Kierkegaard: Either/Or II

My dear friend,

In Part I we looked at the many and varied writings of A, a young man of talent and sensitivity who is, it seems to me, nevertheless lost in life. He has no direction; indeed he lives in such a way that he cannot generate any momentum, for he lives in possibility and will not choose anything decisively. He is afflicted by a self-regard that prevents him from making true and forthright contact with others. And he is unhappy.

We do not know A’s name, but we now turn to the writings of one who does. The author of the letters which comprise most of Part II, known only as B, is a family friend of A. He is an older man, of an analytical bent, and though he lacks the literary flair of A his letters demonstrate that he is a man of generous understanding and personal depth. He has himself read at least some of the contents of Part I, and he is concerned for A’s spiritual well-being. He identifies A’s whole way of living as aesthetic, and against the aesthetic he offers and defends the ethical. His purpose is to convince A to abandon his current way of life in favour of a higher. His approach is twofold: he tries to show A what is bad in the aesthetic way of life, and he tries to show A that what is good in the aesthetic way of life is also found, in a higher way, in the ethical way of life. He tries this second method first.

Part II – The Papers of B

The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage

Is marriage opposed to romance? Is dutiful love true love? B does not waste any time quarreling about minor matters. If we are to be confronted with a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical, we will do so on the highest ground: love. It is first love, romantic love that rejoices the heart of the aesthete: romance is feeling, possibility, vitality. The ethical, on the other hand, is embodied in the institution of marriage with its demands of fidelity and responsibility. Which is higher?

B’s central thesis is this: the ethical both comprehends and enriches the aesthetic. Married love is not inferior to the first blush of love, it is superior. What, after all, are the qualities and characteristics of romantic love? Lovers declare their love to be eternal, but only in marriage, “filled with an energetic and vital assurance”, is the endurance of love firmly promised and lived. Lovers will call on the moon and the stars to be witnesses of their love, but marriage is more ambitious: marriage reaches above and beyond the heavens and calls on God, the Highest, to bear witness. The love of romance is exclusive, and lovers declare that they shall never love another; marriage underwrites and supports that resolution. In each case the natural tendency of romantic love is matched or overmatched by the marriage vow.

If A’s idea of love is opposed to marriage — remember that he called marriage “unmusical” in contrast to Don Giovanni’s “inherently musical” sensuality — what should we think? B declares that A’s love is a weak, diseased thing of which he should be ashamed. What is this love, this sickly victor that is vanquished by a vow? If the love of lovers were truly triumphant then duty could not defeat it.

Once you have got hold of the despairing notion that duty is the enemy of love, then your defeat is assured and you have disparaged love and divested it of its majesty, just as you have done with duty, and yet that was the last thing you wanted…

In B’s eyes the conflict A posits between love and duty is entirely false. Marriage preserves the good qualities of first love and purges what is corrupting and inconstant. The duty to which marriage commits one is not a low thing, not degrading or petty. On the contrary, it elevates and sustains the heart’s ambitions.

Duty here is just one thing, truly to love, with the sincerity of the heart, and duty is as protean as love itself, declaring everything holy and good when it is of love, and denouncing everything, however pleasing or specious, when it is not of love.

And it is really true, C, when you stand back and consider the matter. All that B says about marriage is quite solid and incontestable. For most of us, the marriage vow is a lifting of our eyes unto the hills. It is better than we are, and we are better with it.

Moreover, the heroic task which marriage sets before the couple, to love one another from their hearts, makes them strong in the virtues, the fruit of which is happiness. Marriage, we must remember, is not only a collaboration. It is also a serious personal challenge for each person, and reaps personal as well as collective rewards.

[Married love] is faithful, constant, humble, patient, forbearing, indulgent, sincere, contented, observant, persistent, willing, joyful. All these virtues have the property of being inward specifications of the individual. The individual does not fight external enemies; it is with itself and its love that it fights it out, of its own accord. And they have a temporal qualification, for their truth consists not in applying once and for all, but all the time. And nothing else is acquired by means of these virtues, just the self. Married love is, therefore, at one and the same time…the everyday and also the divine (in the Greek sense), and it is the divine through being the everyday. Married love does not come with an external mark, not like the rich bird with a rush and a roar, it is the incorruptible being of a quiet spirit.

These, I believe, are among the most beautiful and thoughtful words I have yet heard spoken about marriage. Do they seem so to you as well, C?

Marriage enjoins, then, what true love desires; the ethical sustains and completes the aesthetic. This is the argument of B’s first letter. Let’s turn now to consider the second letter, which is the longer.

Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality

Either/Or. These words have always made a strong impression on me and they still do, especially when I mention them by themselves in this way and out of context; the most frightful conflicts can now be set in motion. Their effect on me is that of an incantation… For although there is only one situation where the phrase has absolute meaning, namely where it points on the one hand to truth, righteousness, and holiness, and on the other to desire and susceptibility, and to dim passions and perdition, it is important to choose rightly even when the choice in itself is harmless; to test oneself so as never to have to begin a retreat to the point one started out from…

This opening gesture sets the stage for what follows: an ambitious attempt to explore, from the inside, the nature of the aesthetic and ethical ways of being, and of the transition, natural and necessary for any healthy soul, from the former to the latter.

We begin from the observation that we, as temporal, personal creatures possessing a measure of freedom, are obliged to choose, to make decisions that shape our lives. We are beings for whom choice is unavoidable if we are to retain the dignity of our nature. This obligation falls to us because if we fail to make such choices, they are made for us and we lose ourselves as a result. The crucial moment arises, and if we hesitate or refrain from decision it no longer lies in our power to direct our own path. Our dignity as free persons is damaged.

Entry into the ethical occurs precisely when this obligation is acknowledged and accepted. To live with the self-understanding that one is a responsible agent is to live the ethical. Paradoxically, perhaps, we must choose the ethical. This choice is not, in the mind of the chooser at any rate, a choice between the good of the ethical on the one hand and the evil of the aesthetic on the other. Rather it is the choice between good and evil on the one hand, and their exclusion on the other; it is the choice to live in contact with and in obedience to the realities of good and evil, something which is foreign to the aesthetic way of life (as we saw in the essay on Don Giovanni in Part I, for instance). “The aesthetic is not evil but indifference.”

You might wonder how entry into the ethical can be motivated as a good if the choice in favour of the ethical is prior to acknowledgement of the categories of good and evil. Can we, on these terms, even maintain that the ethical is better than the aesthetic? Objectively, of course, we can, but subjectively, in the mind of the chooser, we cannot. Or so it seems to me. But this is not the last word, for B argues that an aesthete will nevertheless be naturally led to confront the decision. He will experience the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical, not morally, but in the only way open to him: aesthetically. This is so because even the aesthete cannot destroy his nature as a soul endowed with genuine freedom:

There comes a moment in a man’s life when immediacy is as though ripened and when the spirit demands a higher form in which it will apprehend itself as spirit. …If this does not happen and the movement halts and is pressed back, melancholy sets in… If you ask a melancholic what reason he has for his condition, what it is that weighs down on him, he will reply, “I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it.” Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude. The reply is perfectly correct, for as soon as he knows what it is, the effect is removed, whereas the grief of the griever is by no means removed by his knowing why he grieves. But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin as great as any, for it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely, and this is the mother to all sins.

Thus melancholy is the spur; it is the self-devouring state in which no one can rest peacefully. When the obligations of choice are evaded, melancholy sets in, and the only escape is to graduate to the ethical life.

The ethical is therefore the telos of every free, rational person. What are the primary inner qualities of this way of life? It is, first, a life in which the categories of good and evil are honoured, as we have said. It is also fundamentally a life of development:

The aesthetic factor in a person is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical factor is that by which he becomes what he becomes.

The ethical is conditioned by choice; it is a life of change, of growth, of becoming. In this choosing the soul manifests its personal nature, for the choices are formed by and in turn form the personality of the chooser. In choosing, one chooses oneself, not in a selfish way, but in a concrete way. One gives oneself shape. The responsibility to choose well is thus a solemn one, and the heart may quiver in the face of it. Who has not experienced that solemnity, that holy dread, when one stands perched on the edge of a life-changing choice, when one confronts one’s freedom directly and cannot deny it, when all the threads of life must be gathered up for the decisive, monumental step? Are you not aware in that moment that you are engaged in spiritual labour, and that you will not be on the far side as you are on the near? B captures that sense of being poised on a precipice vividly:

What a person gives birth to in a spiritual sense is a creative urge of the will, and that is in man’s own power. What then is it you are afraid of? You are not going to give birth to another human being, you will only give birth to yourself. And yet, as I know well, there is a gravity in this which perturbs the whole soul; to be conscious of oneself in one’s eternal validity is a moment more significant than everything in the world. It is as though you were caught and trapped and now could never again escape, either in time or eternity; it is as though you lost yourself, as though you ceased to be; it is as though the next moment you would rue it and yet it cannot be undone. It is a grave and significant moment when one binds oneself for an eternity to an eternal power, when one receives oneself as the one whose memory no time shall efface, when in an eternal and unfailing sense one becomes aware of oneself as the person one is. And yet, one can still let it be! Look: here, then, is an either/or.

The remedy, then, prescribed for A’s melancholy is that he must undertake to live this drama in his own life. He must choose to live his own life in all of its concrete specificity. He must take responsibility for himself, choosing from the inside, not the outside. The task is “to clothe oneself with oneself”. And the first fruit of this entry into the ethical, says B, is repentance. “Choosing oneself is identical with repenting oneself.” In choosing you receive yourself, and part of this reception is a reception of one’s history, constituted by acts which may be judged as good or evil. This is the first step.

What follows is a portrait of the ethical life, highlighted from a variety of angles. One living ethically, for instance, retains and cultivates a memory of his life; the aesthete, by contrast, who thirsts for novel experiences, benefits by forgetting. To choose oneself ethically means not to choose abstractedly or in isolation, but to live soberly, honestly, with both feet on the ground, with acceptance of one’s situation, limitations, and human relationships.

This emphasis on rejecting artificiality leads B into a long digression against monastic vocations, which he considers fundamentally unreal, primarily on the grounds that the solitary life is an offence against God-given human relationships. B holds that every man has a duty to marry. Those who choose to live an uncommon vocation reject this duty, they “repent themselves out of themselves, rather than into themselves”. This is all pretty tendentious, I’m sure you will agree, but it is interesting to recall that Kierkegaard himself never married, and in fact wrote this book in the wake of his broken engagement. I am not sure how many layers of the authorial onion I can licitly peel back, but I am tempted to read this passage as a record of Kierkegaard’s internal battle with himself over his vocation. Step lightly, I know…

Because of his orientation toward becoming, the ethical person is not paralyzed by possibility. This, recall, was the curse of the aesthete: that he needed to float on a sea of possibilities if he was to conquer boredom. In the ethical one sees tasks — tasks of inward growth and development — instead of possibilities, and this awareness of tasks keeps an ethical person from being overwhelmed by circumstances or externals.

The person who lives aesthetically expects everything from outside, hence the sickly anxiety with which many speak of the dreadful circumstance of not having found one’s place in the world. Who would deny the satisfaction of being fortunate in this respect? But such an anxiety is always an indication that the individual expects everything from the place and nothing from himself. The person who lives ethically will try to choose his place rightly, but if he notices that he has chosen wrongly, or that obstacles arise over which he has no control, he does not lose courage for he never surrenders his sovereignty over himself. He at once sees his task and is therefore instantly active.

Finally the letter turns to a critique of certain aspects of A’s way of life. Remember that in Part I A had claimed that duty, because it was principled, constraining, and “unmusical”, was fundamentally opposed to love, which was spontaneous and full of possibility. B believes that love and duty are fundamentally harmonious, and identifies A’s central error as his supposing that “the individual is placed in an external relation to duty”. A sees duty as something imposed on him and on love from the outside. But this, says B, is false, and for the reasons stated in B’s first letter: the natural tendency of love is only augmented, sustained, and encouraged by the responsibilities of marriage. The duty of love respects the nature of love, and in fact makes it healthier than it would otherwise be. At bottom, one who honours the duty of love has seen that the aesthete’s view of love is low and insulting:

He has perceived that it was an insult and therefore ungracious to want to love with one part of the soul but not with all of it, to treat one’s own love as one element and yet take the whole of another’s love, to want to be something of a riddle and a secret. He has perceived that it would be unseemly if he had a hundred arms so that he could simultaneously embrace many; he has but one embrace and wants to embrace only one. He has perceived that it was an insult to want to attach himself to another person in the way one attaches oneself to finite and accidental things, conditionally, so that if difficulties later arose one could make a change.

The aesthete is unable to experience beauty in all of its richness. This is ironic, of course, for beauty is the principal object of the aesthete’s desire, and one would expect him to excel in its appreciation. Not so. The aesthete approaches life with a view to feeding on the beauty, using the beauty to please himself, and when the beauty passes or is no longer new, it dies for him. But the ethical person does not need beauty. As such, he can appreciate it with a calm mind wherever he finds it, accepting it for what it is, not needing to constantly refer it to his own needs:

If occasionally I have an hour free I stand at my window and look at people, and I have a regard for the beauty of each one. However insignificant and humble he may be I see him with a view to his beauty… The beauty I see is joyful and triumphant, and stronger than all the world. And this beauty I see everywhere, even where your eye sees nothing.

That is quite beautiful.

In friendship, too, the aesthete fails. We saw that A expressly forbade the cultivation of genuine friendships on the grounds that they result in obligations, which in turn hobble the capacity for “crop rotation”. Therefore the aesthete hides from friendship. The ethical person, on the other hand, has committed himself to becoming a specific, concrete person. He has no need to hide himself from others, and embraces friendship. This coming-to-be-known by others is an intrinsic part of the ethical life, and is in fact a duty of life:

‘It is every man’s duty to become revealed.’ The Scriptures teach that ‘it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement’ when everything shall be revealed. Ethics says it is the meaning of life and reality that man be revealed. So if he is not, the revelation will take the form of punishment.

Praising the strengths of the ethical life, B concludes:

[The ethical] affords to life peace, assurance and security, for it is constantly crying out to us: quod petis, hic est [What you are seeking is here.]. It saves one from all infatuations that would exhaust the soul and it brings to it health and strength. It teaches us not to overvalue the fortuitous or to idolize good fortune. It teaches one to be happy in good fortune… It teaches one to be happy in misfortune.

Thus his long essay on the virtues of the ethical life draws to a close. Believe it or not, I have excluded some noteworthy material! I have not mentioned, for instance, B’s passionate and thoroughly politically incorrect attack on feminism, which makes for bracing reading and it not without merit. But all good things must come to an end, my friend, and this letter is no exception.

But we are not quite at the end after all.

The Edifying In The Thought That Against God We Are Always In The Wrong

No, we are not quite at the end, for Kierkegaard, or Eremita, or B, has seen fit to round off the book with an enigmatic essay on a religious theme. B claims in his notes that the sermon — it is really a sermon — was written by a friend of his, and he notes that he thought it especially fitting that A read it. The style here is that of Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, and I think we must interpret it as a last-minute intervention from the religious sphere — Kierkegaard’s highest, but thus far silent, sphere of life.

The enigma of the piece is not so much in its content, but in its relation to the rest of the book. The sermon argues that when we love, we would rather accuse ourselves of wrongdoing than accuse our beloved, and that this same dynamic applies to our love of God. It is edifying, therefore, to think that when we are against God we are always in the wrong. What has this to do with the foregoing? I am remembering that entry into the ethical bears the fruit of repentance, and I see that if we are edified at the thought that “we are always in the wrong” then we must acknowledge the categories of right and wrong, which was a condition of the ethical. In this sense, the sermon asserts that it is edifying to live in the ethical — at least. But it seems a roundabout way of making the point, less forceful than what preceded it, and I suspect that I am missing something. Can you do better?

***

What shall I say in closing? This is a large, ambitious work that resists neat summary. It is a beautiful work, a masterpiece.

How should we receive it? It has to be kept in mind that this book is the opening move in Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication”. Reading your notes on his later, retrospective Point of View I am reminded of his tactic: to disguise himself, suppressing his true purpose, in order to lead his readers out from the wilderness in which they wander. It is a strategy that risks misunderstanding and failure, as Kierkegaard knew, for later in life he said, “I held out Either/Or to the world in my left hand… but all, or as good as all, grasped with their right what I held in my left.” We must not make the same mistake.

Clearly the book is an exploration of these two ways of being in the world: the aesthetic and the ethical. It is not a book from which one can extract a pithy lesson or an abstraction. As a faithful reader of Kierkegaard I will instead let the author speak to me, man to man, and where he speaks words that reveal or convict I must not dissemble within myself, for he condemns only in order to reform, and stings only to mend. If I have recognized myself in aspects of his portrait of the aesthete then that insight may not be simply dismissed. If it is a truth that touches me, then it edifies. Let it become a matter for reflection and prayer.

Perhaps my voice is not strong and warm enough to penetrate to your inmost thought; ah! but ask yourself, ask yourself with the solemn uncertainty with which you would address a person you knew was capable of deciding your life’s happiness with a single word, ask yourself even more seriously, for in truth it is a question of salvation. Stay not the flight of your soul, do not sadden what is your better part, do not enervate your soul with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself, and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one can recognize a thing many times and acknowledge it, one can want a thing many times and attempt it, yet only the deep inner movement, only the indescribable motions of the heart, only these convince you that what you have recognized ‘belongs to you’, that no power can take it from you; for only the truth that edifies is the truth for you.

My friend, until now my reading of Kierkegaard has focused on his later works, so it was a pleasure to turn to his early writings. For the opportunity your request gave me, I thank you. I have been reminded once again why I admire Kierkegaard as I do, for here I have met the same passionate voice, penetrating insight, and, in an uncanny way, personal contact that I have valued before. If reading this overview has failed to convey that experience to you, it is entirely the fault of

Your friend.

Kierkegaard: Either/Or I

My dear friend,

I hardly know where to begin! Like Victor Eremita, to whom sly old Kierkegaard has shifted responsibility for this clamouring collage of addresses and aphorisms, I am tempted to keep my distance: just set the things in some sort of order and let them be, a beautiful mess. But conscious that I am reading the book in your stead, and wanting to report back in more than superficial detail, I’ve decided to wade as deeply into the swirling waters as my own modest ability permits. I hope that you will find the result satisfactory.

Like an actor in some one-man theatre show, Kierkegaard in this book assumes a cast of different personae. Like a Russian doll, the pseudonymous identities are packed one inside another. Eremita, in his playful way, would have us believe that he came in possession of these writings quite by accident. He sets the stage with a tale of an impulsive purchase of a writing desk and the chance discovery therein of a secret drawer containing sheaves of writings, writings which, upon inspection, fall roughly into two parts. The first are the papers of a young man whom Eremita dubs simply A. They are ironic and restless, now lyrical and now despairing. The second set, the work of an older man, a friend of A’s whom Eremita calls B, follows. He is mildly pedantic, but patient and obviously concerned with A’s spiritual welfare, for in his plodding way he submits A’s writings to an ambitious critique. Both A and B have supplemented their own writings with others, chosen, one suspects, as illustrations and elaborations of their own thoughts. I see no way forward but to examine each section as it arises.

Part I – The Papers of A

The papers of A are comprised of two essays, three addresses, and a collection of aphorisms, supplemented by a series of journal entries which A says he copied down from somewhere else.

Diapsalmata

These ‘musical interludes’ look like occasional writings: aphorisms, parables, and reflections thrown together in no discernible order. They reveal the unhappy mind of an aesthete, a man who has lost interest in life and doesn’t know how to move forward. “I feel,” he says, “as a chessman must when the opponent says of it: that piece cannot be moved.” Resigned and melancholic, he looks on the world with an ironic eye. Its activity and concerns do not concern him, and are in fact beneath him, for he has seen through them:

Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman’s nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart. And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life?

Even as he holds himself superior to the bespattered businessman and his kind, he has no wish to share his resigned wisdom with the riff-raff of the world, for who would understand him? This sense of futility he captures with a finely wrought parable that draws again on the imagery of fire:

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who think it’s a joke.

And though A is a young man of considerable intellectual gifts, even the intellectual life he judges to be a realm of false promises where the distinction between earnest inquiry and dry joke has been blurred:

What philosophers say about reality is often as deceptive as when you see a sign in a second-hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed, you would be fooled; the sign is for sale.

But perhaps A’s attitude, with its lack of both conviction and hope, is best captured here:

If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.

Keep this in mind, my friend, for here the book’s crucial dichotomy, which Kierkegaard, behind the scenes, is constantly labouring to place before our eyes — namely, that of the choice, the either/or — rises into view. Is it true that our choices, however important we may think them, are ultimately personally irrelevant? Are we fated? A thinks so, and holds it as dearly bought wisdom.

The Immediate Erotic Stages, or The Musical Erotic

I know, my dear C, that you are a music lover. This next section therefore, an animated and passionate essay on music and its relationship to sensuality and desire, and more particularly a celebration of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, will be of special interest to you.

What does A mean when he speaks of the spirit of sensuality in the abstract? How shall we recognize it when we encounter it? Sensuality, says A, is possessed of an intense inwardness; it is not mere lechery, then, that he is considering. On one hand it is a quest for immediacy, for experience without the mediation of reflection or self-consciousness; it is experience pure and simple, here and now. On the other hand it is relentlessly successive; it does not rest in any one object, but moves always from one experience to another, one object to the next. As such it is closely related to the art of music, which is also inward, immediate, and successive. Indeed, of all the arts it is really only music that can truly express the spirit of sensuality.

A takes Mozart’s operas as illustrations of stages in the awakening of the true erotic spirit. The first and lowest level is represented by the page in Le Nozze di Figaro. In this stage desire is stirred but not fully awake; it is a dreaming sensuality manifest as yearning and melancholy. It yearns because it is desire; it is melancholy because it has not risen to the level of fixing its desire on any particular object. “Desire is lost in the present in a quiet longing, engrossed in contemplation, and yet it cannot evacuate its object, essentially because in a deeper sense no object exists.” In the second stage, for which A turns to Die Zauberflöte and chooses Pagageno as exemplar, desire awakes to a particular object, and seeks it. Yet according to A Papageno’s quest is badly marred in one respect: its goal is marriage. Marriage is ethical love, which A considers “absolutely unmusical”. Here we touch on an important theme which dominates the entire second half of the book: the nature of marriage and its relationship to love and duty. It is enough for now to note that A regards marriage as the enemy of true love, just as ethics is the enemy of pure aestheticism.

It is the musical figure of Don Giovanni who portrays the sensual spirit to an unsurpassable degree. Don Giovanni is the very personification of desire, “flesh incarnate”.

One can indeed imagine many more musical classics, yet there still remains just one work of which it can be said that its idea is absolutely musical, so that the music does not enter as an accompaniment but, in bringing the idea to light, reveals its own innermost being. Therefore Mozart with his Don Giovanni stands highest among the immortals.

