents being presented with adequate ideas of

204
possible selves and adequate opportunities to realize those
ideas. In Sinclair's work the "internal" conditions of
morality take the form of recognizing that self-
determination depends upon the activity of self-
consciousness on the part of the agent. Recognition of the
external conditions of moral development appears in Sinclair
as an acknowledgment that good and evil are permanent
features of human experience.

Although the terms of Sinclair's moral analytic do not
precisely match one-for-one with Green's, there is a close
correspondence in the quality and strategy of their efforts
to develop an ethical discourse. What Sinclair's treatment
of the problems of metaphysics and ethics demonstrates above
all else is an eagerness to combine her sense of the
importance of consciousness with an acknowledgment of the
claims of material experience. In other words, what is
important for reconstructing Sinclair's profile as the
inheritor of Green (and Ward) is the recognition that her
effort to reconcile ideal and real corresponds with Green's
insistence that moral development has both internal and
external conditions. In a sentence: Sinclair's philosophy
is closely congruent with the overall tendency of Green's
cultural thinking to combine ideal and real, spiritual and

material.

205
III
The foregoing analysis of Sinclair's philosophical
efforts toward reconciliation of ideal and real brings to

the reading of The Divine Fire an understanding of her

 

central philosophical and rhetorical strategy. In that
novel, the reconciliation of ideal and real becomes
specifically focused on problems of moral development.
Sinclair's conception of morality as self-conscious self-
realization combines in The Divine Fire with her commitment
to the reconciliation of ideal and real to dramatize the
ethical presuppositions of Green's positive-freedom
liberalism.

Begun only four years after her exposition of Green's
ethics, it is not surprising that The Divine Fire (1904)
bears echoes of (Green's) idealist thinking. The conversion
of ethics into narrative in that novel is accomplished
primarily by means of a reconciliation of ideal and real
that corresponds closely with the patterns of Sinclair's
reformulated idealism and Green's analysis of morality. It
is a neo-classical drama written by the novel's protagonist,
Savage Keith Rickman, that provides the organizing trope for
the novel's most important features.

Although the son of a middle-class London book dealer,
Rickman received a thorough education in classical
literature because his father regarded such an education as
capital improvement on his own book-selling business.

Rickman's attitude toward his father's business is well

206

summed up by his referring his father's new store as "The
Gin Palace of Art." Rickman is frustrated with his part in
the book shop because it interferes with his intention to
have a literary career. His literary production at the
novel's beginning consists of a neo-classical tragedy, Eglgp
in Leuce.

At the beginning of Rickman's drama Helen appears on
the island of Leuce, where she prays for deliverance from
Aphrodite's power.

In Act I . . .[t]he Chorus tells the story of
Helen, her rape by Theseus, her marriage with
Menelaus, her flight with Paris, the tragedy of
Troy and her return to Argos. It tells how
through all her adventures the godhead in her
remained pure, untouched, holding itself apart.

In Act II Helen is asleep, for the soul of
Leda still troubles her divinity, and her
mortality is heavy upon her. Helen rises out of
her sleep; her divinity is seen struggling with
her mortality, burning through the beauty of her
body. Desire awakens in Achilles, and in Helen
terror and anguish, as of one about to enter again
into the pain of mortal life. But he may not
touch her till he, too, has put on immortality.

[In Act III] Pallas Athene was there to
appear to Achilles and divest him of his
mortality; that she was to lead him to Helen,
whose apotheosis was supposed to be complete . . .
. (The Divine Fire 137-138)

The central issue of Rickman's neo-classical drama is the
struggle for divinity to find an adequate incarnation for
itself, and that all inadequate attempts to incarnate
divinity devastate those who try. In one instance, the
reconciliation of dream and reality patterns Rickman's love
for the novel's other principle character, Lucia Harden. In

another important instance, it (pre)configures theparadigm

207
for Rickman's own moral development in a way that closely
corresponds with Green's idealist ethics. In order to
recognize the novel's idealist paradigm of moral
development, it is useful to examine in detail the trope of
reconciliation as it is first set up in Rickman's play and
worked out in his developing love for Lucia.

In Rickman's drama, Helen resists incarnation in all
mortal form because it is always inadequate to her divinity.
Each of the three men who try to possess Helen objectify her
in terms of only one aspect of her divinity. Theseus
chooses her because he wants to marry one of Zeus's
daughters, Paris wants her for pleasure, and Menelaus hopes
to domesticate her. Each of these three try to force
Helen's ideality to suit one aspect of their own mortality,
and each is devastated by his inability to unify divine
ideal and mortal reality.

