Posts tagged ethical criticism

“I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice or dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust and dishonest towards them… . I am honest, because I don’t like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I’m afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind… . It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them.”

—George Eliot, “Worldiness and Other-Wordliness: The Poet Young”

“But directly we say that the business of the artist is to provide us with a vivid and complete experience, no more, no less, we reopen the whole question. What sort of experience, we may ask, and how is he to make it vivid and complete? Behind the choice of what experience he shall offer us lie other choices, between one sense and another, between the senses and the reason, between optimism and pessimism, between black and white. Morality lies behind it, and an ethical as well as an aesthetic convention. Further, behind such a choice lies the influence that it must have upon its readers. The morality of the artist which affected his choice may differ from the morality of his work, which affects his readers. But both must be considered; and Mrs. Woolf herself has been driven, by her own sense of truth and reality, to recognise this. She lay down a sharp line of distinction between the Edwardians and Sterne or Jane Austen in one essay; but directly she began to deal with the facts instead of the theory her sharp line quivered. For one thing, she could not disguise even from herself the fact that though art may be, theoretically, ‘an end in itself,’ it concerns morality… . We may cling to a doctrine of pure aesthetics as closely as we choose, but the thing is round us; the watchdogs of the Lord bark at our heels; the yoke of His burden is laid upon our shoulders. And Mrs. Woolf knows it. She knows that there is, at bottom, no division… . For good or evil, with or against our wills, we are all moralists, poets and novelists, Christians and Satanists, Stoics and Epicureans, Baudelaire and Dante, Sophocles and Chaucer, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Some proclaim the moral, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dickens and Tolstoi. Others let it take possession of the reader’s imagination unawares. But the moral is there and will have its effect.”

— Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir