‘The Morality of Style’: John Morley as Essayistic Liberal

Abstract

This essay explores John Morley’s understanding of “the morality of style,” a key evaluative tool that he employed throughout his career as a critic of politics and culture. Morley demonstrated a commitment to liberalism, which to him meant an acknowledgment of the importance of pursuing political agendas within a cultural context that prized sympathy, aesthetic education, and historical understanding. Morley believed the critic’s task was to focus on writers representative or typical of their age. An extensive analysis of his essay on Thomas Babington Macaulay demonstrates how Morley put his ideas into practice: the essay emphasizes the profoundly formative effect of a writer’s style on readers’ minds, and reveals Morley’s links to the late-Romantic lineage from which he draws his critical principles. Morley’s “essayist liberalism” shows the extent of his investment in normative models of political individuation and his efforts to balance this ideology with a commitment to pluralism and an open-ended view of historical process, grounded in practices of imaginative understanding and a culture of self-perfection.