From America’s British Culture, pp. 1–3

This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culture—although it is not simply English, for much in British culture has had its origins in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. So dominant has British culture been in America, north of the Rio Grande, from the seventeenth century to the present, that if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States—why, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.

When we employ this word culture what do we signify by it? Does “culture” mean refinement and learning, urbanity and good taste? Or does this “culture” mean the folkways of a people? Nowadays the word may be empoloyed in either of the above significations; nor are these different meanings necessarily opposed one to the other.

Our English word culture is derived from the Latin word cultus, which to the Romans signified both tilling the soil and worshipping the divine. In the beginning, culture arises from the cult: that is, people are joined together in worship, and out of their religious association grows the organized human community. Common cultivation of crops, common defense, common laws, cooperation in much else—there are the rudiments of a people’s culture. If that culture succeeds, it may grow into a civilization.

During the past half-century, such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee have described the close connections between religion and culture. As Dawson put it in his Gifford Lectures of 1947,

A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. . . . It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any unanimity of physical type. . . . Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.

Dawson gives us here a quasi-anthropological definition of culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and men of letters would have raised their eyebrows at this sociological approach. The principal dictionaries of nine decades ago offered diverse definitions of the word—the agricultural meaning, the biological one, the bacteriological one, and others; but the common apprehension of culture ran much like this: “The result of mental cultivation, or the state of being cultivated; refinement or enlightenment; learning and taste; in a broad sense, civilization, as, a man of culture.”

This latter employment of the word, connoting personal achievement of high standards in manners, taste, and knowledge, conjuring up the image of the virtuoso, is not archaic today. But the prevailing anthropological understanding of the word signifies the many elements which a people develop in common. We may take as a working anthropological definition that offered by H.J. Rose, in a footnote to his Handbook of Latin Literature (1936).

“By ‘culture’ is meant simply a mode of communal life characteristically human, i.e., beyond the capacity of any beast,” Rose writes. “Refinement and civilization are not implied, although not excluded. Thus we may speak alike of the ‘culture’ of the Australian blacks and of the modern French, distinguishing them as lower and higher respectively.”

To apprehend the relationships between “culture” as the word is employed by anthropologists and “culture” as that word is understood by the champions of high achievements in mind and art, we may turn to the chief poet of this century, T.S. Eliot. Since fairly early in the nineteenth century, reflective men and woman have tended to regard this latter sort of culture as something to be sought after. Just what is it that the champions of culture seek? Why, “improvement of the human mind and spirit.”

Eliot suggests that this high culture consists of a mingling of manners, aesthetic attainment, and intellectual attainment. He argues too that we should regard culture in three senses, that is, whether we have in mind the development of an individual, or the development of a group or class, or the development of a whole society.

As Eliot explains, the different types of culture are interdependent. The question is not really one of conflict between “democratic” and “aristocratic” modes of culture. A nation’s culture may be diverse, seemingly; yet the personal culture cannot long survive if cut off from the culture of a group or class. Nor may the high culture of a class endure if the popular culture is debased, or if the popular culture is at odds with personal and class cultures.

“Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures, and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone,” Eliot writes. “If I am not mistaken, some disintegration of the classes in which culture is, or should be, most highly developed, has already taken place in western society—as well as some cultural separation between one level of society and another. Religious thought and practice, philosophy and art, all tend to become isolated areas cultivated by groups in no communication with each other.”

With increased speed, that lamentable process of disintegration and separation has continued since Eliot wrote those sentences four decades ago; it is especially conspicuous in American higher education. If the decay goes far enough, in the long run a society’s culture sinks to a low level; or the society may fall apart altogether. We Americans live, near the end of the twentieth century, in an era when the general outlines and institutions of our inherited culture still are recognizable; yet it does not follow that our children or our grandchildren, in the twenty-first century, will retain a great part of that old culture.

Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very young person who today is among this school’s graduates: Miss Cecilia Abigail Kirk. For some miles, that highway sweeps grandly through a tranquil landscape of fields and woods, apparently untouched by human hand and innocent of human dwellings; it is somewhat eerily empty, as if it were outside of Time. My small companion looked meditatively upon this prospect, and at length inquired of me, with rather a wry curiosity, “What is all this?”

She might have put the question, “Are we in that usual world of ours, or are we out of it?” For it was that sort of landscape, and a silent day, and our car solitary on the highway. Or she might have asked, pertinently, “What are we doing here?” Or “How do we distinguish reality?”

I trust, young ladies and gentlemen, that during your years at La Lumiere you have fallen into the habit of asking yourselves and your friends, from time to time, just such questions. For as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. The more fully developed a human being is, the more often he asks such questions.

And commencement day is a particularly important occasion for inquiring of the world, “What is all this?”

G. K. Chesterton wrote once that we can understand the human condition only through the medium of parable; it was so that Jesus taught. Permit me to offer you a parable on this day, so eventful for you. I am sure that most of you, at some stage of life, have read or have had read to you C. S. Lewis’ charming series of parables about the battle of life, which he published under the general title of The Chronicles of Narnia. No children’s books in this century have been more influential than the Lewis volumes, which is a reason for us to be hopeful about the twenty-first century. It is from the fourth book of those Chronicles, The Silver Chair, that I draw my parable.

In that book, an enchanted prince and his friends are held captive in enormous caverns far below the surface of Narnia. The Witch-Queen of Underland nearly succeeds in persuading her captives that no “Overworld”—the Overworld being the sunlit reality that you and I know—ever has existed, insisting that the lamps of her own subterranean realm are the only source of illumination; that there is no sun.

“When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me,” the Witch-Queen reasons. “You can only tell me that it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.” So cunning is the Witch that she induces the captives to repeat after her, “There is no sun. . . . There never was a sun.”

In our time, ladies and gentlemen, many voices have been declaring, in effect, “There is no sun.” A multitude of writers and professors and publicists and members of the class of persons commonly styled “intellectuals” gloomily instruct us that we human beings are no better than naked apes, and that the mind is merely an imperfect organic computer, and that consciousness is an illusion. Such persons insist that life has no purpose except sensual gratification; that the brief span of one’s physical existence is the be-all and end-all. Such twentieth-century sophists have created out of their murky cave of the intellect, an Underland; and they endeavor to convince us all that there is no sun—that the world of wonder and hope exists nowhere, and never did exist.

True, my old friend Eliseo Vivas wrote once that “It is one of the marks of human decency to be ashamed of having been born into the twentieth century.” Spiritually and politically, the twentieth century has been a time of decadence. Yet as that century draws near to its close, we may remind ourselves that ages of decadence often have been followed, historically, by ages of renewal. You graduates of 1986 will be little more than thirty years old, most of you, when the twenty-first century of the Christian era begins. Endowed with what you have learnt at La Lumiere, and fortified by the habits you have acquired here, every one of you may do something important to redeem the time.

What can you do to commence redeeming the time—that is, to raise up the human condition to a level less unworthy of that the Author of our being intended for us? Why, begin by brightening the corner where you are; by improving one human being, yourself, and helping one’s neighbors. Thus are formed what the early Christians called “the colonies of God.” For such opportunities andresponsibilities your schooling at La Lumiere has helped to prepare you.

You will not need to be rich or famous to take your part in redeeming the time: what you need for that task is moral imagination joined to right reason. It is not by wealth or fame that you will be rewarded, but by eternal moments: those moments of existence in which, as T. S. Eliot put it, time and the timeless intersect. In such moments, you may discover the answer to that immemorial question, “What is all this?”

Let me try to enlarge upon these sibylline phrases of mine concerning time and the timeless. Twenty years ago, my wife and I dined in Los Angeles with the most learned and lively of all Jesuits in my lifetime, Father Martin D’Arcy, historian and apologist. My wife, Annette—present here today—asked Father D’Arcy about the nature of Heaven.

Heaven, he replied, is a state of being in which all the good moments of one’s earthly existence are forever present, whenever desired—and not in memory merely, not re-enacted merely, but in their original fullness and freshness, outside of Time. Hell, on the contrary, is a state of being in which all the evil moments of one’s life are forever present, against one’s will.

Thus you and I create our own Heaven and our own Hell. The informed Christian knows that his every decision, here below, is irrevocable; that moral choices are for eternity. Heaven is not a fantasy-land where the soul gets a better job and makes new friends. If only you and I could remind ourselves, every day, that we are even now in eternity; that our actions of anger or lust or violence endure forever; but that our actions of generosity or love or forgiveness will be with us beyond the end of Time—why, how immensely better men and women you and I would be! At the very least, how much we would save our years from becoming, in Eliot’s lines, “the sad waste time / Stretching before and after.”

What is all this? Why, this present realm of being, in which your consciousness and my consciousness are aware of reality, is a divine creation; and you and I are put into it as into a testing ground—into an arena, if you will. As the German writer Stefan Andres puts it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this world. Your schooling at La Lumiere has given you some light by which to guide yourself in this endeavor. That is the primary reason why this school was founded, and some of that radiance will remain with you when you may have forgotten nearly everything specific that you studied at La Lumiere.