His Helen, [Rickman] said, was eternal Beauty, the
eternal Dream. Beauty, perpetually desirous of
incarnation, perpetually unfaithful to flesh and
blood; the Dream that longs for the embrace of
reality, that wanders, never satisfied till it
finds a reality as immortal as itself. Helen
couldn't stay in the house of Theseus, or the
house of Menelaus, or the house of Priam. Theseus
was a fool if he thought he would take her by
force, and Paris was a fool if he thought he could
keep her for pleasure; and Menelaus was the
biggest fool of all because he expected her to
bear him children and to mind his house. They all
do violence to the divinity in her, and she
vindicates it by eluding them. Her vengeance is
the vengeance of an immortal made victim to
mortality. Helen in Argos and Troy is the Dream
divorced from reality. .'. "This divorce is the
cause of all the evil that can happen to men and
women." (EP 148)

208
Rickman concludes his description of the play by saying:

"The idea is reconciliation, the Wedding of Dream
to reality." (EP 149)

In the course of writing the play itself, Rickman begins to
effect such a reconciliation:

That first draft was the work of the young scholar
poet, the adorer of classic form, the dreamer who
found in his dreams escape from the grossness of
his own lower nature and from the brutalities he
lived in. A great neo-classical drama was to be
his protest against modernity and actuality. Then
came an interval of a year, in which he learnt
many things that are not to be found in books, or
adequately expressed though a neo-classical drama;
and the thing was finished and re-written at a
time when, as [Lucia] had said, something had
happened to him; when that same gross actual world
was making its claims felt through all his senses.
And he was suffering now the deep melancholy of
perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams,
but aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced
from reality. (EP 150)

Rickman retains his dreams, yet acknowledges that they are
divorced from reality. In the range of his own experience
he cannot find adequate incarnations for them. Even though
he began the drama as a protest against reality, in the
course of writing it he begins to acknowledge the claims of
reality upon him.

Although Rickman's allegorical drama is charged with
much symbolism, he manages to breathe life into the symbols,
making them flesh and blood. In his art, then, he is able
to reconcile ideal and real, but he is not yet able to do
this in the reality of his life. Whereas he uses art to
escape the reality of his life, he needs yet to reconcile

(wed) ideal and real on the reality-side of the equation.

209

Rickman himself has a Dream of ideal beauty, and he
successively tries to find an incarnation for that Dream in
the women with whom he becomes involved. He is, therefore,
in a situation roughly analogous to Paris, whose task it is
to chose between incarnation of the fairest goddesses. Each
of the three women with whom Rickman becomes involved
corresponds to one of Paris's choices alluded to in the
drama. In Poppy Grace, a slightly disreputable musical
actress, Rickman looks for an incarnation of his dream in
the form of Aphrodite, in the form of sexual pleasure and
love. Later, he becomes engaged to Flossie Walker, a woman
whose principle ambition is to marry and start a family.

She represents for Rickman an incarnation of his dream in
the form of Hera, in the form of domestic happiness--hearth
and family.

It is not, however, until he meets and falls in love
with Lucia, the novel's other main character, that he makes
any real progress toward the actual reconciliation of dream
and reality. When he meets Lucia, she functions as his
Helen. Lucia presents to him the first nearly adequate
incarnation of his ideal dream, and the experience is
strange to him.

[M]ost of all he dreaded the supreme agitation of
love. For he knew now perfectly well what had
happened to him; though he had never known it
happen to him in this manner before. It was love,
as his heart had imagined it in the days before he
became the thrall of Miss Poppy Grace. He had
known the feeling, but until now he had not known

the woman who could inspire it. It was as if his
heart had renewed its primal virginity in

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preparation for some divine experience. (EP 132)
[emphasis added]

In fact, Rickman undergoes nothing less than a kind of non-

specific, quasi-mystical conversion at the hands of Lucia.
Rickman's play thus patterns his own attempt to find in

Lucia an incarnation of Helen, of his own dream of ideal

beauty. His Helen in Leuce becomes "Helen in Lucia." The

 

following description of his drama applies equally well to
his developing relationship with Lucia:

"In Leuce, you know, she appears as she is,
in her divine form, freed from the tyranny of
perpetual incarnation. I can't explain it, but
that's the idea. Don't you see how the chorus in
praise of Aphrodite breaks off into a prayer for
deliverance from her? And at the end I make
Athene bring Helen to Achilles, who was her enemy
in Troy.--That's part of the idea too."

"And Achilles?"

