The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Blakey Vermeule (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 169 new ground. The book proceeds from a simple, suggestive idea: that argument is as intrinsic to the dramatist's practice as it is to Renaissance culture. Knowles reminds us that Shakespeare's plays derive from a world replete with controversy and that much of its audience would have had formal training in rhetorical disputation. The plays dramatize arguments, they engage in arguments with their sources, and, by extension, they provoke disagreements among their audiences. In particular, Knowles stresses 'the argument of action', the proof made manifest by an action or appearance; this requires us to judge its relationship to verbal contentions. Shakespeare's method of historical argument is presented as fundamentally scepti? cal. Each play is seen as puttinga key value or ideal to question. In Knowles's account of 1 & 2 Henry IV, Falstaff's scepticism towards honour is seen as embodying the plays' quizzical sense of the gap between words and things. Unlike McAlindon, Knowles sees Hal's preoccupation with debt and redemption, not as testimony to his sense of responsibility, but as one of many calculated strategies in the play. We are also invited to hear a reductive language of commercial and material calculation in Hal's rhetoric. This is one of many examples in the history plays where seemingly ideal aspirations are placed in the service of interests and ambitions and a contradiction is explored between actions and the arguments that justify them. So, the ambivalence surrounding the rejection of Falstaff is seen as typical of the plays' consistent duality of perspective, Shakespeare's 'humanist revision ofthe actual' (p. 86). For Knowles, the dramatist is engaged in a profound rejection of the values that he saw prescribed in the historiography around him. His dramas re-create the experience of history, rather than formulate an evaluation of it; it is the process of argument that counts, not its resolution. Shakespeare's humanism continues, therefore, to be as debatable as his historicism, even for those who celebrate rather than debunk it. University of Northumbria Dermot Cavanagh The Party ofHumanity: WritingMoral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain. By Blakey Vermeule. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xii + 250pp. ?32.50. ISBN 0-80186-459-3. 'The premise of this book is that Pope, Johnson, and Hume?the three moralists?are practical psychologists whose moral impulses are inseparable from their social aims, projects, and networks. A furtherpremise is that moral psychology in general presents us with the following paradox. Moral psychology is closely connected to reasoning about social life. Reasoning about social life is closely connected to reasoning forpersonal or collective advantage. Moral psychology is therefore closely connected to self-interest. Yet the lifeblood ofmoral ideals is the fictionthattheycan transcend the social' (pp. 2-3). Thus Blakey Vermeule sets out on his obliquely focused discussion of the tensions between private interest and public benefit, between moralism and cynicism, and even, when it comes to Johnson's 'Life of Savage', between compassion and its curiously framed 'opposite' prudence (p. 119) in British writing of the eighteenth century. Vermeule's method is one that shiftsbetween stating the not quite obvious and reformulating the obvious so that an unsuspected and untroublesome paradox is exposed, albeit one that continues not to be troublesome. At its best, this can make us realign our relation, ifonly briefly,to a series of familar texts, including Pope's Dunciad and Johnson's biography. At its worst, it subjects us to loose informalities, for example about friends confirming one another's delusions (pp. 57-58), or to the loose digres? sion on the teaching of critical theory in universities (pp. 34-40), which concludes with an account ofthe author's own trip to St Mary's Church in Twickenham, where, 170 Reviews unsurprisingly, 'Signs of Pope are nowhere' (p. 40). At its most worrying, we find a sequence of neat misreadings of eighteenth-century texts, enabled by a sequence of subtle misquotations. This process begins with Vermeule's account ofJoseph Wright of Derby's painting Three Persons Viewing 'The Gladiator' by Candlelight, where it simply strains the evidence of our own eyes to claim that 'the rationalist elder statesman or merchant [. . .] has arranged...