The old Stoics taught that some things in life are good, and some are evil; but the great majority of life’s happenings are neither good nor evil, but indifferent merely. Wealth is a thing indifferent, and so is poverty; fame is a thing indifferent, and so is obscurity. Christian doctrine inherits from Roman Stoicism, in part, this understanding of how to live a life. Shrug your shoulders at the things indifferent; set your face against the things evil; and by doing God’s will, find that peace which passeth all understanding.

How do we know these postulates to be true? Why, by the common sense and ancient assent of of mankind—that is, by hearkening to the voice of old authority, the voice of what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” I think of what John Henry Newman wrote about Authority in 1846: “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity; such are the words of the wise; such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories; such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.” Believe what wise men and women, over the centuries, have believed in matters of faith and morals, and you will have a firm base on which to stand while the winds of doctrine howl about you.

This counsel that I offer you will not guarantee your winning of any of the glittering prizes of modern society; for those too are among the things indifferent, and some of them are among the things evil. Yet this counsel from a writer who has seen a good deal of the world may help you on the path toward certain eternal moments, when time and the timeless intersect. What happens at such timeless moments, such occurrences in eternity? Why, quiet perfect events, usually: among them the act of telling stories to one’s children, or reading aloud to them.

What is all this? I have found it to be a real world, sunlit, in which one may develop and exercise his virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice; his faith, hope, and charity. You will take your tumbles in this world, which can be rough enough in our age, Lord knows; but the disciplines of this school have taught you to recover gracefully from a tumble, without many tears. It is a world in which there is so much in need of doing that nobody ought to be bored. For young Americans especially, this is a world of high opportunity.

What advice do I offer you? Why, do not mistake a subterranean lamp for the sun. Do not mistake a witch-queen for Our Lady. Do not fancy that the sorry policy of Looking Out for Number One will lead you to Heaven’s gate. Do not fail to remind yourselves that consciousness is a perpetual adventure. Do not forget the source of Light.

All this creation about us is the garden that we erring humans were appointed to tend. Plant some flowers in it, if you can, and pull some weeds. If need be, draw the sword to defend it. The school of Light has sent you on your way, and I wish you all good traveling in your progress toward the Light Eternal.

The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes
edited by Peter J. Cataldo.

“Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I was fed up with Stubbs and Oman and the rest of them. Unfortunately, the boredom that is generated in people’s minds by academic history leads to a positive anti-historicism which seems to be becoming characteristic of modern ‘left-wing’ thought.” So Christopher Dawson wrote to G. K. Chesterton in 1932, when Dawson’s The Making of Europe was published. A historian endowed with imagination, Christopher Dawson restored to historical writing both an understanding of religion as the basis of culture and a moving power of expression. Also, Dawson was a highly learned man and a most conscientious scholar. He and his friends of the “Order” group of Catholics, in the 1930s, were not uncritical of Chesterton and Belloc’s historical views. As Mrs. Scott puts it, the “Order” writers “were to make the point that Catholicism was not always a jolly tavern, nor were Catholics necessarily medievalists, and that Europe was not always the Faith.” Dawson admired Chesterton, but “Belloc he preferred as a poet rather than as a historian, for he considered his views one-sided and unreliable, nor did he feel at home with Belloc’s particular brand of “triumphant Catholicism.”

Dawson, indeed, was a historian so honest and temperate that he was spared most of the slings and arrows commonly directed at English Catholic writers by Protestant adversaries. Yet his being a Catholic convert had a good deal to do with his not obtaining any full-time university post until, at an advanced age, he was invitedto Harvard as the first Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies.

Doubtless it was as well that Dawson was not enrolled in the roster of those “academic historians” who bored him. For Dawson’s writing was done in his own study, among his thousands of books. He was perhaps the last of the great historians so to labour. Dawson’s is the sort of history, marked by intellectual penetration and broad confident learning, that Francesco Guicciardini wrote in his splendid study in the Strozzi-Guicciardini palace. (Dawson’s study, though, is not preserved: Dawson and his wife, Valery, shifted somewhat eccentrically from residence to residence.) Like Guicciardini, Dawson had the mind of a statesman; though unlike Guicciardini, Dawson had no opportunity to practice statecraft. For besides being an eminent historian, Dawson was one of the principal social thinkers of this century, much influenced by Troeltsch and Le Play; and Dawson’s writings on the troubles of our time powerfully influenced T. S. Eliot.

For this reviewer, the liveliest parts of this admirable biography by Dawson’s daughter are the sketches of Dawson’s family, early surroundings, and domestic existence. Mrs. Scott shows us a Victorian and Edwardian England of which the vestiges now are being swept away. Dawson was born in 1889 at Hay Castle (today a huge bookshop), on the Welsh border; he inherited a landed property in Yorkshire, Hartlington Hall, though he disliked the duties of a landed proprietor. He accumulated a noble library—part of which he transported to Harvard during his Stillman Professorship, preferring his own books to those of the Harvard stacks. One is reminded of Robert Parkinson, “Rotter,” in Wyndham Lewis’s novel Self Condemned: “Parkinson was the last of a species. Here he was in a large room, which was a private, functional library. Such a literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism. Its three or four thousand volumes were all book-plated Parkinson. It was really a fragment of paradisewhere one of our species lived embedded in his books, decently fed, moderately taxed, snug and unmolested.”

Dawson wrote many books, all of them important; this biography has sent me back to re-reading some that I turned to decades ago. In this perspective, it comes home to me that I have been saturated in Dawsonian historical studies, and that my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts. (We never happened to meet, although we had friends in common, among them Father Martin D’Arcy and T. S. Eliot.)

What was Dawson’s principal achievement? It was to show us that all civilizations arise out of religious belief: culture comes from the cult. This understanding, expressed somewhat differently by Arnold Toynbee and somewhat similarly by Eric Voegelin, now begins to dominate the history of ideas, and presently will be reflected in popular histories; Dawson’s studies are winning the day.

And it is not historians only upon whom Dawson’s insights have worked. If one turns to Robert Graves’s novel Seven Days in New Crete (American edition’s title, Watch the North Wind Rise), published in 1948, one encounters an imaginary Brief History of the collapse of civilization in the “post-Christian era” and the eventual renewal of a high culture through cultivation of religious belief. Graves’s religion of the White Goddess is a far cry from Dawson’s Christianity; but the historical analysis of the causes of social decay and the means of social renewal in Graves’s romance are Dawsonian.

The wide range of Dawson’s thought is suggested in the titles of the essays that compose The Dynamic Character: “The Metahistorical Vision of Christopher Dawson” (Russell Hittinger); “The Theology of Recapitulation” (Paul Quay); “The Maturity of Christian Culture” (Glenn Olsen); “Christopher Dawson and Baroque Culture” (R. V. Young); “Christianity, Capitalism, Marxism” (John J. Mulloy); “A Flaw in the Bishops’ Pastoral” (Richard Roach): and recollections of Dawson by Chauncey Stillman. These were papers presented at conferences of The Society for Christian Culture, which organization concerns itself chiefly with Dawson’s work.

Dr. Young expresses succinctly the method of Dawson as a philosophical historian: “For Dawson himself the broad vision of the grand sweep of history is not a means of imposing an a priori, synthetic order on the particularity of human events; it is rather a means of understanding just those particular actions of the historical process by seeing them in a larger context. The crucial factor is that in Dawson’s work the immediate and the particular are not neglected in the interest of the abstract and general. Doubtless this characteristic is ultimately attributable to Dawson’s Christianity—to his belief that a single historical event, the Incarnation, is of absolute and unique importance.”

On Easter day, 1909, young Christopher Dawson sat where Edward Gibbon had sat, on the great steps leading to the church of Santa Maria Aracoeli, In Rome; there and then Dawson determined to write a history of culture; indeed, he vowed it. “However unfit I may be,” he wrote in his journal, “I believe it is God’s will I should attempt it.”

In the corpus of his writings, Dawson succeeded in fulfilling his vow. Gibbon had cast his contemptuous glance upon the monuments of superstition; Dawson saw in those monuments the power and the truth of Christian culture.

It is altogether possible to look “upon such monuments and to despair, as Henry Adams did at Chartres, safely leaving “the Virgin in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born. but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, a dead faith.”

But also it is possible, with Christopher Dawson, to hope. As Dawson wrote near the end of his life, “We are living in a world that is far less stable than that of the early Roman Empire. There is no doubt that the world is on the move again as never before and that the pace is faster and more furious than anything that man has known before. But there is nothing in this situation which should cause Christians to despair. On the contrary, it is the kind of situation for which their faith has always prepared them and which provides the opportunity for the fulfilment of their mission.”