The Don is a force of nature; an endless fount of gaiety and desire, a tireless seducer. “When he is interpreted in music…I have the power of nature, the demonic, which as little tires of seducing, or is done with seducing, as the wind is tired of raging, the sea of surging, or a waterfall of cascading down from its height.” He is not bothered by ethical reflection on his actions, past or future. His experience is entirely immediate, a state which only music can capture. The Don is, in A’s judgement, “inherently musical”. He must speak in music, for no other means of expression could truly portray his spirit; were he to speak without music, he would be subject to the reflection of language and therefore decline from his unselfconscious immediacy.

What do you think of A’s interpretation of the opera? He certainly has some interesting things to say. His comment, for instance, that “the very secret of this opera is that its hero is also the force animating the other characters” seems to me worthy of consideration. Yet I retain some doubts about the central thrust of his essay. He has illuminated the character of the Don in a wonderful way, but has he really understood the opera? I am thinking in particular of the Commandatore character, who seems not to fit A’s view of the opera, and who indeed directly contradicts it. The Commandatore, after all, is the ethical, and he triumphs over Don Giovanni in the end. Even the aesthete, even desire, must face judgement. A makes just one comment about the Commandatore, that he is “unmusical” and therefore restricted to the periphery. But the Commandatore commands the stage at the opera’s end — if it is a periphery it is a strange periphery indeed.

How does this essay contribute to the book as a whole? It is an exaltation of immediacy and desire, divorced from ethical considerations. It anticipates, it seems to me, Nietzche’s eagle, the violence of which is not subject to censure because it is merely an expression of its nature, unreflective, almost unconscious and impersonal. Desire is the Don’s nature, and A sees it likewise as beyond ethical evaluation. In A’s mind ethics destroys the beauty and spontaneity of life.

Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern
Shadowgraphs
The Unhappiest One

Oh, dear. In these three short orations delivered before the Symparanekromenoi — the “fellowship of the dead” — the morose savouring of the finer points of sorrow that was hinted at in the Diapsalmata returns, this time augmented and expanded. We are in a candle-lit world soaked in the dark tones of nineteenth century romanticism. “I toast you, dark night, I toast you as victor, and this is my solace, for you make everything shorter, the day, time, life, and memory’s tribulation, in eternal oblivion!” Themes of tragedy, sorrow, and death, respectively, are offered for our contemplation. We are treated to morbid reflections that seem to relish decay and death as bearers of glad tidings: “Happy the one who died in his old age, happier the one who died at birth, happiest of all the one who was never born.” The orations are animated by that peculiarly self-indulgent unhappiness that one suspects is not quite in earnest: “…What is life but madness, and faith but folly, and hope but reprieve, and love but salt in the wound?” It’s all so deliciously gloomy.

The import of these three sections, it seems to me, is that they further illuminate aspects of the aesthetic sphere of life. In A’s world beauty has little to do with goodness. Our author is able to find beauty in sorrow and death, and transmute it into art. It is a sickly kind of appreciation that these addresses evoke, but it would be futile to deny that the appreciation is real. For the Symparanekromenoi suffering is art, and their dedication to art manifests as an embrace of suffering.

We, too, form an order; we, too, sally forth now and then into the world like knights errant, each along his own path, although not to fight monsters or to come to the aid of innocence or be tried in adventures of love. None of that occupies us, not even the latter, for the arrow of a woman’s glance cannot hurt our hardened breast, and it is not the merry smile of happy maidens that moves us, but the secret beckoning of sorrow. Let others be proud that no girl near or far can withstand the power of their love, we do not envy them; we would be proud if no secret sorrow escaped their attention, no private sorrow were too coy and too proud for us to succeed in probing triumphantly into its innermost hiding places!

They are minor pieces, then, in the overall architecture of the book, but not insignificant.

[Joy and sorrow]
…joy is far easier to represent in art than sorrow… It is of the essence of joy to reveal itself, but sorrow wants to hide, yes, even sometimes to deceive. Joy is communicative, sociable, open-hearted, and wants to express itself; sorrow is reserved, silent, solitary, and seeks to retire into itself.

[A parable]
If someone possessed a letter which he knew or believed contained information concerning what he had to consider his life’s blessedness, but the written characters were thin and faded, and the handwriting almost illegible, he would read it and reread it, with anxiety and disquiet certainly, but with passion. At one moment he would get one meaning out of it, the next another. When he was quite sure he had managed to read a word, he would interpret everything in the light of that word. But he would never pass beyond the same uncertainty with which he began. He would stare, more and more anxiously, but the more he stared the less he saw; sometimes his eyes filled with tears, but the more that happened, again the less he saw. In due course the writing became weaker and less distinct; finally the paper itself crumbled away and he had nothing left but eyes blinded with tears.

Crop Rotation: An Attempt at a Theory of Social Prudence

People of experience maintain that it is very sensible to start from a principle. I grant them that and start with the principle that all men are boring. Or will someone be boring enough to contradict me in this?

Such is the elegant beginning of this short but, so it seems to me, critical essay in which A describes a method he calls “crop rotation”. Crop rotation is a discipline by which an aesthete may govern his inner life with the aim of enhancing the aesthetic quality of his experiences. The ideal for an aesthete is to live immediately and unreflectively, as we saw in the essay on Don Giovanni. A’s problem is that he is naturally reflective and is unable to attain the ideal of immediacy. In consequence he must contend against the great foe of the aesthete — boredom. Evasion of boredom requires constant change, an infinite variety of new experiences which ordinary life is unable to provide. Crop rotation is a method for defeating boredom even in the ordinary circumstances of life.

Constant change, says A, may be achieved in two ways. The first is by varying the external circumstances of one’s life: different places, different people, different things. This method may be pursued for a time, but eventually exhausts itself:

One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one travels abroad; one is europamude, one goes to America, and so on; finally, one indulges in a dream of endless travel from star to star. Or the movement is different but still an extension. One is tired of dining off porcelain, one dines off silver; one tires of that, one dines off gold; one burns half of Rome to get an idea of the conflagration at Troy. This method defeats itself; it is the bad infinite.

The alternative is not to change the external, but to change oneself: to live in the same circumstances, with the same people, but yet to have different experiences. This method requires that one draw on and develop internal resources. The secret is to pay attention to the minor details that change, to focus on the arbitrary or the tangential, or to view a familiar situation from a new and original point of view. It demands creativity, attention, and great command of the inner life to succeed in this discipline, for “it requires deep study to succeed in being arbitrary without losing oneself in it, to derive satisfaction from it for oneself.”

Perhaps this is too abstract. A provides us with a vivid example of the kind of attitude to life that he is advocating:

There was someone whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. He was ready at every opportunity with a little philosophical lecture which was utterly boring. Driven almost to despair, I discovered suddenly that he perspired unusually profusely when he spoke. I saw how the pearls of sweat gathered on his brow, then joined in a stream, slid down his nose, and ended hanging in a drop at the extreme tip of it. From that moment everything was changed; I could even take pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, just to observe the sweat on his brow and on his nose.

From one point of view it is humorous, but from another it is quite sad, for while he is enjoying that sliding bead of perspiration he is certainly not listening attentively to his interlocutor’s words. Indeed, to the extent that he is always hunting for the accidental in order to feed his appetite for novelty he alienates himself, and A is quite explicit about the need for this estrangement. He cautions against friendship, marriage, and vocational commitment on the grounds that all three will try to involve one in obligations, in which the ethical intrudes into the arbitrary play of inner experience. The key is to vary oneself, and this cannot be done if one is tied down by others.

You might be tempted, dear C, to take A’s theory as a misguided but mostly harmless entertainment for an asocial recluse. I believe that A may have thought that himself at the time of composition, yet the next and final section of Part I disturbs that complacent assessment, for it unfolds in detail the harrowing consequences of A’s method.