"Achilles is strength, virility,
indestructible will." (PP 148-149)

Rickman's own greatest achievement in the novel is a
tremendous and sustained act of self-abnegation in which he
demonstrates "indestructible will" corresponding to
Achilles's. It is this act of "indestructible will" that
divests Rickman of his own "mortality" and makes him worthy
of Lucia's love and marriage. More specifically, the
divestiture of Rickman's "mortality" comes through his moral
development. This moral development takes the form of his
adopting for himself an idea of a possible self that is

determined by rational principle, not by immediate desire.

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IV

The reconciliation of dream and reality serves its most
important patterning function in configuring the
representation of moral development in The Divine Fire.
Rickman's moral development is closely analogous to Green's
idealist analysis of morality. The parallels concern the
acquisition of an adequate idea of a possible self one might
become and the effort to realize that idea.

The idea of self or personal good under which Rickman
operates in the novel's beginning is patently hedonist.
Although his literary pretensions do lend him a propensity
to idealize experience, the realization or incarnation of
those ideals generally takes shape in the gratification of
sensual pleasures. For example, he frequently spends his
time away from the book shop drinking to excess and in the
company of a slightly disreputable musical actress. As his
own neo-classic drama would suggest, the actress, one Miss
Poppy Grace, is a vastly inadequate incarnation of his ideal
vision of Love and Beauty. Yet an excess of champagne helps
fill in where the reality leaves off.

The satisfactory reconciliation of dream and reality in
Rickman's own life begins only after he is sent to a country
manor owned by Lucia Harden to catalogue its especially
historic library. In that setting, Rickman's moral
development comes through a difficult struggle occasioned by
an intricate moral dilemma. From the start of his

relationship with Lucia, Rickman is bothered by the

212
difficult position in which he finds himself. Rickman was
requested by Lucia to make a catalogue of the famous Harden
library. He has learned through a business acquaintance
that the library is soon to come onto the market because its
owner, Lucia's father, is about to go bankrupt. Lucia,
however, is completely ignorant of her father's financial
status. Thus, Rickman's opportunity to catalogue it gives
him explicit and "inside" information about the library's
true value, and puts his father and him in a position of
great advantage.

Rickman will be given right of first refusal to
purchase for 1,000 pounds the library which he knows is
worth over 4,000. The library's owner--Lucia and her
father--thus stand to lose 3,000 pounds of the real value of
the library if Rickman acts on this inside knowledge.
Rickman is thus in the dubious position of standing to
purchase the library far below its value at the expense of
its owner who stands to lose most of its real value.
“Moreover, he is in this position because of knowledge he
ought not to have.

Rickman is sensitive from the start about the dubious
moral position in which he finds'himself. He is torn
between his growing love for Lucia, loyalty to his father
who educated him, and his own sense of the morally proper
thing to do. After he comes under Lucia's spell and falls
in love with her, however, he undergoes a moral

metamorphosis. Thus, when Lucia's father dies, and the

213
library is sold to Rickman's father against his son's
vehement objections, Rickman first threatens to and then
actually does permanently estrange himself from his father
and the business.

The final phase of Rickman's own moral development does
not begin, however, until several years later when his own
father dies and he inherits his father's estate as well as
its financial obligations. In those several years,
Rickman's father took out a debt against which the remainder
of the Harden library was being held as collateral. Upon
learning this, it immediately occurs to Rickman that once he
reclaims the library by paying off the remaining debt, he
‘would be free to do with it as he pleased, including
returning it to Lucia.

It takes Rickman several years of dreadful self-
abnegation in which he nearly starves himself to death
trying to save money, but he eventually pays off the
remainder of the debt and reacquires the library in order to
return it to Lucia. She, however, is very reluctant to
accept it because of their unequal social status and because
of the difficult life he has lived. In order to convince
her to accept the library he tells her that he had to go to
some trouble to redeem it, and that if she refuses, his work
will have be thrown away for nothing. In the following
passage Rickman explains to Lucia that the years working to

redeem the library were the best years of his life:

214

"There were about three years of it, the best

three years out of my life; and you are going to

fling them away and make them useless.". . .

"The best years out of your life--why were
they the best?"
"Because they were the first time in which I

was free." (PP 553)
Rickman's "freedom" comes in here, in spite of his working
under the obligation of a (moral) debt, in the Kantian sense
in which a moral agent is only free when governed by a law
of its own making. During the time he was working to redeem
the library, Rickman has ordered his life according to a
rational and moral principle of his own choosing. He is
motivated by an idea of what is morally right. He is no
longer subservient to sensuous pleasures. Rickman's
declaration of freedom here corresponds to Achilles's
divestiture of mortality, and it is this, following the
pattern of his drama, which allows Rickman to achieve the
reconciliation of his dream and reality in the form of
marrying Lucia. Their marriage, then, represents the
"wedding of Dream to reality" (PP 149).