The serious study of history virtually has been proscribed in American schools; It is supplanted by “social stew,” or else survives for most young people only in the form of an alleged “world history” founded unconsciously upon Voltaire’s Universal History (in which work there occurs a single mention of Christianity, in connection with Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge). Yet a vigorous and imaginative living historian, John Lukacs (much influenced by Dawson) argues that history will be the chief literary form of the dawning age, and a renewed consciousness of the past may redeem us from many horrors of the present. If this renewal of the historical consciousness does come to pass, Christopher Dawson may yet be chief among its authors.

This review first appeared in The Chesterton Review, vol. 10 (1984), pp. 435–38.

Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls “that presumptuous little upstart”—made Leviathan the symbol of the state, or rather of mass-society, composed of innumerable little atomic individual human beings.

But here we are concerned with Donald Davidson’s Leviathan. In 1938, long before the administration of Lyndon Johnson popularized the slogan “The Great Society,” Davidson wrote that his Leviathan is “the idea of the Great Society, organized under a single, complex, but strong and highly centralized national government, motivated ultimately by men’s desire for economic welfare of a specific kind rather than their desire for personal liberty.” Six decades later, Leviathan looms larger than ever.

The Southern States that once formed the Confederacy have been the most conservative region of America, it is generally agreed. Once upon a time, Richard Weaver told me that Middle Tennessee is the most southern part of the South. There in Middle Tennessee, near the town of Pulaski, in 1893, Donald Davidson was born. Surely Davidson was the most redoubtably conservative of those able American men of letters who have been called the Southern Agrarians. As poet, as critic, as historian, and as political thinker, Davidson was a stalwart defender of America’s permanent things during an era of radical change.

Ever since the forming of the Union in 1787, the dominant political tendency in the southern states has been resistance to centralizing power. Far more than any other region, the South has set its face against Leviathan—that is, against the swelling omnipotent nation-state, what Tocqueville called democratic despotism, the political collectivity that reduces men and women to social atoms. Davidson scourged the centralizers—and that at a time when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was doing much as he liked with the United States of America.

Browsing in the library at Michigan State College, in 1938, an earnest sophomore, I happened upon a new book, published by the University of North Carolina Press, entitled The Attack on Leviathan, and subtitled Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States. It was written eloquently, and for me it made coherent the misgivings I had felt concerning the political notions popular in the 1930s. The book was so good that I assumed all intelligent Americans, or almost all, were reading it. Actually, as I learned years later, the University of North Carolina Press pulped the book’s sheets after only a few hundred copies had been sold: clearly an act of discrimination against conservative views. I had a hand in the reprinting of the book, by another firm, in 1963; and I am happy at having brought out in 1990 a third edition, for Leviathan is as meancing in 1992 as he was in 1938.

Professor Davidson rowed against the tide of opinion among America’s intellectuals in 1938. Centralizing nationalism, he argued, is of necessity tyrannical and enslaving. For a specimen of his method and style, take this passage from his chapter on American literature. He has been criticizing Emerson, and he finds that the opinion shapers of New York and Boston during the 1930s are Emerson’s heirs:

In our own time, the metropolitan critics are makingnational prescriptions that are equally partial, though somewhat more confused. In one sentence they assure us that the industrial unification of America is desirable and inevitable; but in the next sentence they declare that the civilization thus produced puts upon us an intolerable spiritual bondage from which the artist cannot escape save through the shibboleths of Marxism and Freudianism. Wearily, they proclaim that America is standardized; but angrily they scorn the rural backwardness of regions that prove to be, after all, less urban than New York. Confidently they announce that America must be industrialized; but they sneer at Mr. Babbitt of the Middle West, the creature of industrialism. They urge the provinces to adopt the intellectual sophistication of the Eastern metropolis; but among themselves they bewail the poverty of the modem temper, which in its sophistication has left them nothing to enjoy.

Now could one write, in this year of 1992, a better description of the mentality of such American intellectuals? One might substitute, of course, the phrase “the industrial unification of the world” for that of America; for nowadays the whole of the world must be subjected to those environmental mischiefs and social discontents that already have worked immense harm in the “developed countries.”

Davidson was bold enough to defend the agricultural economy against industrial aggrandizement. (Parenthetically, it seems worth remarking that in recent years the dollar volume of agricultural produce in the industrial state of Michigan has exceeded the dollar volume of manufactured products.) Bolder still, he took up the cause of his own region, the South, against the nationalizers of New York and Washington. He appreciated, too, other American regions: New England, the Great Plains, the Lake States, the Pacific coast. But it was the South which required the service of Davidson’s sword of imagination.

Can principles enunciated as Southern principles, of whatever cast, get a hearing?” he inquired in The Attack on Leviathan. “ . . . It seems to be a rule that the more special the program and the more remote it is from Southern principles, the greater the likelihood of its being discussed and promulgated. Southerners who wish to engage in public discussion in terms that do not happen to be of common report in the New York newspapers are likely to be met, at the levels where one would least expect it, with the tactics of distortion, abuse, polite tut-tutting, angry discrimination and so on down to the baser devices of journalistic lynching which compose the modern propagandist’s stock in trade. This is an easy and comparatively certain means of discrediting an opponent and of thus denying him a hearing. It is also a fatal means. For if such approaches to public questions are encouraged and condoned, then confusion has done its work well, the days of free and open discussion of ideas is over in the South, only matters of crass expediency can come into the public forum at all, and we face the miserable prospect of becoming the most inert and passive section of the United States, or else of falling into blind and violent divisions whose pent-up forces will hurl us at each other’s throats. Then will Jefferson’s prophetic vision come true. We shall take to eating one another, as they do in Europe.

Such matters have not much improved since Davidson wrote those sentences, half a century past: The South continues to be treated by Congress as if it were a subject province (in voter registration especially), and the New York newspapers remain ungenerous.

New York City was to Donald Davidson the abomination of desolation. He and his wife spent their summers at Bread Loaf, in Vermont; and Davidson took extraordinary pains to avoid passing through New York City en route. For that matter, he detested sprawling modern cities generally, Nashville included, though he found it necessary to reside most of his life in the neighborhood of Vanderbilt University. To his volume of poems The Tall Men (published in 1927) Davidson had a prologue, “The Long Street,” the antithesis of the rural Tennessee of yesteryear, that land of heroes. That Long Street—I think of devastated Woodward Avenue in Detroit—is the symbol of a dehumanized urban industrial culture:

The grass cannot remember; trees cannot
Remember what once was here. But even so,
They too are here no longer. Where is the grass?
Only the blind stone roots of the dull street
And the steel thews of houses flourish here
And the baked curve of asphalt, smooth, trodden
Covers dead earth that once was quick with grass,
Snuffing the ground with acrid breath the motors
Fret the long street. Steel answers steel. Dust whirls.
Skulls hurry past with the pale flesh yet clinging.
And a little hair.

Davidson was a guardian of those permanent thing which perish upon the pavements of the Long Street; and an inveterate adversary of the enormous welfare state, which devours the spirit. Those themes run through his verse as through his prose.

Politics, we are told truly is the art of the possible—and the preoccupation of the quarter-educated. That is, politics ranks low in order of precedence of the works of the mind, if one refers simply to defecated political theory and practice. But Professor Davidson never divorced politics from religion or imaginative literature or tradition. He knew that the greatest works of politics are poetic, from Plato onward. In his later collection of essays entitled Still Rebels, Still Yankees (1957), he writes about the dissociation of the poet from society, now

. . . painfully apparent as society has accepted the dominance of science and consequently has become indisposed to accept poetry as truth. . . . In this phase of operations the poet may well become an outright traditionalist in religion, politics, and economics. He examines the defects of modern civilization. He develops a sense of catastrophe. With an insight far more accurate than the forecasts of professional social philosophers, he begins to plot the lines of stress and strain along which disaster will erupt. He predicts the ruin of modern secularized society and makes offers of salvation. These are unheard of or unheeded. Then upon the deaf ears and faceless bodies of modern society he invokes the poet’s curse.

Eliot’s poetic curse was that famous fatal dismissal, “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” Davidson, fiercely though he reproached a sensate age, was not quite ready to pronounce a curse upon his time. Tradition still might reassert its old power. Take this passage from his essay “Futurism and Archaism in Toynbee and Hardy” contained in Still Rebels, Still Yankees:

‘You cannot turn the clock back!’ is the commonest taunt of our day. It always emerges as the clinching argument that any modernist offers any traditionalist when the question is: ‘What shall we do now?’ But it is not really an argument. It is a taunt intended to discredit the traditionalist by stigmatizing him a traitor to an idea of progress that is assumed as utterly valid and generally accepted. The aim is, furthermore, to poison the traditionalist’s own mind and disturb his self-confidence by the insinuation that he is a laggard in the world’s great procession. His faith in an established good is made to seem nostalgic devotion to a mere phantom of the buried past. His opposition to the new—no matter how ill-advised, inartistic, destructive, or immoral that new may be—is defined as a quixotic defiance of the Inevitable. To use a term invented by Arnold J. Toynbee, he is an Archaist. By definition, he is therefore doomed.