The Seducer’s Diary

This section was not written by A. He discovered the papers in a drawer of an acquaintance, and copied them out furtively. Our editor Eremita attributes them to “Johannes the Seducer”. The papers consist of a series of diary entries and letters which vividly illustrate A’s method of crop rotation, the pursuit of the “interesting”.

Johannes’ writings recount the stages of his seduction of Cordelia, a young girl of 17 years. It makes for uncomfortable reading, I don’t mind telling you. It is not that Johannes is a lecher, or that his writing is sexually lurid — it isn’t. He seems largely uninterested in physical seduction; his ambitions are spiritual. He does not want Cordelia to give only her body; he wants her soul: her love and admiration. He wants to conjure out of her the passion of young love, though without any intention of truly returning it. He wants to have her in his power, and with masterful subtlety he manipulates her feelings until she renders herself up. It is spiritual molestation.

The specific details of how he achieves his end — and he does achieve it — are not edifying and I will not dwell on them. Johannes is an aesthete, indeed a virtuoso of the aesthetic life. Like A, he cannot escape being reflective and so cannot be Don Giovanni. Instead, he deploys a carefully calibrated strategy in which he manoeuvres his young prey, setting traps for her, springing surprises.

I tense the bow of love to wound the deeper. Like an archer, I slacken the bowstring, tighten it again, listen to its song — it is my martial music — but I do not take aim with it yet, do not even lay the arrow on the string.

Throughout, his interest is in coaxing out of her the desired response. When he succeeds he is elated, like a young man in love. But he is not in love. He remains always both in and yet above the situation, he is “not only the one baptized but also the priest”. Ultimately, Cordelia herself does not matter to him. Only he matters, and when once he is satisfied, she is dropped.

Thus Part I comes to an end. I hope, dear C, that my summary has been helpful to you. You said that you had no time to read the book yourself; you may complain that this précis is so long it defeats your purpose in soliciting my help — I apologize! I have gone on at some length, yet I have missed so much. I am no philosopher, as you know, and my psychological acuity pales beside Kierkegaard’s own, so I fear that I have not done him justice. But I do hope I have captured at least the main points. Casting a quick eye back over the ground we have covered, we see Kierkegaard — or his various characters, if you wish — exploring from many angles the aesthetic stage of life, the aesthetic way of being. It thrives on feeling and spontaneity. It can evoke melancholy, but gaiety as well. In its lower forms it may produce mere hedonism, but for those with the ability it can be developed into a highly reflective, disciplined art of appreciation. A mature aesthete may be a connoisseur of suffering, but he is a connoisseur. Above all, the aesthete despises duty, commitment, and anything that would make him something concrete, or fetter his scope for self-variation. I must admit that this sphere of life has its attractions, though I am not prepared to admit that it attracts my better nature.

In Part II, which I will defer to a later letter, we turn to the papers of B, an advocate for the ethical mode of being. His conscious task is to subject A’s writings to sustained critique. Until then, be assured of the best wishes of

Your friend.

Happy belated birthday, Søren

The 200th birthday of Søren Kierkegaard came and went earlier this week. I had been planning to write something to mark the occasion, but circumstances conspired against me.

Celebrations appear to have been muted in the wide world as well. Apart from a brief appreciation in the New York Times and an enthusiastic (though, at times, misleading) essay in Aeon magazine, our popular media seems to have let the day slip by without comment. Even at the Korrektiv blog, where Kierkegaard’s tombstone is a masthead, silent observance was the order of the day. Google did honour the day with a special doodle, so that was nice.

Kierkegaard comes in for a good deal of admiration around here, and from time to time we have been known to dilate at length about this or that aspect of Kierkegaardiana. If you have a hankering, for example, to read didactic and often puzzled ruminations on a haphazard collection of his minor works, you could hardly do better than to sojourn right here: Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, Stages on Life’s Way, Judge for Yourself!, The Present Age, The Point of View for my Work as an Author, and De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

If anyone cares to recommend worthwhile writing on the great Dane, please do so. Meantime, I know I have a copy of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript around here somewhere…

Kirk: The Secret Commonwealth

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies
Robert Kirk
Introduction by Andrew Lang
(Dover, 2008) [1692]
94 p.

Several years ago I passed a few happy weeks walking the Scottish Highlands. I was enchanted by the soft, green mountains, the shrouding mists, the mysterious ruins, and the numerous cattle. (This last enchantment was apparently mutual.) My motives in undertaking this walk were various, but I had hoped, somewhere deep down, that in the course of my journey I would catch a glimpse of faerie, that realm of mystery inhabited by airy creatures whose character is known to us only through the stories of softly-lit encounters passed down by our ancestors. I did not, in the end, see anything answering the description, or, if I did, I failed to mark it. This book reminds me of what I missed, and reassures me, to some extent, that it may have been for the best.

Robert Kirk was a Scottish minister who had a special interest in fairies and allied creatures, and who, perceiving that the world was becoming a place less hospitable to them, and noting the doubts raised in certain quarters about their nature and very existence, set out to collect and arrange the lore about these creatures for the instruction and enrichment of all. He wrote his book in the last decade of the seventeenth century, though it was not widely read until 1815 when, at the behest of Sir Walter Scott, it was first published.

It is a fascinating work. Kirk is sober and meticulous, and he presents a judicious mixture of anthropological speculation and anecdote. We learn that fairies are normally subterranean, dwelling in the fairy hills common in the Highland landscape, and — what I did not realize — that they are large creatures, comparable in size to you and me. They speak the language and adopt the fashions of human societies, and can sometimes be mistaken for humans. Yet they are, in themselves, airy and insubstantial, impossible to wound with a sword or spear, and visible best, if at all, at twilight. They are aristocratic in government, and sullen in temperament. They are impious, fleeing, for instance, at the mention of Christ, and “ever readiest to go on hurtful errands”. It is for these reasons that I was perhaps foolish to seek them out.

The faculty of seeing fairies is not granted to all; Kirk speculates in a long letter to Sir Robert Boyle that an especially keen sense of sight may be needed, or perhaps the fairies themselves can regulate their appearances to grosser mortals. In any case the faculty is one that is given, and taken away, not cultivated by any art. Those so gifted with “the second sight” reported that it was sometimes accompanied by other capacities, such as foreknowledge of death, and Kirk enumerates many examples. It is reported that seers lose their gift when they leave their native land.

Our instinct in view of such matters is disbelief. We have no fairies, and, perhaps more to the point, we will have no fairies. Maybe we are simply weary, or maybe we fondly (though falsely) imagine that science, that mighty wind, has blown away the veil of mystery and exposed the nothing behind it. In the end we have our prejudices. Even so, Kirk may yet be of value to us, for he teaches us how thoroughly our experience is mediated through our assumptions, which is surely a healthy thing for a culture professing an allegiance to empiricism.

As for Reverend Kirk, we are told that he was himself such a friend of faerie that — well, if you want to know what became of him, let me point you to David Bentley Hart’s delightful essay on the subject. If you took the time to read what I have written here, you owe it to yourself to read what what he has written there, for it is really immeasurably better.

*

Andrew Lang, the noted folklorist who contributed the introduction to this edition of The Secret Commonwealth, wrote this short poem in honour of Kirk:

For we have tired the Folk of Peace;
No more they tax our corn and oil;
Their dances on the moorland cease,
The Brownie stints his wonted toil.
No more shall any shepherd meet
The ladies of the fairy clan,
Nor are their deathly kisses sweet
On lips of any earthly man.
And half I envy him who now,
Clothed in her Court’s enchanted green,
By moonlit loch or mountain’s brow
Is Chaplain to the Fairy Queen.

Mantel: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
(Harper Perennial, 2009)
672 p.