Rickman has developed an Eggg of what is ultimately
right with respect to the library, and the central struggle
of his narrative concerns his attempt to realize that idea
for himself and others. The alternation between Rickman's
earlier life of drinking and debauchery and his later life
of self-abnegation and principled choice dramatizes a
parallel alternation between hedonist utilitarianism (with

its pleasure principle) and Green's "Kantian" ethics which

configures moral development in terms of creation of a

215
hierarchy of desires ordered by rational or principled
choice and supervened by self-consciousness.

Sinclair's position regarding the viability of hedonist
ethics is clearly given in this passage from her essay on
Green:

All so-called ethical systems which have not
recognized the metaphysical principle in man--
Eudaemonism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism--are
failures because they cannot account for the
simple fact that a moral being is moved by an end
which is not happiness, or pleasure, or utility,
but is more often opposed to them, and therefore
by no conceivable process can be evolved from
them. It is not a question of Determinism versus
Indeterminism. In all cases man's action is
determined by motives (otherwise it would be
purposeless action, the action of an idiot), but
in moral action he is moved by an end which is not
imposed on him from without, or by the necessities
of his merely physical nature, but is itself
determined by the constitution of his rational

nature from within. ("Ethical and Religious
Import" 700)

The idea that moral sanctions must be internally generated
is perhaps the central informing theme of The Divine Fire.
It explains his relentless effort to redeem the library. It
shapes Rickman's declaration of freedom even while he is
under apparent compulsion of redeeming a debt. The
significance of this apparent paradox becomes clearer when
it is noted that Sinclair is careful not to put Rickman
under any external compulsion to redeem the library. Lucia
does not expect nor at all encourage Rickman to return the
library to her. Moreover, Rickman must several times
negotiate a longer term for the repayment of the money

borrowed against the library. He has ample opportunity to

216
let the debt lapse and surrender the library as collateral.
In choosing to persevere in clearing the debt, Rickman puts
himself under a moral obligation no one else recognizes.
His compulsion is entirely of his own making.

Finally, there are two specific features of Rickman's
moral development that correspond closely with the
presuppositions of Green's positive-freedom liberalism.
First, Green makes much of the idea that moral development
depends upon agents having adequate ideas of possible
selves--ideas of selves which, when realized, will in fact
result in lasting satisfaction on the whole. (For Green the
goal of morality is permanent satisfaction on the whole,
what he terms "an abiding satisfaction of an abiding self.")
It is clear that before Rickman meets Lucia the idea of
personal good he attempts to realize is not one which will
produce lasting satisfaction. Conversely, Rickman learns
from Lucia--albeit in a somewhat mysterious way--a more
principled/ideal conception of what his life ought to look
like. Nevertheless, it is not until he forms an adequate
idea of his own moral potential that he begins to make moral
progress.

Secondly, according to Green, agents need social scope
in which to realize the ideas of possible selves they have.
This is an important part of the foundation of Green's
commitment to positive freedom. Correspondingly, Rickman's
moral development depends upon his being able to act on his

idea (to redeem the library). It is not until he frees

217
himself from his father's book shop and the usurious
commercial ethic it represents that he has the scope in

which to realize an idea of a possible self.

V
The problems of metaphysics and especially the problem
of reconciling ideality and reality preoccupied Sinclair for
her entire career. Her first novels deal with it and her
last philosophical works are determined attempts to refit
philosophical idealism with the implications of the New

Realists. Amid this sustained preoccupation, The Divine

 

PEPE should be seen as an experiment in reconciliation of
ideality and reality in specifically ethical space. Given
Sinclair's pre-existing commitment to the ethics of
idealism, her novelistic representation of this moral
philosophical problem suggests that what was missing from
the solution was an element of realism. Put another way,
Sinclair gained from Green's ethics the moral idea(l)s, and
turned to the novel for the both the means and the realist
material needed to complete the reconciliation. That a
literary work within her own novel provides the pattern for
the protagonist's moral development strongly suggests that
she recognized literature's potential as just such a
reconciling mechanism.