To abide by Tradition is not to fall into archaism, Davidson told the rising generation. As for turning back the clock—why, as Davidson puts it, “Neither can you turn the clock forward, for Time is beyond human control.” When a Futurist uses this clock metaphor, we perceive

. . . an unconscious revelation of his weakness. He wishes to imply that his design, and his only, is perfectly in step with some scientific master cloak of cause and effect that determines the progress of human events. This implication has no basis in reality, since the Futurist actually means to break off all connection with the historical process of cause and effect and to substitute for it an imagined, ideal process of quasi-scientific future development which is nothing more than a sociological version of Darwinism.”

Such was the conservative mind of Donald Davidson. If I have made him seem somewhat abstract—why, that has been my blunder. He was remarkably versatile: a collector of folk ballads, a gifted lecturer, a writer of librettos, an historian, even from time to time active in the troubled politics of Tennessee. He was all too well aware of the huge blunders in public policy during the twentieth century: If one turns to the second volume of his history of the Tennessee River, one finds three chapters accurately exposing the failures of that enormous undertaking, so warmly commended by the liberal press and most Tennessee politicians—yet so founded upon economic and social fallacies.

* * *

Southern Agrarians proclaimed when I was a child that the southern culture is worth defending; that society is something more than the Gross National Product; that the country lane is healthier than the Long Street; that more wisdom lies in Tradition than in Scientism; that Leviathan is a devourer, not a savior. Study what the Twelve Southerners have written [in I’ll Take My Stand] and you may discover that they are no mere Archaists.

“Worn out with abstraction and novelty, plagued with divided counsels, some Americans have said: I will believe the old folks at home, who have kept alive through many treacherous outmodings some good secret of life.” So Donald Davidson wrote in his chapter [of I’ll Take My Stand]. He continued:

Such moderns prefer to grasp the particular. They want something to engage both their reason and their love. They distrust the advice of John Dewey to ‘use foresight of the future to refine and expand present activities.’ Thefuture is not yet; it is unknowable, intangible. But the past was, the present is; of that they can be sure. So they attach themselves—or reattach themselves—to a home-section, one of the sections, great or small, defined in the long conquest of our continental area. They seek spiritual and cultural autonomy. . . . They are learning how to meet the subtlest and most danggerous foe of humanity—the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence. They are attacking Leviathan.

Another of Kirk’s friends of the Fifties, the lyric poet Roy Campbell, by accident went over an Iberian cliff, though he had survived wounds and injuries in several countries. To die in an automobile was an ironical end for Roy, who had loved horses and bulls but detested all machines. Kirk called him “the last of the scalds,” for like the Viking scalds, Campbell was fearless, outrageous, and reckless, at once a doer of deeds and a singer of them.

Loving freedom and tradition, he was beaten by Communists in Toledo and beat literary ideologues in Bloomsbury. He commanded four hundred of the King’s African Rifles—many of them cannibals—in East Africa; he was storm-tossed in the Hebrides, anathematized in Durban, torn by wild beasts in Africa, buffeted by the critics of the Left. At one time or another he was sailor, shepherd, solider, war correspondent, secret agent (an ineffectual one), hunter, horse trader, bull breeder. And always he was a poet of high imagination and skill. Spain he loved above all other lands. Despite the violence of his career, he was the gentlest of companions. Kirk spent days with him in Chicago and London.

No man ever found more pleasure in life than did Roy Campbell—interested passionately in sea creatures, in insects, in children, in Christian faith, in the world of letters, in Mithraic symbols, in gypsies, Africans, ancient towns, ancient ballads. Once he told Kirk that he could have sat happily for a thousand years under Spanish oaks, watching the pigs feeding on acorns.

Much of the whimsical variety of the man may be gleaned from his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse (which deals with his life only to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; he never finishing his projected second volume). But one does not learn from that diverting book how humane was this fighting wanderer and scoffer at modernity.

Campbell was an undismayed champion in arms against the gloomy powers that unnerve modern man. He never feared to brandish the sword of imagination. As he wrote in his Civil War poem “To the Survivors,”

For none save those are worthy birth
Who neither life or death will shun:
And we plow deepest in the Earth
Who ride the nearest to the Sun.

Some people embroider the truth; and yet they may be more modest, and in essence more truthful, than certain men and woman who pride themselves upon their literal veracity. Roy Campbell interwove his fact and his fiction. In reading his autobiography , one cannot be quite sure that, in many particulars, it is a factual narrative. Did Roy really wage that desperate fight against gypsies on a bridge near Toledo? Whocan say? Were Roy alive, one might obtain only a poetic answer from him.

Much of Campbell’s account of his adventures in the Civil War is grisly reality, and some of it is fanciful. Camilo Cela, the Spanish man of letters (whom Kirk met in Palma de Mallorca) was asked whether Roy’s soldiering against the Reds was to be accepted soberly. “What does that matter?” Cela objected, in very Spanish fashion. “Campbell wandered along the front, sometimes as a journalist, sometimes with a gun. Put it down that everything he wrote was perfectly true. The real Campbell is the Campbell of his books.”

Roy’s was the true poet’s awareness that high truth is symbolic, rather than matter of fact. The poet’s interpretation of reality is elastic, but it is not false because of that latitude. Truth is a coy mistress who lets no mortal posses her utterly. Yet the poet is more favored by her than are the dull, prosy souls who cofound petty detail with wisdom. . . .

* * *

If one would understand Campbell, the first thing to do is to read G. K. Chesterton’s romance Manalive, published in 1921, about the time when Campbell (in the words of Peter Alexander, his biographer) “tramped about southern France, a bearded long-haired figure in shabby clothes who was several times mistaken for an escaped convict.” It is doubtful whether Chesterton and Campbell ever met. Nevertheless, Roy Campbell was Innocent Smith of Manalive—wanderer, enthusiast, commonsense philosopher, pistol-packing servant of God. Even Innocent’s eccentric endless romance with his own wife was paralleled by Roy’s tempestuous (but finally idyllic) relations with Mary Campbell. . . .

* * *

Perhaps Campbell’s most enduring work is his rendering of the poems of Saint John of the Cross, published in 1951, with a preface by Martin D’Arcy. “Roy Campbell carries us with him to Spain and into the presence of a Saint singing the love of God,” Father D’Arcy wrote. Edith Sitwell, in her foreword to the third volume of Campbell’s Collected Poems (1960), declared that “Roy Campbell was one of the very few great poets of our time.” Stephen Spendler, once Campbell’s bitter enemy, did not rank Roy so high; but he was very ready to concede, recently, that Campbell was “the author of a number of resplendent poems unique in modern English verse.”

Campbell wrote with passion, out of ardent and sometimes horrible experience of the 20th-century world. The Primate of Spain confirmed Roy and Mary just before the Red militia seized power in Toledo (except for the besieged Alcazar) and murdered the Campbell’s Carmelite confessors, together with all the other Carmelite monks. Out of this Toledo terror rose Campbell’s poem “Toledo, July 1936”:

. . . high above the roaring shells
I heard the silence of your bells
Who’ve left these broken stones behind
Above the years to make your home,
And burn, with Athens and with Rome,
A sacred city of the mind.

Writing often of death, Campbell glowed with his love of life: Innocent Smith, again.

“At certain strange epochs,” says Innocent Smith in Chesterton’s Manalive, “it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t blood enough in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages looking up to an eternal perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true that death was their only chance of learning to live.”

That passage might have been Campbell’s retort to his literary adversaries; certainly it is in Roy’s tone. But therewas no malice in Campbell. To quote again from Manalive, “His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.”

Kirk had taken his chances in clouds of poison gas, on peaks of the Rockies, and in alleys of New Orleans; he had walked the streets of Detroit with a sheath knife at his belt. But to Roy Campbell he most humbly took off his Borsalino hat. Dead? Not that incandescent soul.

Similarly, some people would like to separate economics from morals, but they are unable to do so. For unless most men and women recognize some sort of moral principles, an economy cannot function except in a small and precarious way. Moral beliefs, sometimes called moral values, make possible production, trading, saving, and the whole economic apparatus.

All human creations and institutions have some connection with moral ideas and moral habits, for human beings are moral creatures. Concepts of right and wrong haunt us in everything we do—whether or not we wish to be concerned with moral questions.

So it is that the final section of this final chapter of [Economics] on the first principles of economics suggests that material prosperity depends upon moral convictions and moral dealings.

Adam Smith, the principal founder of economic science, was a professor of moral philosophy. He took it for granted that moral beliefs should affect economic doings.

The success of economic measures, like the success of most other things in human existence, depends upon certain moral habits. If those habits are lacking, the only other way to produce goods is by compulsion—by what is called slave labor. Let us examine briefly some of the moral qualities that make possible a prosperous economy.

Any economy that functions well relies upon a high degree of honesty. Of course, some cheats and charlatans are found in any society, yet on the whole, in a prospering economy most people behave honestly. “Honesty is the best policy,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in the eighteenth century, echoing an old English proverb. He means that honesty pays, in an economic sense.

