500
PARTISAN REVIEW
The word grates upon our moral ear. We do what we should
do, but we shrink from giving it the name of duty. "Co-operation,"
"social mindedness," the "sense of the group," "class solidarity"–
these locutions do not mean what duty means. They have been in–
vented precisely for the purpose of describing right conduct
in
such
a way as
not
to imply what duty implies-a self whose impulses and
desires are very strong, and a willingness to subordinate these im–
pulses and desires to the claim of some external non-personal good.
The new locutions are meant to suggest that right action is typically
to be performed without any pain to the self.
The men of the nineteenth century did not imagine this possi–
bility. They thought that morality was terribly hard to achieve, at
the cost of renunciation and sacrifice. We of our time often wonder
what could have made the difficulty. We wonder, for example, why
a man like Matthew Arnold felt it necessary to remind himself almost
daily of duty, why he believed that the impulses must be "bridled"
and "chained down," why he insisted on the "strain and labour and
suffering" of the moral life. We are as much puzzled as touched by
the tone in which F. W. H. Myers tells of walking with George
Eliot in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity "on an evening of rainy
May," and she, speq,king of God, Immortality, and Duty, said how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, "yet how
peremptory and absolute the third." "Never, perhaps, have sterner
.accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing
Law. I listened, and night fell; her grave majestic countenance
turned towards me like a sybil's in the gloom; it was as though she
withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise,
and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate."
The diminution of faith
in
the promise of religion accounts for
much but not for all the concern with duty in nineteenth-century
England. It was not a crisis of religion that made Wordsworth the
laureate of duty. What Wordsworth asks in his great poem "Resolu–
tion and Independence," is how the self, in its highest manifestation,
in the Poet, can preserve itself from its own nature, from the very
sensibility and volatility that define it, from its own potentiality of
what Wordsworth calls with superb explicitness "despondency
arid
madness." Something has attenuated the faith in the self of four
