The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

164 chapter 11qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance....Butan almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repressing andsilencing of poetry. 14 “Regularity, uniformity, precision, balance”: he mightas well have said “literary Prudence and Temperance in their bourgeoisexpressions.” It is no surprise to find Arnold the nineteenth-centuryHellenist commending poetry for an aristocratic expression of the virtues,its “glory, the eternal honor, ...this noble sphere.” 15 Arnold is not exactlycontemptuous of the literally prosaic virtues of the bourgeoisie. He isnot a proud aristocrat, not actually. But in judging poetry he takes hisstand on the plains of Ilium or in the courts of Shakespeare’s imaginedage of Lancaster and York, not in the coffeehouses of Addison’s London,or the London of Chaucer, either, that hive of the bourgeoisie before itsgreater time.The second banishment of religious faith and hope gathers forceamong secularizing intellectuals around the middle of the nineteenthcentury. A. N. Wilson attributes the odd hiccup in the banishment—on inthe eighteenth century, then off, then on again in the mid-nineteenth—to“Hume’s time bomb,” that is, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,published in 1779, three years safely after Hume’s death and three years,too, after the publication of another anti-Christian bomb with a long fuse,Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Wilson’s view these sat onlibrary shelves until the new seriousness of religiosity in England in the1820s and 1830s caused them to be taken down and examined. In their owntime, Hume could logic-chop and Gibbon sneer and the cosmopolites of1776–1779 could laugh along with them. Not the sober and intellectuallyserious late Georgians and early Victorians. 16Arnold himself, though a deist and a devout student of the Bible, said it(“Dover Beach” was composed about 1851):The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shoreLay like the folds of a great girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar....Or Edward FitzGerald in 1859, though the sentiments are of course also ancientand Epicurean and indeed secularly Persian of the early twelfth century:Myself when young did eagerly frequentDoctor and Saint, and heard great argument