a person who, while objecting to the vulgar Calvinism of the Reformation, none the less urged some fastidious discriminations of his own. The phrase ‘anti-puritan puritan’ admirably fits Murdoch too. It is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking about this area in her work that critics can be more royalist than the king. They have sometimes drawn a figure who, however apt the role of scourge of egoism might be in a zealot, is insufferable as an artist. The fact that art is a realm of moral compromise is a matter of regret to Murdoch, as The Fire and the Sun shows; but it is also a fact, as well as a theme in itself.
Iris Murdoch is in some sense both the most other-worldly and the most worldly of our novelists. The war between the best and the second-best fills her characters, her idea-play, and provides her narrative locomotion. Speaking at Caen of women’s liberation she discussed the extent to which women have become ‘more liberated…more ordinary’. That apotheosis of ordinariness is itself typical of the emancipations her work is in quest of. And if she could be said to urge any position in the old quarrel between worldliness and other-worldliness it might be Arthur Fisch’s counsel to the outsider Hilary Burde in A Word Child: ‘the spiritual urge is mad unless it’s embodied in some ordinary way of life’ (88).
In a splendid section of The Uses of Division John Bayley expounds the Russian critic Shestov. Shestov thought that great writers are, however much they protest the contrary, solipsists, and that the real virtues of their work are different from what they are usually taken to be. In the nineteenth-century novel this solipsism affects the way art faces its chief dilemma, that of serving the eschatological functions of which religion is no longer capable. It must ‘search for and reveal salvation while showing that no such thing existed’. ‘Tolstoi searched endlessly for the good and identified it with God,’ Bayley paraphrases Shestov, ‘but what his characters want and strive for is…contentment and assurance, even at the cost of hypocrisy.’13
I shall pursue this further in discussing The Nice and the Good in Chapter 6. In that novel, Kate Gray has a patrician and socially useful assurance, a ‘golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction’ (22), which is an active force for good in the world. It might be said that in Iris Murdoch’s world, just as in Shestov’s, morality appears not merely as a vengeful Fury haunting the characters – though they are certainly sufficiently haunted – but as a potent ambiguity. Contentment too plays an equivocal role, since it can defend against profitless despair, but also feed a less than perfect self-delight. In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby significantly ascribes such an ambiguous content to Shakespeare himself: ‘There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world’ (482).
The ambiguity could be examined further by comparing Murdoch’s fine work of moral philosophy The Sovereignty of Good with the novels. In that work she spoke eloquently for the unconsoled love of Good, and emerged as a puritan moralist in a tradition sanctioned by Plato, arguing for unselfing, and for the difficult task of ascesis. The austere project of the book is to rescue a religious picture of man from the collapse of dogma, to attack all forms of consolation, romanticism and self-consciousness, and to study the necessary degeneration of Good in morals.
‘All is vanity’ is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every natural thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is to necessity.(71)
She also, however, insisted on the pursuit of happiness. In one 1982 Gifford lecture she discussed happiness as a moral duty, and she spoke often of the ways that the desire for happiness ‘keeps people sane and freshens life’, and insisted that ‘one should plan one’s life in order to be happy, and this involves decisions about work; and marriage and where you live, and cultivating your talents and so on. I think our sort of world here provides innumerable opportunities for happiness which sometimes, it seems to me, people don’t take advantage of.’14 The villains of her novels like Austin in An Accidental Man and George in The Philosopher’s Pupil are always (unlike the positive demons Mischa and Julius) worldly failures and incompetents.
Moreover, if there are few writers who have written as high-minded a book as The Sovereignty of Good, there can be few writers who have attacked or tested the high-mindedness of their own characters – their uninhabited idealism – with greater ferocity or precision. ‘Wasn’t it deliciously high-minded?’ asks the satanic Julius of the lovers’ loftily self-deluded antics (FHD 266), and we are chilled by his wicked irony because we are obliged to take its grim and comic point. It is Rupert, the most primly high-minded of all the characters in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who is destroyed by the plot. Murdoch published this novel and the book of moral philosophy in the same year, and their ironic relation seems intentional. It is partly that ‘Any man, even the greatest, can be destroyed in a moment and has no refuge; any philosophy that denies this is a lie’ (BP 19), and that she is showing the defencelessness of all philosophy against mischance: any attempt to incarnate the Good must be vain. None the less if there is something apt about the destruction of the high-minded Rupert, there is a further level of irony that Julius would surely have savoured in the swiftness with which critics have explained that Rupert really deserved to die because he was prim.
This meting out of punishment to the puritan characters is comic unless it involves disaster – as with Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, who is destroyed partly because of her need ‘to play a good, even an absurdly good part’ (213); or Cato in Henry and Cato, accused by Beautiful Joe similarly of being too unworldly. Both The Bell and The Unicorn concern communities in which, as Dipple put it, the characters are attempting to jettison all the imagery of the culture and face the ensuing blackness. In each case, though the pagan innocents in the story certainly suffer, the cruellest suffering accrues to the murderously high-minded votaries of the Good itself – Hannah in The Unicorn, Michael in The Bell – who seem convicted of moral hubris or of being spiritually on the make.
The two sermons of The Bell debate whether it is more proper to live by James’s maxim ‘Be ye therefore perfect’ or Michael’s more tolerant ‘Be ye therefore slightly improved’. The first posture is shown to be uninhabitable, and yet morality cannot survive without it: the need for the form of the Good is a moral need, not a logical need. The second posture is also inadequate. This debate, which funds all that Murdoch has written as an unresolvable ambiguity, is conducted in Art and Eros, where Plato is absolutist but Socrates argues that truth ‘must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best’. For Socrates ‘our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn’t mean there is no difference between good and bad in what we achieve and it doesn’t mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest and truthful spirit.’ Art, for Socrates, is the realm of the second-best par excellence. Our duty, says the Abbess in The Bell, is ‘not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life’ (81). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch suggests that the idea of love arises necessarily in the attempt to mediate between best and second-best (62).
The plots of the novels have always made especially cruel fun of those puritans who wish to change themselves fast, or who try in other ways to detach themselves from reality, living beyond their moral income. Three different pseudoascetic narrators all detach themselves from their various milieux, becoming self-encaged in a hermetic routine like Hilary in A Word Child, retreating ludicrously to ‘repent of a life of egoism’, like Charles in The Sea, The Sea, or cocooning themselves in censorious and self-serving moral rectitude, like Bradley in The Black Prince. The word ‘puritan’ is used of Bradley some dozen times in the book. In each case a pandemonium supervenes, an irruption of the forces of low Eros out of which the puritan hero had attempted a premature levitation. The idea-play of Murdoch’s novels urges unselfing and moral ascesis. The always rapid and compressed plots, rarely taking more than a month, constitute a set of warnings about the dangers of moral overreaching, or of a spirituality inadequately rooted in the deep structure of the personality and in some ordinary customary