Geoffrey Hill begins his essay on Green explaining that
Green's admirers were much more prone to abstraction than

Green himself was. In support Hill cites Nettleship's

218

comment that Green "sent us out once again on the high
pilgrimage towards Ideal Truth" (Nettleship quoted in Hill
104). Nettleship adds that Green would not have liked such
"high" language applied to himself, but, he adds, "it is
true" (104). Hill says of Nettleship's comments that "they
may be taken as a marginal indication of the central issues
in Green's metaphysical and ethical debate" (104).
According to Hill, that central preoccupation is

the recognition that while we are 'unconditionally

bound', 'necessarily belonging to such a world',

being so bound is not necessarily the same as

being in a fix and is most certainly not the same

as being a fixer. (Hill 104)
Hill's point about Green is that he felt caught in "an
essentially Kantian crux"--i.e., between the concrete world
of experience and the desire and (moral) necessity of being
unconstrained by that world. Put into other words, Green
was frustrated by the seeming incompatibility of the ideal
(spiritual) and the material aspects of human experience.
Green's metaphysics and especially his moral and political
theory strive to overcome this incompatibility.

Hill indicates that this frustration was "a prevalent
ethical emphasis of [Green's] time" (104). May Sinclair's
name should certainly be added to the list of those who,
like Green, struggled to reconceptualize human experience in
ways that resolve the tensions between the ideality of human

potential and the materiality of its realization. The

219
reconfiguration of the tension between human potential and

human reality is the very thing Green's positive-freedom

 

liberalism strives to resolve. Sinclair's fiction
participates fully in the literary reconfigurations of
Victorian cultural response occasioned by Green's ethical

critique.

CONCLUSION:

BEYOND "PERPLEXED PERSISTENCE"

In an enigmatic essay on Green entitled "'Perplexed
Persistence': the Exemplary Failure of T. H. Green,"
Geoffrey Hill explains that Green's admirers were much more
prone to abstraction than Green himself was. In support
Hill cites R. L. Nettleship's comment that Green "sent us
out on the high pilgrimage towards Ideal Truth" (Nettleship
quoted in Hill 104). Nettleship adds that Green would not
have liked such "high" language applied to himself, but, he
adds, "it is true" (104). Hill says of Nettleship's
comments" that they may be taken as a marginal indication of
the central issues in Green's metaphysical and ethical
debate" (104). According to Hill, that central
preoccupation is
the recognition that while we are 'unconditionally
bound', 'necessarily belonging to such a world [as
this]', being so bound is not necessarily the same
as being in a fix and is most certainly not the
same thing as being a fixer. (Hill 104)

If correct, this would suggest that the central issues of

Green's metaphysical and ethical debate are just this

220

221
tension between being bound to the material world of human
experience and hoping to transcend it somehow. Hill's point
about Green is that he observed that "the nature of the
world is such as we are constrained to recognize, the
ineluctable fact, but to be content with the rich
discrepancies which this offers is none the less dangerous
and is sometimes treacherous" (Hill 105).

Hill closely connects Green's discontent with such
discrepancies to the extremely difficult prose he produced.
He points out, however, that to discuss Green's shortcomings
is to be caught up with "Bona fide perplexity" "having its
origins really in intellectual difficulty, not in any
selfish interest" (108). But the difficulty of Green's
prose reveals much more than only the difficulty of the
problems with which he dealt. "Green gave us ideas but he
did not give a 'language'; and in failing to give a
'language' he closed off one dimension of moral
intelligence" (118). "Perplexed persistence" is Hill's term
for the quality of Green's very difficult idiom that does
not escape the unresolvable tension between the material and
moral tendencies of Victorian culture.

Hill represents Green as feeling caught in "an
essentially Kantian crux"--i.e., between the concrete world
of experience and the desire and moral necessity of being
unconstrained by that world. This tension in Green
represents what Hill takes to be a characteristic of much

Victorian thinking about the "formal engagement" between

222
literature and society. It represents, Hill says quoting
Coleridge, a "fealty to Reason under the servitude to an
accepted article of Belief" (Hill 105).

What distinguishes Green's moral analytic from its
contemporaneous alternatives is his attempt to articulate
moral experience through the language of philosophical
idealism. Even more than natural scientific explanations of
morality, Green's idealist ethics provide a supremely
rational mode of moral inquiry. This is so in two ways.