When Hilary Mantel’s ambitious historical novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, and then won the National Book Critics Circle Award the same year, I made a note of it; I don’t normally go out of my way to read contemporary fiction, but the Tudor period, and the life of Henry VIII in particular, is of more or less perpetual interest. Then in 2012 Mantel won the Man Booker Prize again, for Bring up the Bodies, the first of two planned sequels to Wolf Hall. I decided I had better take a look.

Wolf Hall charts the course of Thomas Cromwell as he rises from an undistinguished childhood in a working class family to become first the trusted advisor to Cardinal Wolsey and then, after Wolsey’s downfall, to become the king’s chief minister and, excepting the king, arguably the most powerful man in England. It is during this period — the early 1530s — that Henry VIII breaks with the Pope over his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and marries Anne Boleyn; Cromwell is the man who greases the wheels. He is portrayed by Mantel as a pure pragmatist, personally loyal to individual persons — he never forgets the kindness shown him by Cardinal Wolsey, for instance — but indifferent to the distinction between temporal and spiritual power, and undettered by any alleged obstacle to the fulfillment of the king’s will.

Mantel does a lot of things right. Her evocation of Tudor England, and especially of the high-stakes political machinations of the royal court and its various outsized personalities, is a pleasure to behold. She goes about it with a sure — as in ‘confident’ — hand. Whether it is faithful or not is something that I cannot judge, but on its own terms it is largely convincing. Her Cromwell is a fine creation, superbly capable and “as cunning as a bag of serpents”, as she has Henry say of him; the part is written with nuance and intelligence.

Her style is interesting but difficult to describe. There is a thorny quality to the prose, an obliquity, with frequent sharp turns and lacunae that require the reader to pay close attention or risk losing the thread. Hers is a literary talent, and it is clear why the book attracted the attention of the awards committees. Moreover, the book is particularly unusual for its distinctive use of the pronoun “he”: it is frequently used in what seems to be an ambiguous manner. Who is “he”? Yet a few cases establish the pattern: in the absence of evidence to the contrary, “he” means Cromwell. More than just a stylistic tick, I believe this actually contributes to the characterization of Cromwell himself, who is somehow immanent in the very grammar of the story and seems almost to be a force of nature.

The central fault of the book — and it is no slight fault in my mind — is its portrayal of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. If the book has villains, is is them. To a certain extent this is natural and even appropriate, for they were the two men who most vigorously opposed the king’s absurd hubris. But her characterization of them — and especially of Thomas More — is mean-spirited and calumnous. She allows More a capacious intelligence and a certain dry wit, but essentially she portrays him as a remorseless kill-joy and sadist. Her treatment of his martyrdom, which is the narrative capstone of the book, is chilly. It is a notably unsympathetic portrait of a great man, and a saint. Naturally, any book that takes Thomas Cromwell as its hero is going to have a topsy-turvy moral perspective, but this mistreatment of More (and, though he is a much more peripheral figure in the story, of Fisher) put quite a strain on my good will. (I can recommend Peter Ackroyd’s fine biography of More, which gives a much more balanced appraisal.) The novel has been lauded in some quarters as a celebration of the triumph of the forces of reform and liberation — represented by Henry and Cromwell — over those of tradition and stagnation — More and Fisher — at the birth of the modern period. In my judgement this reading is too simplistic and does a disservice to the subtlety and craft of the story she tells, but to the extent that it is true, it is all too true.

Finally, a curiosity: “Wolf Hall” is the name of the house of the Seymour family, from which Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, will come. Jane does appear here and there in this book, but, if I remember correctly, no part of Wolf Hall actually takes place at Wolf Hall. Nonetheless, for a book that circles in and around Henry’s court, the title is remarkably apt.

Another guide to guides to children’s books

Some months ago I wrote brief appraisals of several guides to children’s literature. In the meantime I have read a few more such books. For instance:

The Read-Aloud Handbook
Jim Trelease
(Penguin, 2006; 6th edition)
432 p.

This book, now in its sixth edition, has evidently been a great success. Sometimes the world is funny like that. The book is pitched as a parents’ guide to reading aloud for children. There are sections on why to read to children, how to read to children (duh), and what to read to children. I am struggling to find a way to describe the overall impression the book makes. It’s as though one were reading a how-to guide to eating breakfast: this is the section describing the differences between toast and cereal, here is the part where jams are defined and listed, and here are the frequently asked questions about which utensils to use in a variety of different situations. In other words, the content is 95% completely obvious, and even then it is dressed up in faux-intellectual garb to make it seem complicated and important. This is a book that leans heavily on acronyms like SSR (which stands for “sustained silent reading” — or, you know, reading). There are some marginally interesting data on effects of television exposure on academic performance, but even then we all knew the answer in advance. (To wit: television is not good for academic performance.)

The second half of the book consists of lists of books recommended for reading aloud. The majority of the books are of fairly recent (post-1990, say) vintage. I was not familiar with most of the titles, so I can only say that after my experience of reading the first half of the book, I could but page quickly through this second half, looking doubtful. Where respect is lacking, there can be no bond of trust.

I am glad to see a book recommending that families stock their shelves with books and read them together; this is praiseworthy. But the best that can be said for this book is that its heart is in the right place.

1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up
Julia Eccleshare (Ed.)
(Universe, 2009)
960 p.

I did not have very high hopes for this guide, expecting it to be a list of books more or less culled from publishers’ promotional materials, its massive bulk an inadequate substitute for thoughtful appraisal — but I was pleasantly surprised. The peremptory tone of the title might well be the worst thing about it.

The first surprise is the breadth of titles selected: not only does one find the great classics of children`s literature, and a host of solid runners-up, but also quite a few foreign language books (presumably available in translation). Even more impressive is the historical sweep of the selections: I estimate that roughly 10% of the titles date from the nineteenth-century or earlier, and approximately 40% were published more than 50 years ago. Having now perused a few guidebooks of this type, I can say that that level of interest in older books is as rare as it is welcome.

Each book receives something between a half-page and two pages for an illustration or two and a short description. It isn’t much space, but after sampling fairly liberally my impression is that the writing is clear and informative and the critical judgements are generally sound. The book is divided into sections based on age, starting with a 0-3 category on picture books and ramping up in stages to a 12+ age group. There are good indices for titles and authors, which obviously make the book much more useful than it would otherwise be.

It is an edited volume, so the reviews themselves are contributed by upward of 70 different pens. This prevents there being a consistent critical perspective, and thus makes it harder to assess whether to trust a particular recommendation, but this is an unavoidable concession for a book of this size. There are also dozens of ‘featured’ reviews contributed by notable children’s authors, such as Eric Carle and Philip Pullman (to choose two poles).

Overall, I was impressed. It is not the sort of book one reads from start to finish (and I did not try to do so), but it would serve admirably as a kind of treasure chest for reading ideas. I am thinking of adding it to our family’s library, which cannot be said for most of the other children’s literature guides that I have looked at.

(If anyone is wondering, one would have to read one book roughly every six days between the ages of 2 and 18 in order to get through all 1001 books before one grew up.)

Books that Build Character
A Guide to Teaching your Child Moral Values through Stories
William Kilpatrick, Gregory Wolfe, and Suzanne M. Wolfe
(Touchstone, 1994)
332 p.

Selecting books specifically for their moral value could be done well or ill. Here it is done well. The danger is that stories not be valued for their merits as stories but rather patrolled for compliance, and reading lists compiled on those grounds are unlikely to make a strong appeal to the imagination. Nor is this, as one might suppose, a temptation principally for “conservatives” who want to teach their children traditional values; anything your child has been assigned to read in school has been patrolled for compliance, and not by a conservative. The authors of this book declare themselves in the introduction:

We don’t think fiction, whether for adults or children, ought to hit us over the head with a blunt moral. We don’t think writers should write primarily out of a moral intent. A storyteller is, preeminently, a person who has a story to tell.

