“Freedom of thought and freedom of action”

“Freedom of thought and freedom of action” is Wharton’s compact account of the different liberties he associates with France and Germany, and of their absence in England. Addressing Philip Carey’s plans, he turns a choice of university into a contrast between ways of living: freedom to act without interference, freedom to think independently, and the pressure of convention that can deny both.

The distinction Wharton draws

Wharton rejects Philip’s assumption that Oxford must command awe. When Philip says that he supposes he will stay for about a year before his family wants him to go to Oxford, Wharton asks why he should go there at all and urges him to matriculate where he is and spend five years. In his view, a year is too little time, and Oxford would leave Philip a “glorified schoolboy.”

He then sets out his contrast: “In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose.” Wharton prefers Germany’s freedom of thought, though he calls both forms of liberty good. His formulation distinguishes outward latitude from intellectual independence: a society may leave people alone in their conduct while enforcing conformity in belief, or regulate conduct while allowing private thought.

England and the pressure of convention

Wharton presents England as the negative case. “But in England you get neither,” he says: convention, in his account, prevents people from thinking or acting as they please. He attributes this condition to England being a democratic nation and adds that he expects America to be worse. The sweeping judgment is Wharton’s polemical generalization, not an impartial account of national character; its force in the exchange comes from his willingness to unsettle Philip’s deference to English institutions.

The speech itself is staged with comic physical detail. Wharton leans back cautiously because his chair has a rickety leg, wary that a rhetorical flourish might end in a sudden fall. The precarious chair undercuts the grandeur of his pronouncement without canceling its seriousness: his defense of independent thought comes from a speaker whose own circumstances are far from secure.

The liberty he wants for himself

Wharton’s argument is also tied to his immediate predicament. He ought to return to England that year, but hopes to scrape together enough money to stay another twelve months. If he must leave, he imagines exchanging the dirty garret—with its unmade bed, clothes on the floor, empty beer bottles, and ragged books—for a provincial university post teaching philology. There, he says, he would play tennis and attend tea-parties, and would even have to wash.

That imagined future sharpens his preference for intellectual freedom. The garret is disorderly and materially uncomfortable, yet Wharton associates his present life with a freedom of mind that he fears losing in respectable academic society. His complaint is not simply that convention restricts a person’s actions; it is that social respectability may make independent thought harder to sustain.

A principle tested by Philip’s experience

The distinction resonates with Philip’s later life in Paris, though the book does not present Wharton’s speech as a formula Philip explicitly adopts. At Gravier’s, Philip encounters a lively argument over the changing standing of painters: impressionism has prevailed, but its victory over older schools remains recent, and judgments of Raphael are being overturned in favor of artists such as Manet, Monet, and Degas. The episode shows artistic judgment being formed within a community whose own standards are shifting.

Philip’s response to art develops through both influence and individual experience. He gradually abandons his former allegiance to older ideals, admires the impressionists, and pins photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia over his washing-stand. Yet another encounter complicates any simple equation between conformity and artistic learning: Fanny Price insists that feeling the beauty of Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus is essential to understanding painting, while her earnest guidance can also become coercive when she tries to dictate what Philip must admire.

The contrast between institutional judgment and personal perception becomes stark when Monsieur Foinet assesses Philip’s work. He grants him manual dexterity, industry, and intelligence, but says that he sees no talent and predicts that Philip will never be more than mediocre. Later, photographs of El Greco’s paintings of Toledo unsettle Philip precisely because their elongated figures and extravagant poses are not realistic, yet convey a troubling reality and seem to offer a meaning he cannot name. Across these encounters, liberty of thought is not a guarantee of artistic success; it is the space in which inherited standards can be questioned and new responses discovered.