First, Green seeks to comprehend residual orthodox
religious moral thinking within a rationalized discourse in
a way that the natural sciences had not done. Green points
out in the opening section of the Prolegomena that most
people would rather leave their deep moral convictions
juxtaposed yet unreconciled with the conclusions of
popularized science "than that anything calling itself

philosophy should seek to systematise them and to ascertain

 

the regions to which they on the one side, and the truths of
science on the other, are respectively applicable" (PE 51)
[my emphasis]. Green adds that in such a climate a moral
philosopher must explain why he holds "a metaphysics of
morals to be possible and necessary; the proper foundation,
though not the whole, of every system of Ethics" (PE 52).
Green's momentous effort was to consolidate and systematize
a range of modes of moral inquiry into one supervening

discourse.

223

Secondly, the metaphysics of morals Green develops as a
foundation for ethics makes rationality the very core of
moral understanding and moral self-realization. The
distinctive thing about human experience, Green contends, is
that it is thinking experience. And, beginning with a
(Kantian) analysis of knowledge, Green works through an
analysis of moral development to a moral evaluation of
social and political institutions. Reason is thus not only
the method to the foundation: it is ultimately the very
foundation itself. Given this dualistic commitment to a
hyper-rationalized account of morality, Green certainly does
exhibit, as Hill suggests, a "fealty to the Reason."

At the same time, however, there are crucial places in
his broader cultural analytic where the efficacy of reason
breaks down. Hill observes that

The difference between Kant and the Victorian
students of Kant in England may well turn on a
difference of emphasis concerning that which
'points beyond the data'. In Kant this is a
'common element' existing as 'a logical
presupposition, a purely formal implication'; in
Sidgwick and Green that which points beyond the
data is more often a pious wish. (108)
Getting beyond the data means, in Kant, getting to a sphere
of transcendent significances, causes, or origins. To
connect phenomena with such origins would be to give a
complete explanation and justification for the appearance of
those phenomena.

In Green's case, the function of "that which points

beyond the data" is to carry the moral imagination to a

224
transcendent origin capable of grounding moral behavior by
transcendentally authorizing the idea that people should
take other agents' interests into account. We might say
Green's pious wish shows up as a hope that human potential
can indeed overcome the constraints placed upon it by social
experience. Green's rigorous philosophy leaves him no other
option than to seek such a transcendental authority.

More precisely, we might say that Green's "fealty to
the Reason under the servitude of an accepted article of
Belief" leads him to view Victorian society as needing to be
precisely adjusted to the parameters of human aspiration and
human potential. Thus, Green remains rationally tied to the
here and now while hoping with a pious wish that human
potential can overcome it. The here and how is for Green
more easily adjusted than the pious wish.

For Green, the adjustment of social reality to human
potential is characterized by an effort to defeat two kinds
of determinism: natural laws and social organization.
Against the utilitarians and social Darwinists, for example,
Green argues that human action is not determined by natural
laws. More importantly his positive-freedom liberalism is
aimed at defeating the constraints placed on human potential
by society itself. Thus, the real thrust of Green's
liberalism is effort to maximize freedom and human moral
agency and to defeat those social formations that constrain
freedom and agency. Positive-freedom liberalism does this

(first) by recognizing that "the mere removal of compulsion,

225
the mere enabling of a man to do as he likes, is itself no
contribution to true freedom" ("Liberal Legislation" 371).
Secondly, the corollary of such a recognition is that
positive external opportunities have to be secured for the
internal moral powers really to be effective. To act on
such a recognition means to bring about in social space the
conditions under which people can actively pursue their
moral development. It is to increase the possibility, at

least, for moral agency.

Viewed in this way, Green's liberal cultural theory
shares fundamental assumptions with the contemporary
cultural studies movement. In his account of the origins of
cultural studies in Britain and America, Patrick Brantlinger
explains that

The task for both the liberal humanist who
believes that the arts have . . . an emancipating
influence at least on individuals, and the radical
cultural critic like [Raymond] Williams, is to
find ways to maximize the power of cultural forms
over the economic base--that is, to maximize
freedom and minimize blind necessity in all
aspects of life. (67)

Brantlinger's useful formulation needs to be updated in
a couple of important ways to reflect the contemporary
commitments of cultural studies. Contemporary cultural
studies' emancipatory efforts have moved beyond recognizing
and resisting only the economic determinism of so-called

"vulgar" Marxism with which Williams was originally

preoccupied. Those efforts have expanded to include a

226
critical stance toward social formations that have now
become the triumvirate of contemporary cultural critique:
class, gender, and race. To these colonial/post-colonial
theory has added nationality.

