Readers of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s brilliant exercises in
historical recuperation know that she is an historian and social
commentator of rare perspicacity, learning, and humanity.
Her works on the Victorian period—on
J. S. Mill, Darwin, Lord Acton, as well as thematic collections
of essays dealing with many other figures and issues from the period—are
unparalleled in their deployment of the once prized, now
neglected faculty that provides the title for her latest
collection. It was Edmund Burke, Himmelfarb notes in her
introduction, who gave currency to the phrase “moral
imagination.”
The dozen essays that make up this book—earlier versions
of some have appeared in previous collections—provide a
kind of theater for the exhibition of its agency.
Himmelfarb has given us a
book of
enthusiasms—“appreciations” is her word—for
writers and thinkers who in all their complexity,
idiosyncrasy, and amplitude nevertheless stand as worthy
objects of our admiration.
Himmelfarb has a signal talent for bringing
the figures and issues she discusses to life, which is to say
that she has a signal talent for inhabiting history with the
permanent passions of mankind. Burke’s writings on the
French Revolution or the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s
urbane deflations of rationalism;
the career of Dorothea in
Middlemarch or the education of Emma Woodhouse in Jane
Austen’s great novel: these are not mere historical or literary
curiosities; they are
examples of intelligence, underwritten by character,
colliding with the perturbations that make a trial of human
life—our life.

In one sense, then, The Moral Imagination is an
homage to teachers—not only to Lionel Trilling,
Himmelfarb’s friend and mentor, but also
a panoply of past teachers: Charles Dickens on the poor,
the complex and generous conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli,
John Stuart Mill’s understanding and seductive misunderstandings of
liberty. The writers Himmelfarb engages do not simply inform, they educate
our imagination, our sense of the possible.
Walter Bagehot, the figure G. M.
Young called “The Greatest Victorian”; John Buchan, who was
so much more than the author of thrillers; Winston
Churchill, in the words of Geoffrey Elton, which Himmelfarb
echoes, “Quite simply, a great man”: these and the other
figures who populate The Moral Imagination are models of
human aspiration. Today, many
find it almost impossible to pronounce words like “virtue,”
“honor,” and “duty,” without
irony.
Yet such words, regularly in the hearts as well as on the lips of
Himmelfarb’s subjects, name the substance of greatness.
Among much else, This book reminds us how greatly
unimpressive is our present complacency.