For any advanced economy is based upon contracts: agreements to sell or to buy, promises to pay, deeds of sale, all sots of “commercial instruments.” Many commercial contracts are oral, rather than written. Today’s markets especially depend upon implied contracts (as distinguished from detailed written contracts). You may have seen a public auction, at which a bidder may pledge a large sum of money merely by raising one hand or nodding his head. The auctioneer trusts the bidder to keep his promise to buy at a certain price. On a much vaster scale, the complex apparatus of stock markets depends on such implicit contracts—and on ordinary honesty.

On the other hand, those societies in which theft, cheating, and lying are common do not ordinarily develop successful economies. If production and distribution can be carried on only under armed protectors and without any certainty of being paid, then little willbe produced and distributed above the level of subsistence. When bargains are not kept and loans are not repaid, prices are high and interest rates are higher—which discourages production and distribution.

Another moral quality or habit important for the success of an economy is the custom of doing good work—of producing goods of high quality. The Romans had a word for this: industria, a moral virtue, from which our English word industry is derived. Goods should be produced, and services rendered, for the sake of turning out something satisfactory or even admirable—not for the sake merely of cash payment. This affection for quality is bound up with the hope of pleasing or helping the purchaser or customer: doing something kindly for other people, even though producer and distributor may never see most of the customers. This belief in working faithfully and well is connected with the virtue called charity. For charity is not a handout, primarily; the word means “tenderness or love, affection for other people.” The producer who creates first-rate goods is serving other people and can take satisfaction in that service.

One more virtue of the marketplace is a kind of courage: what the old Romans used to call fortitude. This economic courage includes the willingness to take risks, the ability to endure hard times, the talent to hold out against all the disappointment, harassment, ingratitude, and folly that fall upon people in the world of getting and spending.

It would be easy enough to list other moral beliefs and customs that are part of the foundation of a prosperous economy, but we draw near to the end of this book. So instead we turn back, for a moment, to one vice we discussed earlier—and to the virtue which is the opposite of that vice.

The vice is called envy; the virtue is called generosity.

Envy is a sour emotion that condemns a person to loneliness. Generosity is an emotion that attracts friends.

The generous man or woman is very ready to praise others sincerely and to help them instead of hindering them. Generosity brings admiration of the achievements and qualities of other people.

Now, generosity, too, is a moral quality on which a sound economy depends. Producer and distributor, when they are moved by generosity, do not envy one another: they may be competitors, but they are friendly competitors, like contestants in some sport. And in a society with a strong element of generosity, most citizens do not support public measures that would pull down or repress the more productive and energetic and ingenious individuals.

A spirit of generosity toward others is still at work in America. But in much of the world, a very different spirit has come to prevail. In Marxist lands, envy is approved by the men in power. Private wealth and personal success are denounced on principle. The Marxist indoctrinator deliberately preaches envy. By appealing to that strong vice, he may be able to pull down constitutions, classes, and religions.

Because the market brings substantial success to a good many individuals, the Marxist hates the market. A consistent Marxist declares that when two people exchange goods in any market, both are cheated. Yes, both—that is what the Marxist says. Exchange itself is “capitalist oppression,” the Marxist propagandist proclaims. Certainly there is little profitable exchange in Communist countries. Envying the market’s popularity and success, the Marxist denounces the market furiously.

In the long run, the envious society brings on proletarian tyranny and general poverty. In both the short run and the long run, the generous society encourages political freedom and economic prosperity.

Also, a successful free economy makes possible material generosity: it creates a material abundance that gives wealth to private charities and enables the state to carry out measures of public welfare.

From the generous society comes plenty. The old Greeks often represented in their sculptures and paintings the symbol of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, a large goat’s horn overflowing with flowers, fruit, and grain. To this day, the cornucopia is the symbol of a prospering economy.

The American market economy, whatever its shortcomings, has put a cornucopia into most households in the United States. The rewards of the market economy have been generous.

If the horn of plenty is to continue to overflow with good things, it must be cherished with courage and intelligence. Crushing taxation, imprudent meddling, malicious envy, or revolutionary violence might destroy the horn. To protect the cornucopia, it is necessary to understand economics tolerably well. Otherwise, a society of generosity may give way to a society of envy.

In our time of troubles, many strange economic doctrines are preached. Yet there is reason to believe that the productive market economy will be functioning well a century from now. The errors of command economies and the blunders of utopian welfare states have become obvious to a great many people, while Adam Smith continues to make economic sense. So long as many people work intelligently, with good moral habits, for their own advantage and for the prosperity of a nation, an economy will remain healthy. But hard work and sound habits may be undone by foolish public policies or by the violent envy of totalist states. There is a strong need for watchfulness on behalf of the economy.

This book has not been able to tell you everything about the Goose with the Golden Eggs. But we have been able to offer some information about the care and feeding of this creature; and we have cautioned you not to slaughter her.

Nowadays this Goose goes by the name of Market Economy. It seems probable that she still will be preening her feathers when you are ready to take your part in the world of work. If you treat her kindly and intelligently, she will continue to lay for you.

Her armed vision discerns the boredom, and the horror, and the glory of this age. Her high talent with the brush transmutes a moment’s experience into a timeless image. She is a painter possessing moral imagination. This year Renee Radell is artist in residence at Detroit’s Mercy College. She has lived for several years far up a country road near Lake Orion, in an inimitable sprawling house—studios and living quarters intertwined—that she and her husband built with their own hands.

Her husband is Lloyd Radell, a masterful figurative and portrait sculptor who casts his own bronzes. As the administrators of Mercy College know, the work of Renee Radell is closely related to the mission of that college. Six of her paintings hang there in administrative offices. Among pictures of hers purchased by Mercy in 1964 is “Blind Child”— as allegory of the intellectual blindness of young people entering college. Through reason, Mrs. Radell affirms, the intangible may be made tangible. That is what she attempts in her paintings. Also, that is the aim of the higher learning.

She is moved nowadays to turn to mural paintings on a large scale. Mercy College hopes that it may be possible for her to undertake such a permanent work to embellish either the chapel, the student center, the library, or a future science building.

She does not paint for the academy only. Some of her pictures hang in the Washington apartments of influential men, and she is represented at the Detroit Art Institute and other museums.

She declares that the shopping mall, too, should be something better than Vanity Fair. Lloyd Radell’s castings full of vitality in deathless bronze, adorn new malls in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo.

Mrs. Radell is small, dark, and glowing with imagination. She was born in Alabama of Lebanese parents, but has lived most of her years in Michigan. One fancies that she will be youthful always. Despite her charm that is almost childish, she is the mother of five accomplished children. In my old house at Mecosta, Michigan, hangs her portrait of her youngest child, Raissa (named for the wife of Jacques Maritain), a solemn little girl with great black eyes.

The children whom Mrs. Radell paints occasionally, in oils or watercolors, are immersed in a world of wonder. One thinks of the child in Eliot’s poem “Animula,” who—

“Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.”

But Renee Radell is a painter of children only incidentally. Most of her adult figures lost their sense of wonder long ago. She paints our modern confusion—so that we may recover order, seeing our own follies.

“We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty,” T. S. Eliot wrote in one of his early essays. “But the essential advantage for a poet is not have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both the beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”

So it is with such a painter as Renee Radell. Much of the world she has known is ugly enough: yet, she looks upon our present failures unafraid. From our milieu she extricates what Eliot called “the permanent things,” those truths about the human condition which renew mind and conscience.

Although Mrs. Radell knew some of Eliot’s poems before she happened to read my own book about Eliot, she was unaware of the close parallel between her painting and Eliot’s verses.

Her earlier work, like Eliot’s earlier work, is a mordant examination of modern decadence. The pictures of her first period remind one strongly of the pictorial satires of Daumier—but probably she was unaware of that parallel, too.

An eminent literary critic, misunderstanding Eliot’s intention, said that Eliot had exposed the disillusionment of a generation.

With Renee Radell’s early paintings, similarly, it would be easy enough to assume that she despaired of human kind. Yet, her true purpose is to remind us of the norms for humanity: to delineate our sunk condition, so that we may recollect what human beings are meant to be.

Take her picture, “Descent into the Hell of Indifference” (1963), a big painting, three feet by eight. The bored and vacuous faces she depicts are self-condemned. Withdrawn into the prison of the ego, the people of “Descent” have cut themselves off from the light. They are world-weary without ever having known the glory of existence.

Their faces pinched and puffy, the people of “Descent”—and of many other Radell canvases—are enslaved by their appetites and have destroyed their own feelings. But it is far otherwise with Renee Radell, for she is full of energy and hope.

Or consider “Doing Their Thing,” painted at the depth of campus unrest in the ’60’s. In the foreground stand two young persons, unisex figures, blocking the way. They are grinning, with the mirth of hyenas. They hold signboards, but their placards are quite blank. They are sour and smug nihilists, birds who foul their own nest.

Then there is “The Tide,” perhaps the most arresting and frightening of Mrs. Radell’s pictures.