Thus, in the case of gender studies Brantlinger points
to one formulation of the "negative task" of feminist
cultural criticism:

to oppose the forms of patriarchal exclusion and
misrepresentation that have over and over again
treated women . . . as art objects, "texts,"
"blank pages," to be written upon by men, while
denying them cultural authority and the chance to
be authors and artists themselves. (141)
As artists and authors, women have the capacity to
articulate for themselves in art and literature their own
aspirations for a more perfect society and their place(s) in
it. Thus the "positive task" of feminist cultural critique
might be seen as an effort to identify and bring into the
open discourse practices "that would bring those traces of
utopian longing and critical opposition into the open and
allow them to become politically empowering instead of
marginalizing" (141). Quite generally speaking, the goal of
feminist cultural critique might be understood as
emancipatory--the attempt to increase women's agency by
circulating the discourses by which women construct society
and their places in it. It is first an epistemological
effort to know what those places are. It is secondly an

ethical effort to realize in social space those roles and

avenues for agency.

227
In much the same way, colonial/post-colonial studies
tries to recognize and resist conceptions of race and
nationality that limit the agency of those regarded as
"other." Thus, in the introduction to a recent special

issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts devoted to

 

"colonialisms," Fred Dallmayr explains that contemporary
modes of colonial/post-colonial discourse are departing from
"earlier forms of colonial discourse predicated on models of
either linear teleology or polar opposition and antithesis"
(2). Giving up these premises means constructing cultural
identity and cultural interaction in ways that avoid simply
polar conceptions of "otherness." Edward Said is one
important model here, whose work "strains against the
confines of cultural polarity, thus pointing obliquely
toward a 'deconstruction' of compact identities and a 'de-
essentialized' form of cultural-political analysis" (4).
This means, in effect, reconstructing national and cultural
identity in ways that do not always regard one group against
or "other than" a privileged or normalized group. To
configure the previously subaltern group's existence
independently of the dominating culture in this way effects
an increase in their agency by increasing their autonomy.
Through their engagements with literature, cultural
studies and Victorian studies use literary texts as
representations of Victorian recognitions of social
formations that limit moral agency. Green's positive-

freedom liberalism provides a Victorian resource for the

228
very same ethical logic that characterizes and drives
Victorian studies' current engagements with such
emancipatory discourses as gender and colOnial/post-colonial
studies. Moreover, it draws upon those same texts in order
to identify and understand the sites and strategies of
resistance to those same social formations. Reading Green
along with period texts that challenge Victorian conceptions
of such things as race, gender, class, and nationality
allows us to rethink the critical formations of their

resistance.

For example, using Green to characterize Clough's
resistance to Arnoldean poetics and the construction of
morality it reinforces reveals the ways in which that
poetics actually restricts rather than increases moral‘
agency. The objective of Arnold's poetic moralism is to
draw the individual's (emotional) experience into line with
conventional patterns of moral thinking. But those
emotional experiences are themselves highly conventionalized
already. (It is largely in the highly conventionalized
discourse of poetry that emotional experiences are popularly
created, differentiated, related, and compared--recognized
as distinct aspects of human experiences at all.) In this
way, then, there is no independent variable in Arnold's
equation of emotional experience with true moral insight.

The equation of emotional experiences with true moral ideas

229
is itself fixed, conventionalized, and thereby arbitrarily
perpetuated.

When applied to the Bible, Arnold's poetic moral
intuitionism simply reinforces highly orthodox patterns of
association between emotional experience and moral
judgments. By so doing, it merely conventionalizes the

individualized features of individual moral experience,

 

severely reducing the possibilities for individual
adjustments between the two.

Whereas Arnold specifies the association of emotional
experience with moral idea, what is needed to maximize moral
agency is a poetics that opens this engagement somehow,
multiplying the possibilities. To do so is to increase
moral agency in the following way. Morality for Green (and
Clough) is a matter of realizing an idea of a possible self
that will lead to permanent or "abiding" satisfaction. If
we understand "emotional experience" as the quality of an
agent's regard for some particular idea of a possible
satisfaction, then to allow the individual agent to
configure the way in which it regards a possible
satisfaction would be to allow the individual increased
autonomy in choosing the possible satisfactions it will
realize. That is, it is to allow the agent greater freedom

in realizing its moral potential.

Against centripetal and conventionalizing patterns,

Clough finds ways to separate emotional experience from

230
conventional patterns (discourses) and thus to maximize the
individuality of the engagement of emotional experiences
with moral ideas and in so doing to achieve a real increase
in agency. The dialogic tendency of Clough's poetry
accomplishes this by reconstituting moral consciousness
apart from conventional moral discourses, and by relocating
moral determinations within the individual moral
consciousness.