At the same time, stories do instruct; literary quality cannot be the sole criterion by which books are judged. This book wants to steer clear of “problem stories”, in which the aim is to provide a kind of therapeutic reassurance that everything, however disordered, is “okay”. Rather, the authors select books “that challenge, thrill, and excite, and awaken young readers to the potential drama of life, especially to the drama of a life lived in obedience to the highest ideals”.

How does this play out in practice? Pretty well. Certainly there is nothing musty or cramped about these recommendations — about 300 in all. Most of the classics are here; there are many Newbery Medal winners, many Caldecott Medal winners; stories about war, about adventure, about domestic life, and about imaginary lands. The books are divided into sections: picture books for young readers, fairy-tales and folk-tales, books “for holidays and holy days”, stories drawn from sacred texts, historical and contemporary fiction, science fiction, and biographies. For each book there is a brief (< 1 page) description and assessment. Quite a few of the titles were new to me, and quite a few of the new-to-me titles sounded worth exploring.

Overall the book is one of the more thoughtful guides that I have read.

The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children
Eden Ross Lipson
(Three Rivers, 2000; 3rd edition)
550 p.

I have to eat my words: I said above that in a book with 1001 recommendations a group effort would be “unavoidable”, but here comes Eden Ross Lipson to prove me wrong. She was the children’s book editor at the New York Times for over twenty years, and she single-handedly penned this impressively sized list of exactly 1001 books, each accompanied by a short description.

It is interesting to compare this guide to the edited volume above. The scope here is actually quite a lot narrower: whereas the Eccleshare guide devoted about 40% of its space to books more than 50 years old, in this book that fraction falls to about 15%. The recommendations are almost (though not quite) exclusively twentieth-century books, and my impression after paging through the entire volume is that a significant fraction of the recommended books are from the 1990s alone. As one would expect from a book conspicuously advertising that provenance, a good deal of attention is paid to “diversity” and political correctness; there is little that could offend the sensibilities of upper-middle class parents for whom a copy of the NYT tucked under the arm is an important cultural accoutrement. The selections are mostly works of fiction, with a bit of non-fiction and poetry thrown in. Books are organized according to the age of the target audience, beginning with picture books and extending up to books for adolescents. Many of these latter are “problem stories” of the sort avoided by the authors of the guide immediately above.

An unusual feature of this book is its set of extensive indices: about 120 pages worth of small-type listings which provide topical entry-points into the main listings. Happily, among them are book suggestions for girls and (separately) for boys. Even the Grey Lady is not quite senile.

Once at a time

Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
– Epistle to the Philippians –

In the context of a discussion of Kierkegaard, Etienne Gilson touches on a matter fit for Lenten reflection:

Christianity’s own goal and solemn promise is to give each man eternal beatitude. It is both that promise and the way to fulfill it. Such a promise is for man of a literally “infinite” interest, and the only way for him to welcome it is to experience an “infinite passion” for it. In terms of the religious life, this means that the only answer a man can give to God’s message is a passionate will to achieve his own salvation, that is, to achieve his own infinite beatitude. A half-hearted effort to such an end would be quite out of proportion with it; it would not at all be a will to that end; it would not be that will at all.

On the other hand, if such a will actually arises in any man, it has to be the will to his own salvation, because what God has promised is actually to save him. Whether or not he was aware of the fact, Kierkegaard himself was merely repeating Bernard of Clairvaux, when he said: “This problem concerns no one but me.” And such indeed is the case, if the problem actually is to know how I myself can share in that beatitude which Christianity promises.

True enough, the same problem arises for each and every man, so that for an infinite number of men its solution, which is Christianity itself, is bound to be the same, but this does not mean that there is a general solution to the problem. Quite the reverse. Out of its own nature, this is such a problem as requires to be solved, an infinite number of times, once at a time; to solve it differently is not to solve it at all.

– Being and Some Philosophers

Laird: Into the Silent Land

Into the Silent Land
A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
Martin Laird
(Oxford, 2006)
154 p.

In this short but substantial book, Martin Laird gives a practical introduction to Christian contemplative prayer. It is a difficult, because profound, subject, and an adequate treatment calls for humility and fidelity and, not least, personal experience. Insofar as I can judge, Laird is a faithful guide. He draws widely on the Christian tradition of prayer, from the Church Fathers, the Carmelite mystics, spiritual masters east and west, and from contemporary writers such as Simone Weil. Despite his academic credentials (Laird is a professor at Villanova University) he wears his learning lightly and the tone of the book is personal and pastoral.

The purpose of contemplative prayer is to dispose one to encounter God. I phrase it this way intentionally: contemplation is not a technique with a guaranteed outcome, but a practice that prepares one for a personal encounter that comes at a time and in a manner not of one’s own choosing. Laird uses the image of the sailor: there is nothing he can do to make the wind blow, but there are skills he can develop to take advantage when it does, and the Christian contemplative tradition is substantially about developing this receptive attitude.  For it is an illusion, says Laird, to think that we are separated from God; in Him we live and move and have our being, but we are not aware of this. Contemplation is about slowly “excavating the present moment” in order to become aware of and receptive to God’s loving presence.

The principal contemplative practice is the cultivation of an intentional silence, a silence of body and mind. In a sense, it is quite simple: “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God,” says St. John of the Cross. But inevitably there are difficulties, and chief among them are distractions — wandering thoughts, worries, day-dreams, and so on, which prevent the mind being quiet and attentive. Laird is particularly helpful in describing how to deal with such problems. He describes controlled breathing exercises (which remind me of non-Christian meditative practices, but which he plausibly argues is a neglected part of our own tradition too) and, most importantly, the “prayer word” which is repeated quietly, over and over, as a way of maintaining focus. The most common “prayer word” in the Christian tradition is the Jesus Prayer — more common in the East than the West, it is true — but it is a personal choice. (I myself lean on fragments of Psalm 46:10 and Ezekiel 36:26, or something from St. Augustine.) Laird gives quite a lot of attention to psychological aspects of contemplative prayer — to the abandonment of false personae, encounters with old emotional wounds, and other stages of spiritual maturation that are typically encountered in a dedicated contemplative practice.

This book has been for me an encouragement. The contemplative tradition has always attracted me, and I know that it is my path, but I have not been diligent in walking it. At some level I am afraid of delving too deep and dredging up a spiritual crisis of some sort; this has happened before, and it rendered me largely unfit for anything else. These days I have more or less all-consuming family responsibilities and I haven’t the luxury of being unfit. Hence my hesitation. But this book has made me reconsider my situation. Perhaps it cannot hurt to take up the Jesus Prayer again and see what happens. It’s a baby step, but one in the right direction.

[St. Augustine]
The third commandment enjoins quietness of heart, tranquility of mind. This is holiness. Because here is the Spirit of God. This is what a true holiday means, quietness and rest. Unquiet people recoil from the Holy Spirit. They love quarreling. They love argument. In their restlessness they do not allow the silence of the Lord’s Sabbath to enter their lives. Against such restlessness we are offered a kind of Sabbath in the heart. As if God were saying ‘stop being so restless, quieten the uproar in your minds. Let go of the idle fantasies that fly around in your head.’ God is saying, ‘Be still and see that I am God.” (Ps 46) But you refuse to be still. You are like the Egyptians tormented by gnats. These tiniest of flies, always restless, flying about aimlessly, swarm at your eyes, giving no rest. They are back as soon as you drive them off. Just like the futile fantasies that swarm in our minds. Keep the commandment. Beware of this plague.

On Dickens

Dickens
Peter Ackroyd
(HarperCollins, 1990)
1234 p.