A half-dozen men and women, fully dressed, float dead or dying in an ebb-tide, unresisting. The life of spirit passed out of them long ago. They are marine counterparts of Eliot’s Hollow Men, in “death’s dream kingdom,” too flaccid of will for survival. They are the indifferent whom God has spewed out.

Her “Political Fertility Rite” is merciless toward our politics. At a political dinner, the flag draped behind the dais, ten philistine admirers cluster round some successful strong-featured public man. One suspects that the dominant figure is a white sepulcher. He strongly resembles Mr. George Romney, or Mr. Nelson Rockefeller, whose stars were in the ascendant when this picture was painted (1968). But Mrs. Radell says that she did not have a specific politician in mind, but a type.

Is Renee Radell, this clever discloser of frailties, an unfeeling cynic? No, she isn’t—decidedly not. Warm-hearted and spirited, Mrs. Radell participates in the tragic sense of life.

Eliot once called James Joyce the most orthodox of modern writers, innovator in syle though Joyce was. I am tempted to call Renee Radell the most orthodox of painters, for faith glows out from her striking colors. I do not mean that her art in the least resembles the stuff commonly sold in “religious goods” shops. She is never falsely sentimental, and never conventional in the bad sense of that word. Nor does she peddle vapid abstraction under the guise of “new breed” religious awareness.

Renee Radell makes ancient religious insights relevant to these closing decades of the 20th century. Her picture “Irrelevance” rebukes the blindness of those moderns who break with all tradition. Her amusing and devastating “Where’s Marlboro Country?”, its bewildered people little helped by their seeing-eye dog, refutes the notion of a utopia here below.

“Cloud Nine,” with its airbrushed clouds, undoes the folk who vainly seek refuge in illusory dreams. Mrs. Radell is a champion of high reality, and she affirms that we can perceive the real only through an awakening of spirit.

Her more recent paintings lead us toward reality through a series of “Dream Sequences.” These pictures, rich in minute detail, outwardly are unlike her earlier work: they are lovely, the expression of glory instead of horror.

The beauty of this recent development in her style does not signify that Renee Radell has become “progressive.” She sees humanity falling off a rainbow; she shows us fallen angels who have rejected God. She paints what Max Picard called “the world of the Flight”—the modern desperate attempt to flee from God into nothingness, a flight which produces total disorder in the soul and in society.

Her Giotto-like “Angel of Plenty,” a wall mural 8 feet by 16 feet long, presents delusory earthly delights, which cannot satisfy. “More!” is the legend on a sign of protest in this picture. Instant total satisfaction of the senses is what the average sensual man expects from the Angel of Plenty. He will be given his heart’s desire, and the iron will enter into his soul.

All life is an allegory, G. K. Chesterton wrote once, and we can understand it only in parable. Mrs. Radell’s paintings are visual parables, clues to the great allegory of the human condition.

Little of today’s art, I suspect, will survive the tooth of time. Junk sculpture, and “abstract” painting abstracted from vacuity, will be tossed aside by future generations. To endure, art must refer to the permanent things, to those norms and hopes and fears which remain virtually constant from age to age.

Therefore, I suspect that the paintings of Renee Radell will be proudly exhibited and much discussed when most other artists’ work of our era has sunk down to garage sales, if it has not vanished altogether. Her technical skill is diverse: she could be a naturalistic painter, if she chose. But she understands that ultimate questions can be answered, nowadays, only through myth and symbol.

Because her pictures strip the ragged follies of our time, they will be preserved as brilliant period-pieces. Better, these paintings by Renee Radell will live because their imagery reveals that human nature is constant, for ill and for good.

Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality
or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition.
Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom
from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly
piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear
were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately
bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would
cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in
stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning
after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody
bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. .
. .

And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear,
if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of
smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into
the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the
gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return.
To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is
the mark of manliness. “They will never love where
they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not
hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that
they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not
fear when they ought to fear.

Time was when there lay too heavy upon manthat fear of
the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching
can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards
of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance,
tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by
an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lord’s
favor. But no such age is ours.

Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread,
modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado,
I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistol’s.
He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man;
for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy
dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly
religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear,
and thus are post-Christian without confessing it.

Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I
began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be
so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era.
. . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases
of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness
of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors
and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once
I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing
solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific
truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy
of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with
the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars
took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince
themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped
for thepresumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind
my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were
not displeased. These were given to passing the collection
plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social
reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic
charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased,
yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and
drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. “Oh
no, “ they murmured, “not the fear of
God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?”

For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism
notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager
to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which
passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive
God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon
their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust
I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was
not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear
of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease
in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman.
Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much
of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar.
Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet
I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure
anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with
greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would
adventure much on their behalf. . . .

The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature
of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking
knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive,
their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell,
which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . .
.

Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics.
In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his
due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but
a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among
aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president,
with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many
of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank;
but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at
worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images.
But in reality God does not alter. . . .

What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside
the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the
totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing
that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects
of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can
do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking
religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is
made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and
justice and freedom.

Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong
evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing
itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then
obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come
to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of
these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern
man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional
inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And
these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there
are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear
of God. But to remedy the casuses of fear from the troubles
of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual;
and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in
a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly
comfort of the analyst’s couch of the tranquillizing
drug.

By fashionable philodoxies of our modern era, by our dominant
system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular
press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of
the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been
persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that
is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have
also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious
drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary
tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know
its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright,
is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But
that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased
only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement.
In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce
ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and
the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and
righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage
God lays down his new commandments.

Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered
remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with
us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant
and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom.
Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts
when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them,
are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be
delivered into the hands of the living God. . . .

Perhaps the primary error of the Enlightenment was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism. But deprive man of St. Salvator, and he will seek, at best, St. Science—even though he understands Darwin, say, no better than he understood Augustine. Similarly, our longing for the invisible springs eternal, merely changing its direction from age to age. So if one takes away from man a belief in spirits, it does not follow that thereafter he will concern himself wholly with Bright Reality; more probably, his fancy will seek some new realm—and perhaps a worse credulity.

Thus stories of the supernatural have been supplanted by “science fiction.” Though the talent of H. G. Wells did in that genre nearly everything worth undertaking, a flood of “scientific” and “futuristic” fantasies
continues to deluge America. With few exceptions, these writings are banal and meaningless. My present point, however, is simply that many people today have a faith in “life on other planets” as burning and genuine as belief in a literal Heaven and a literal Hell was among twelfth-century folk, say—but upon authority far inferior. . . . Having demolished, to their own satisfaction, the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane; and so, defying their own inductive and mechanistic premises, they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians. As for angels and devils, let alone bogies—why, Hell, such notions are superstitious!

But if the stubborn fact remains that, although not one well-reputed person claims to have seen the men in the flying saucers, a great many well-reputed persons, over centuries, have claimed to have seen ghosts; or, more strictly speaking, to have perceived certain “psychic phenomena.” From Pliny onward, the literature of our civilization is full of such narrations. Scholars have analyzed soberly such appearances, from Father Noel Taillepied’s Treatise on Ghosts (1588) to Father Herbert Thurston’s Ghosts and Poltergeists (1955). The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research has examined painstakingly, for decades, the data of psychic manifestations. Eminent people so different in character as the Wesleys and Lord Castlereagh have been confronted by terrifying apparitions.

And men of letters have encountered spectral visitants so often as to become altogether casual about these mysteries. Take, as a random example, an aside in Ford Madox Ford’s Portraits from Life. Ford’s London editorial office was in an old house “reputed full of ghosts.” Thus—

My partner Marwood, while sitting one evening near the front windows of the room whilst I was looking for something in the drawer of a desk, said suddenly: “There’s a woman in lavender-coloured eighteenth-century dress looking over your shoulder into that drawer.” And Marwood was the most matter-of-fact, as it were himself eighteenth-century, Yorkshire Squire that England of those days could have produced.

Ford touches upon this little episode merely to introduce his first meeting with D. H. Lawrence, in that office. As Ford Madox Ford implies, he then felt more embarrassed than alarmed or even interested. For in such matters, we always doubt the plain asseverations of our friends, and even the testimony of our own senses. Some impression has been made upon the imaginative brain, yes; something very extraordinary seems to have happened. But what? Ordinarily the experience is so evanescent and so meaningless, however alarming, that speculation seems vain.

That “psychic phenomena” occur, even a philosophical materialist like George Santayana took to be indubitable. Santayana’s own explanation, or the gist of it, is that in a medium-like state we make out shadows or reflections, as it were, of past events.

This is only one analysis of the puzzle, with really no more to substantiate the argument than there is to prove Cicero’s suggestion that ghosts are the damned, condemned to linger near the scenes of their crimes. Here I am but suggesting, in fine, that no one ever has satisfactorily tested or demonstrated a general theory of ghostly apparitions; yet a mass of evidence, of all ages and countries—though particularly abundant, for reasons no one ever has discussed properly, in northern Europe and in Japan and China—informs us that strange things beyond the ordinary operation of life and matter have occurred at irregular intervals and in widely varying circumstances. Two forms of psychic phenomena are fairly frequent: the revenant, and the poltergeist or racketing spirit; and these terrify men. (Telepathy and the milder forms of “second sight” are encountered even more frequently, but they rarely bring with them the horror and dread of the “ghost.”)

