Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
Willey Thinking
By Bernard Williams
The English Moralists
by Basil Willey
Norton, 318 pp., $6.95
This book has emerged from a course of lectures which the author gave, as he rather dauntingly informs us in the Preface, for more than thirty years in the University of Cambridge. The course of lectures and the examination paper that it serves were conceived at a time—as Willey mentions—when the remnants of a pure aestheticism made it less than fashionable to attempt to relate literature and morality. They continued—though this he does not mention—through a period when his colleague in Cambridge, F. R. Leavis, was indeed relating literature to morality, but in a way that still gave little scope to the reflective history of moral ideas: the morality to which Leavis relates literature is a morality, a particular kind of outlook which, being identified with the essence of creative literary sensibility itself, becomes the basis of a peculiarly timeless kind of criticism.
Review, 1479 words
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