Rationalist Revival

THE ENGLISH MORALISTS by Basil Willey. 318 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The British philosophers and essayists of the past three centuries are more admired than read. Impeccably cool and collected, preening themselves on their rationalism, they leave the present impassioned age cold indeed. Yet these writers played a large part in shaping modern notions of good and evil, pleasure and pain, freedom and tyranny. They are also eminently readable, writes Basil Willey, English-literature professor for 18 years at Cambridge. His engaging little book may well spark a rationalist revival.

A believer in God who makes his credo perfectly plain in the course of the book, Author Willey is not in complete sympathy with these earnest skeptics. He gives them their due in a few felicitous phrases without becoming their advocate:

sb FRANCIS BACON: "It is undeniable that Bacon has about him something of the magnificent charlatan. He is full of large utterance, but himself performs little. His own experimenting was unprofitable, and he ignored some of the best work of his contemporaries. But as the buccinator novi temporis (trumpeter of a new age), he is without an equal, and the next three centuries rightly regarded him as the seer, or even the poet, of science. Although he is reputed to be the father of the English essay, he despised the Epicurean life to which most of the essayists have been temperamentally inclined. He was at home in a heroic age, and scorned to be found anywhere but at intellectual headquarters."

sb JOHN LOCKE: "One might call him the first modern English philosopher to write like a gentleman. His tone expresses confidence in the essential reasonableness of God, Nature and Man and in the fundamental stability of the English Constitution. There is said to be an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, but I doubt if any kind of philosophy has ever been, in all its implications, more hostile to poetry than that of Locke."

sb JOSEPH ADDISON: "The 18th century in England may not have been a very moral age, but it was certainly an age of moralists. Addison was the first lay preacher to reach the ear of the middle classes and to give dignified expression to their ideals and sentiments. He was the safest, the nicest great writer English literature had produced until the Victorian age."

sb LORD CHESTERFIELD: "Few Would-be servants of God put so much energy into their task as Chesterfield puts into the service of Mammon. The load carried by Bunyan's Christian was almost light compared with the burden imposed by this Worldly Wiseman on his unfortunate offspring. He felt that life held no greater good than to please it and be pleased by it. He tells his son: 'We shall not converse much together, for I cannot stand awkwardness; it would endanger my health.' "

sb EDMUND BURKE: "The French revolutionists were sweeping away the past and replacing it by a mathematically symmetrical new order; and they were doing this in the name of 'nature.' Burke managed to throw 'nature' back into the teeth of its French disciples. It is 'natural,' he argued, for men to accept tradition, to be unequal, to be religious, to be respectful to their betters. The noble rustic or savage are exploded myths; rustics and savages merely turn out to be ignoble in ways somewhat different from our own."

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