In a similar way Mary Ward's advocacy of the historical
hermeneutic of Green's critical theology opposes the
Arnoldean conventionalization of morality occasioned by his
reassertion of the Bible as the locus of moral authority.
When replaced in the constellation of texts in which its
signification was originally implicated, Robert Elsmere
forms a resistance to Anglican orthodoxy and Arnoldean
biblical criticism, both of which merely reassert the Bible
as the primary locus of moral and cultural authority.
Anglican orthodoxy ritualizes and thereby conventionalizes
the engagement of emotional experience with moral ideas in
much the same way Arnoldean poetics and biblical criticism
do.

Against Arnold's literary version of biblical
criticism, the historical hermeneutics of critical theology
views biblical narrative and therefore dogma as the
contingent Vorstellung of a particular group of interpreters
or authors of a particular time. For Baur, Green, and Ward,

this Vorstellung is merely dogma--not the essential Begriff,

231
conceived of as a personal and immediate consciousness of
divinity. Ward's novel resists the fusion of Vorstellung
and Begriff that characterizes religious orthodoxy because
it conventionalizes and depersonalizes the individual's
emotional engagement with moral ideas.

In the case of the protagonist of Robert Elsmere, the
conventions of that engagement preclude the use of reason in
contemplating ideas of possible satisfactions and possible
selves. Reason individualizes the emotional attachment to
moral ideas by allowing the individual to identify its own
good with the idea of a possible satisfaction, and to regard
that identity as an end to be attained by action. If
orthodoxy precludes the use of the reason, then it impedes
this process, and one could well argue that without this
kind of personal attachment no inducement to reach for it
would ensue. Ward's recurrence to the historical
hermeneutics of Green's critical theology explains her
resistance to various forms of religious and moral orthodoxy
as a social formation that limits individual moral agency.

George Eliot presents a less difficult deployment of
positive-freedom to maximize moral agency. Eliot's
invocation of a socially-constituted self sharply contrasts
with the deontological individualism associated with
Victorian realists she so much admired: Mill, Spencer, and
Lewes. Daniel Deronda is itself thus a locus of resistance
to the deontological conception of the self--a conception of

human interaction which, while decreasing external ’

232
compulsion, also actually decreases moral agency. The
difference between freedom and moral agency is that the
removal of compulsion does not necessarily increase one's
ability to realize an idea of a possible self that will
result in permanent satisfaction. Green argues, for
example, that:
If the ideal of true freedom is the maximum of
power for all members of human society alike to
make the best of themselves, we are right in
refusing to ascribe the glory of freedom to a
state in which the apparent elevation of the few
is founded on the degradation of the many . . . .
("Liberal Legislation" 372)
His essential point regarding deontological individualism is
that a true increase in freedom is not/cannot be merely a
null-sum gain. In other words, any increase in human
freedom and human agency must be "compossible." The
juxtaposition of models of subjectivity represented by
Deronda and Gwendolen in Eliot's novel can be read as a
critique of the limits for social cohesion afforded by each
model. Eliot's deployment of Deronda's socially-constituted
self as the principle of resolution represents a critical
resistance to this limitation of deontological liberalism.
Finally, May Sinclair's narrative transformation of
Green's moral analytic represents a late-century recognition
of both internal (faculty) and external (material)
conditions of moral development. Rickman's quest for an
adequate idea of a possible self is a necessary but not a

sufficient condition of his moral development. He must have

social scope (social opportunities) in which to realize that

233
idea of a possible self. Thus, it is not until he
eventually frees himself from the usurious commercial ethic
associated with his father's book-shop dealings that he has
the opportunity to realize an adequate idea of a possible

self.

The ethical reconstruction of the Victorian "literary"
I have here proposed has as its goal the reformation of
Victorian literary studies into a mode of ethical discourse.
It makes Green's moral and cultural analytic available for
contemporary appropriation by situating it against the moral
and cultural conditions it was developed to address.
Reading Green back into literary representations of
Victorian experience, we see the engagement of his moral
analytic with lived cultural problems. We come to
understand the real opportunities for moral freedom of a
given cultural moment. The ethical reconstruction of the
Victorian "literary" makes literary studies productive of
ethical knowledge in a broader way as well. It allows us to
understand and use literary texts as sites of and strategies
for resistance to social formations of all kinds that limit
human moral agency. To combine ethics with literary studies
in the way I have done here is to create the language Hill
found missing in Green--to open up one important dimension
of moral intelligence. The engagement of ethics with
literary studies helps us to move beyond our own "perplexed

persistence."

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