At the end of his serious book Apparitions, Professor G.N.M. Tyrell remarks, “Psychical research has certainly not drawn a blank. It has, on the contrary, discovered something so big that people sheer away from it in a reaction of fear.” This is true; and possibly some day these mystifying events will be properly examined in a scientific spirit, classified, and somehow fitted into the natural sciences—though I doubt it. At present, such phenomena submit neither to rhyme nor to reason: the revenant seems unpredictable and purposeless, and the poltergeist behaves like a feeble-minded child. Thus it is that the True Narration of ghostly happenings almost never attains to the condition of true literature. To guess at any significance in these manifestations, we still must resort to literary art—that is, to fiction. And art, as Burke says, is man’s nature.

Because this limbo has no defined boundaries and interiorly remains terra incognita, the imaginative writer’s fancy can wander here unimpeded by the dreary baggage of twentieth-century naturalism. For symbol and allegory, the shadow-world is a far better realm than the hard, false “realism” of science-fiction. . . . Unlike the True Narration, the fictional ghostly tale can possess a plot, theme and purpose. It can piece together in some pattern the hints which seem thrown out by this vision or that haunting or some case of second sight. It can touch keenly upon the old reality of evil—and upon injustice and retribution. It can reveal aspects of human conduct and longing to which the positivistic psychologist has blinded himself. And it still can be a first-rate yarn.

What makes a ghostly tale worth reading? Or writing? Certainly the supernatural has attracted writers of genius or high talent: Defoe, Scott, Coleridge, Stevenson, Hoffmann, Maupassant, Kipling, Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, F. Marion Crawford, Edith Wharton; and those whose achievement lies principally in this dark field, among them M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Meade Faulkner, Sheridan Le Fanu and Arthur Machen. Many of the best are by such poets and critics as Walter de la Mare, A. C. Benson and Quiller Couch. Theirs are no Grub Street names. The genre has in it something worth attempting.

Clearly a fearful joy is one attraction, from Horace Walpole to L. P. Hartley. Most of us enjoy being scared, so long as we are reasonably confident that nothing dreadful really will overtake us. Thus the fun of the Gothic tale is the fun of the roller-coaster or the crazy-house at the county fair. It is worth noting that the great milieu of the ghost-story was nineteenth-century Europe, and especially England, versatility and technique improving as the century grew older. Despite its revolutionary changes, to us today the last century seems an age of security and normality; and Britain especially was cozy and safe. The Christmas ghost-story, told by the glowing hearth with all the strong defenses a triumphant civilization to reassure the timorous, reached its apogee in the delightful frights of Montague Rhodes James, provost of Eton, shortly before the First World War.

Yet, this is not the whole of the matter; if it were, supernatural fictions would have short shrift in our age. The fountains of the great deep being broken up in this time, we have supped long on real horrors, and require no fanciful alarums to titillate our palates. Gauleiter and commissar are worse than spectral raw-head-and-bloody-bones. What is nearly as bad, man in modern fiction—as Mr. Edmund Fuller has pointed out—tends toward a depravity more shocking than Monk Lewis’ grotesqueries. The august school of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and Mr. James M. Cain provide for appetites that find phantasms not sufficiently carnal. And for those who are after pure, and relatively harmless, excitement, the daily slaughter in the Wild West of television may suffice. Without straining credulity, no ghost could do half so much mischief as a Private Eye.

Notwithstanding these handicaps, I expect the tale of the supernatural to endure as a minor form of genuine literary art, and perhaps sometimes—as in The Turn of the Screw—to emerge as a major form. For at its best the uncanny romance touches upon certain profound truths: upon the dark powers that aspire always to possess us, and upon intimations of immortality.

George Macdonald, and his disciple C. S. Lewis, employ the ghostly and the supernatural means in letters to a moral and theological end; and from them the rising generation of authors ought to learn that naturalism is not the only road to higher reality. For the writer who struggles to express moral truth, indeed, “realism” has become in our time a dead-end street; it fully justifies now the definition in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s
Dictionary: “The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.”

Emerson, amid nineteenth-century meliorism, never could credit the reality of evil. But a good many twentieth-century writers are unable to credit the reality of anything except evil. Now it can be said of the better ghostly tale that it is underlain by a sound concept of the character of evil. The necromancer, defying nature, conjures up what ought not to rise again this side of Judgment Day. But these dark powers do not rule the universe: they are in rebellion against Providential order; and by bell, book, and candle, literally or symbolically, we can push them down under. This truth runs through the priest’s ghost-stories in A. C. Benson’s The Light Invisible; also it is hinted at in some of the eerie narrations of W. B. Yeats’ Mythologies.

I venture to suggest that the more orthodox is a writer’s theology, the more convincing, as symbols and allegories, his uncanny tales will be. One of the most unnerving of all spooky stories is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Diamond,” which concerns an ugly modern house where the cellars seem to be full of souls in torment, doled out little drops of water by a medium-housekeeper. But in its concluding pages—and this is true of too many of Blackwood’s creations—the power of the story is much diminished when the reader is informed that, after all, the cellars aren’t really Hell: it is merely that people who formerly lived in the house believed in Hell, and so invested the place with an unpleasant aura. Because the Christian tradition, with its complex of symbol, allegory, and right reason, genuinely penetrates to spiritual depths and spiritual heights, the modern supernatural fiction which isolates itself from this authority drifts aimlessly down Styx.

Though Freudianism retains great popular influence today, as an intellectual force it has been compelled to retreat; and Freud’s naïve understanding of human nature must make way for older and greater insights. For Freudians and positivists, only the “natural” exists. The philosophical and ideological currents of a period necessarily affecting its imaginative writing, the supernatural in fiction has been somewhat ridiculous much of this century. But as the rising generation regains the knowledge that “nature” is something more than mere sensate existence, and that something lies both above and below human nature—that reality, after all, is hierarchical—then authors will venture once more to employ myth and symbol, to resort to allegories of the divine and the diabolical, as lawful instruments. And in this revival the ghostly tale may have its part. Tenebrae ineluctably form part of the nature of things; nor should we complain, for without darkness there cannot be light.

But enough of this: I am turning into a ghostly comforter. I do not ask the artist in the fantastic tale to turn didactic moralizer; and I trust that he will not fall into the error that shapes under the hill are merely symbols. For the sake of his art, the teller of ghostly tales ought never to enjoy freedom from fear. As that great moralist Samuel Johnson lived in dread of real eternal torment—not mere “mental anguish”—so that great “invisible prince,” Sheridan Le Fanu, archetype of ghost-story writers, is believed to have died literally of fright. He knew that his creations were not his creations merely, but glimpses of the abyss.

And I hope that in writing Gothic romances for moderns who suffer from taedium vitae, the coming set of eerie authors will not modernize their craft beyond recognition. It has been a skill innately conservative. As M. R. James wrote of Le Fanu, “The ghost story is in itself a slightly old-fashioned form; it needs some deliberateness in the telling; we listen to it the more readily if the narrator poses as elderly, or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.’” If faithless to this trust, the ghost-story writer will deserve to be hounded to his doom by the late James Thurber’s favorite monster, the Todal, “a creature of the Devil, sent to punish evil-doers for having done less evil than they should.”

This essay by Russell Kirk appears in The Surly Sullen Bell (Fleet, 1962).
An expanded version was published in Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, edited with an introduction by Vigen Guroian (Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 2004).

Historical
Consciousness: The Remembered Past

Review reprinted from The Sewanee Review,
Spring 1969, Volume LXXVII, Number 2.

Applying
a philosophical intellect to the study of history, Dr. Lukacs believes
that historical studies may become the principal literary form and way
to wisdom in the dawning age. This does not mean that he endeavors to present
a “philosophy of history”—on the contrary, he agrees
with Burckhardt that the notion of a philosophy of history is “a
centaur, a contradiction in terms; for history coordinates, and hence is
unphilosophical, while philosophy subordinates, and hence is unhistorical.
. . .”

“It may be that the future of Western thought will be historical,” Lukacs
writes; “but, I repeat, this does not mean a philosophy of history
but a chastened historical philosophy, concentrating on the historicity
of problems and of events, assuming the uniqueness of human nature anew,
presenting no new definitions, no freshly jigsawed categories, emphasizing
the existential—and not merely philosophical—primacy of truth:
a more mature achievement of the human mind than even the mastering of
certain forces of nature through the scientific method, and certainly more
mature than the simplistic conception of causalities.”

