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The Sociable Mr Moore

‘decency’. We might also read Bromwich as he invites us to read Emerson, that is, ‘as a moral psychologist’: ‘The appropriateness of seeing him this way is justified in his descriptions of such feelings as pride, shame, chagrin, and exhilaration’ (p. 203). For literary critics, such feelings come primarily at the instigation of literature and often with a rarefied exactness that it is their duty to articulate. Dickinson’s poem ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’ is described thus: ‘the tuning of the soul’s attention to a pitch of clarity not burdened by any earthly desire calls for a preternatural suspense of habit, a suspense even of nature itself ’ (p. 205). Here are Bromwich’s virtues as a prose stylist laid bare, unpretentiousness of diction matched by delicacy of awareness. Like Emerson, Bromwich has a deeply antinomian streak. The affinities I have claimed for him only contrive to make his mind appear more tractable than it really is. Such affinities are only a less specious form of the labour-saving devices commonly used in politics: ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘libertarian’, ‘communitarian’. It’s not that these words don’t name anything real; but the reality of what they name pales in comparison to the reality of the mind to which they accrue. What one gets from reading Moral Imagination is less an idea (or a group of ideas finely sifted into order) than the atmosphere of a person thinking. It is an experience that allows us to think of what T. S. Eliot once said about Henry James – ‘he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it’ – as a compliment after all.