Though lucid enough, this book [Historical Consciousness] is
complex, and never doctrinaire or ideological—which will diminish
attention to it in the mass media. One might review it from a number of
points of vantage. It would be possible to comment at length on Professor
Lukacs’s distinction between “the public” and “the
people” (like Plato, Lukacs is a lover of distinctions); upon his
mordant criticisms of positivistic historians; upon his remarks about national
character; of his discussion of objectivity and subjectivity; or his doubts
about Darwin, or his appreciation of Heisenberg’s discoveries. This
historiographer casts his net wide.

This reviewer chooses to examine Lukacs’s remarkable book with an
eye principally to Lukacs’s argument that history may be the new
humanism, and especially his chapter “Facts and Fictions”,
which has to do with history as a principal form of humane literature.
These concerns lead Lukacs and his readers to some consideration on historical
learning and religious faith.

Edmund Burke contrasted the “idyllic imagination” of Rousseau
with the “moral imagination” of Christian and European civilization:
that is, he contrasted the ideology of futurism with the moral understanding
that we draw from the deep well of the past—the resources of historical
studies and of poetic insights. In our time, John Lukacs is doing something
quite similar. We escape from the clutch of ideology and from the boredom
of positivism, he reasons, by repairing to historical knowledge and to
our literary patrimony. “We are outgrowing some of our standard intellectual ‘problems,’ at
least in the West, where the conflict between science and religion has
become outdated; and it is at least possible that history and religion,
and history and science, may be brought together, but on a higher level.” We
live today in an intellectual interregnum. “It is, for example, historical
thinking that provides us with the best explanation of the chaotic development
of scientific thinking during its last phase,” Lukacs continues; “and
it is not impossible that as we struggle through a tremendous jungle of
dying concepts and half-truths, many convergent paths in science, history,
religion may emerge before us; there are certain discernible symptoms that
point in these directions.”

Historical studies conceivably may lead us out of the jungle, but this
is not certain; excessive specialization, positivistic prejudices, shallow
scientism, and the thinness of culture in the mass age afflict the historical
discipline, as they afflict every other field of study today. Historical
Consciousness is intended to help in effecting a grand reform of historical
writing and teaching.

A reformed history may be imaginative and humane; like poetry, like the
great novel, it must be personal rather than abstract, ethical rather than
ideological. Like the poet, the historian must understand that devotion
to truth is not identical with the cult of facts.

We have known, in the modern age, no Thucydides, no Polybius, no Livy,
no Plutarch. Obsessed by the Fact, a nineteenth-century idol, most modern
historians have forgotten that facts, too, are constructions—and
meaningful only in association. It is the event, rather than the
isolated fact, which is the proper concern of historians. In a
sense, the genuine historian must be at home with fiction.

Of course, the historian is no fabulist. The historian’s task is
more difficult than the novelist’s, because of its restrictions.
The historian may not invent imaginary characters; he may describe possibilities
only upon the foundation of real evidence; he may not invent motives for
his characters. Nevertheless, he is engaged in a labor of moral imagination.
And, as the novel declines, history may divide with poetry the realm which
the novel has dominated for little more than two centuries. Such a narrative
history as Stephen Runciman’s The Crusades (my example,
not Lukacs’s) may suggest the way in which a reinvigorated historical
consciousness might reoccupy the ground that has been the novelist’s.

It was with Walter Scott that the novel first acquired immense popularity
and influence; from the hour of its triumph, then, prose fiction of the
modern age has been intimately associated with the historical consciousness.
Scott promulgated through historical romances the principles of Burke—a
development to which Lukacs might have paid more attention, for, in Acton’s
phrase, “History begins with Burke.” Through the novel, rather
than through systematic histories, the nineteenth-century public acquired
a lively historical consciousness—the achievement of Macaulay and
a few others notwithstanding. For the novelist possessed of true historical
understanding rose superior to the cult of “objective facts.” If,
as Lukacs remarks, “historical thinking affected the novelists more
profoundly than the novel affected historianship,” still the novelist
often roused the public historical consciousness long before the sobersided
historian set himself to the task: Dickens’s analytical description,
in Barnaby Rudge, of the Gordon Riots preceded by a century the
first monograph on those disturbances by a systematic historian.

Quite commonly, the romancer who sets himself to write an historical epic
fails both as novelist and historian; while fiction reflecting historical
circumstances may be superior to more pretentious endeavors to join the
historical discipline with the humane imagination. “In spite (or,
perhaps, because) of Tolstoy’s penchant for writing a ‘scientific’ history, War
and Peace reflects a kind of ideological, rather than historical thinking.
Flaubert, without knowing it, was the more profoundly historical writer
of the two. . . .” César Birotteau, Martin Chuzzlewit, Lucien
Leuwen, and Sentimental Education contribute as much to the
historical consciousness as do Old Mortality, Les Chouans, A
Tale of Two Cities, and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Much though the novel has accomplished in rousing the public’s historical
understanding and the public’s moral imagination, it now appears
that prose fiction may be near the end of its tether. The novel descends
toward Avernus from several causes. For one thing, “what people still
call ‘Fact’ has become often stranger than what they call ‘Fiction’”—take
the realities of the concentration camps for one instance. For another,
the novelist’s imagination is discouraged by “the deadening
accumulation of nonsense in this age of universal literacy when we encounter
such banalities in conversation, such mistakes in rhetoric, such bloopers
in the paper of a student that their accurate record would result in an
unreal impression of exaggeration.” Moreover, in the Bourgeois Era
(against which Lukacs entertains no prejudices) the novel’s principal
themes were related to the connections between “the inner lives of
persons” and “the external order of society”; as the
old framework of society succumbs to democratic formlessness, a certain
archaism oppresses the “classical” novel.

In this last, Lukacs’s argument resembles that of Lionel Trilling.
But Trilling suggests that the novel of ideological conflict may supplant
the novel of movement and contact between classes; while the notion of
ideological fiction, like ideological politics and ideological history,
is anathema to Lukacs. Instead, the “growing meaninglessness of social
bonds,” as Lukacs puts it, “forces the novelist of the twentieth
century to contemplate increasingly the individual’s relationship
with himself.”

Now if the historian, together with the poet, is to supplant the novelist
as the guardian and enlivener of the moral imagination, he must learn to
write more nobly and more philosophically than he does today. “In
the beginning was the Word, not the Fact; history is thought and spoken
and written with words; and the historian must be master of his words as
much as of his ‘facts,’ whatever those might mean.”

Lukacs is appealing here not to linguistic analysis nor to semantics,
but to rhetoric in its original signification.

For wordsare not mere tools, neither are they mere symbols. They are representative realities;
they remind us of the inevitable connection between imagination and reality.
. . . The corruption of speech involves the corruption of truth, and
the corruption of words means the debasement of speech which is the debasement
of our most human and historic gifts.

While the public’s relish for “flamboyant ‘historical’ novels” diminishes,
popular interest in good history increases. Yet this may work mischief
if the writing of history is dominated by “professional intellectuals”—positivists,
ideologues, Benda’s treasonous clerks. Meritocracy among historians
would be as dismal as meritocracy in the state, “a poisonous development.” Increasingly,
guardianship of traditional common sense and of the languages has been
abandoned by most intellectuals for “more advantageous occupations.
. . . Yet these melancholy developments have not weakened my belief that
among all kinds of people, in these very times, and even in the United
States, appetite for all kinds of historical knowledge, and their historical
consciousness in many different ways, is growing.” Lukacs fled from
Hungary, where ideology and force of arms had triumphed over the historical
consciousness and the moral imagination, because in America the illusions
of Progressivism are not yet altogether triumphant.

The most important implication for the historian is the power of religious
understanding, lacking which there can exist no order in the soul and no
order in the state—indeed, no history that can be recorded without
a shudder. Here Lukacs stands with Johan Huizinga, Christopher Dawson,
and Herbert Butterfield, who he quotes frequently. Cartesian objectivity
is a limited thing, and dying: our situation is post-scientific, rather
than post-Christian; the new physics undoes the smug pseudo-certainties
of the mechanists. Human nature is central once more, and it may fall to
the historian to renew our apprehension of that nature.

There is no man but historic man. Forgetting this truth, we justify Hegel’s
observation that we learn from the study of history how mankind has learned
nothing from the study of history. The Darwinians “fantastically
elongated the history of man on this earth,” mistaking the Java or
Peking or Rhodesian anthropoids for humanity at one end of the scale, and
projecting man into an unprovable progressive future—“Ye unborn
ages, crowd not on my soul.” But abruptly we have become aware that
it now lies in our power, through the “progress” of technology,
to terminate human history some two thousand years after the birth of Christ:
man working upon himself, as he so often has in the past, retributive providential
judgments. The Last Judgment once more can be reasonably postulated as
the terminal event in history.

If all history is a drama, this time cries for a new Thucydides. More
and more, the people of our age become conscious that, as Santayana expressed
it, those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it; and to repeat
it, one may add, without pleasure or hope. When the moral imagination is
starved, when generation cannot link with generation, Kipling’s fable
of the Hive is realized; and the fire awaits. Like his mentor Tocqueville,
John Lukacs seeks historical understanding that we may prophesy.

Russell Kirk was founder of the University Bookman.