Charles Dickens
G.K. Chesterton
(Readers’ Club, 1942) [1906]
254 p.

During the Dickens bicentennial year, I made a resolution to read at least a few of his novels and to tackle Peter Ackroyd’s doorstop of a biography, which had been sitting on my shelf for several years. As it turned out, I managed to read only one novel (Martin Chuzzlewit), but I did succeed in finishing not only Ackroyd’s biography, but Chesterton’s as well. Here I am, a few weeks late, to say a few [sic] words about them.

(I might add that anyone not sufficiently doughty to read all of what follows could nonetheless skip to the end, where I have appended a number of Chesterton’s keener remarks on our subject. It would be a pity to miss them.)

Literary biographies are a strange sub-genre. Do you want to know what a great writer’s life was like? Well, he spent much of each day sitting at a desk. Exciting, isn’t it? Yet it is natural to feel some curiosity about the personality of a writer whose imagination has created stories and characters we love. Both sides of the coin are especially relevant to Dickens, for a writer as prolific as he certainly did spend a great deal of time at a desk, and he did create (in Ackroyd’s words) “the richest gallery of fictional characters ever to have issued from the imagination of one man.”

Dickens rose to greatness from humble beginnings. Born into a downwardly-mobile middle-class family, he was embarrassed as a young boy when his father had debt troubles and was confined for a time to the Marshalsea prison. Dickens was himself forced to take employment in a blacking factory to help with the family finances, a circumstance which occasioned such deep shame that he concealed it his entire life from all but his closest friends; we may speculate that his special concern for the happiness of the poor was rooted in these experiences of labour and poverty. But, these episodes aside, his childhood was in many respects a happy one: he wandered the streets of London — that city which he was to make his own in such an extraordinary way — exploring the thoroughfares and byways, watching the people come and go with a facility and sensitivity for detail that astonished his friends throughout his life. “Dickens had, if ever man had, the key of the street,” says Chesterton, “His stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in the street.” City streets were, in a sense, his home; his stories are not those of drawing rooms and manor houses, but of alleys, sidewalks, and bridges, and the bustle of London’s streets was always a comfort and an inspiration to him.

As a young man he took up a career in journalism, principally covering politics. It was not, it would seem, the most promising course for a man of such prodigious imagination, but the hasty press of the newspaper business appealed to him, and even in his journalistic writings it is possible to descry occasional glimpses of his comic sensibility. (Ackroyd notes that, of a politician who muddled a speech, Dickens filed a report noting that “Lord Lincoln broke down, and sat down.”) Then, in the mid-1830s, when Dickens was in his early 20s, he began contributing short fictional sketches under the pseudonym “Boz”, and though they are little read today, they generated enough attention at the time for him to be approached by a publisher with a proposal: he was asked to write an open-ended series of sketches about the adventures of the members of a sporting club. Dickens accepted the proposal, and set to work. He began with a character named Pickwick, and his sketches eventually produced one of the great comic masterpieces of English literature. Says Chesterton in his entry on Dickens for the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

The track of the story wandered; the tone of the story changed; a servant whom Pickwick found cleaning boots in an inn-yard took the centre of the stage and towered even over Pickwick; Pickwick from being a pompous buffoon became a generous and venerable old English gentleman; and the world still followed that incredible transformation-scene and wishes there were more of it to this day. This was the emergence of Dickens into literature.

The Pickwick Papers brought him fame throughout England. Both Ackroyd and Chesterton comment on the remarkable range of his popularity: his stories were relished by high-society connoisseurs and by the poor labouring classes, even those who were illiterate. An early biographer noted that “I found [a locksmith] reading Pickwick. . .to an audience of twenty persons, literally, men, women, and children.” Chesterton argues that the special appeal of Dickens to the poor was rooted in his comic vision of ordinary life (“He was to make men feel that this dull middle class was actually a kind of Elfland.”) and that his broad popularity is evidence for the deep vein of truth his fiction touches (“In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens.”) I was interested to learn that for many years, long after he had unquestionably become the most famous and successful author in England, Dickens was worried by the thought that his inspiration would desert him and that he would fall from the public’s graces back into a life of poverty. It is true that the size of his readership fluctuated from book to book during his lifetime, but he was always popular, and — though of course he could not have known this — for a long time after his death each successive edition of his books sold better than the one before. I don’t believe that any of his books has ever been out of print.

He did much more than write novels too. I was surprised to learn that throughout his life he took on side projects, ranging from writing and performing in amateur theatrical productions (which was always an intense passion of his) to editing journals and newspapers. In the beginning his intention was to maintain a safety net for himself should his literary fortunes fade, but he continued with side projects long after they ceased to be financially necessary. It is fair to say that he was, in modern parlance, a “workaholic”: he was unable to sit still or relax for long, and was most content, after a fashion, when burdened with large amounts of work. Since work is a curse, I cannot help seeing this as a character defect, and indeed it is one of the few things I do not like about the man.

Late in life Dickens began a series of very successful dramatic readings of his own books, both in Britain and in America. This was a novelty at the time, and people flocked to see the great man giving voice to the many beloved characters he had created. (What I would give for an audio recording of one of those evenings!) Peter Ackroyd does a particularly fine job conveying the atmosphere of these occasions and the intensity of Dickens’ portrayals. His final reading, which marked Dickens’ withdrawal from public life and had received great advance publicity, is captured with particular pathos. Following the reading, Dickens addressed his audience:

“. . . From these garish lights I vanish now for ever more, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” There was a brief hush in the audience followed by something very like a common sigh and then, as his son recalled, “a storm of cheering as I have never seen equalled in my life”. His head was bowed and the tears were streaming down his face as he left the platform.

Some months later, at the age of just 58, Dickens died, and was quietly buried in Westminster Abbey. Many commentators have argued that his early death was due to his constant overwork, and in particular to the grueling schedule of public readings that he maintained. Chesterton, in his inimitable way, agrees: “He died of popularity.”

***

What sort of a man was Dickens? Those who knew him in society routinely noted his vivacity, his verbal quickness, and his restless manner. He often dressed flamboyantly, in loud colours, with something of the air of a dandy. People often noted his astonishing powers of observation, his seeming capacity to take in a scene in remarkable detail, and to assess character with a facility that sometimes unnerved acquaintances. Henry James, after meeting Dickens, highlighted this aspect of his personality, while also (characteristically) seeing deeper into it than most; he noted “. . .a straight inscrutability, a merciless military eye, I might have pronounced it, an automatic hardness, in fine, which at once indicated to me, and in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy of apprehension. . .” He loved social occasions, and the theatre, and the busy streets of the city; “a long walk in the noisy streets would act upon him like a tonic”.

He was a very disciplined man, in his way. Certainly he was a disciplined writer: he would customarily write each day from 9 am – 2 pm, “like clockwork”. He sat at his desk looking out of a window, and he averaged about 2000 words each day. When writing he would sometimes leave his chair and stand before a mirror, observing himself as he acted out the dialogue he intended to write, trying out facial expressions and tones of voice. He was, in fact, a very visual writer, who placed great stress on the illustrations accompanying his stories and often looked to them for inspiration. While working he required absolute silence in the house, which was something of a burden to his family. He stressed the value of punctuality and order to his servants. He filled his house with mirrors, and almost always wanted a window left open.

At home he was frequently impatient and compulsive. Chesterton captures this side of his personality well:

Everything must be put right, and put right at once, with him. If London bored him, he must go to the Continent at once; if the Continent bored him, he must come back to London at once. If the day was too noisy, the whole household must be quiet; if night was too quiet, the whole household must wake up. Above all, he had the supreme character of the domestic despot — that his good temper was, if possible, more despotic than his bad temper. When he was miserable (as he often was, poor fellow), they only had to listen to his railings. When he was happy they had to listen to his novels.

He would not abide criticism of himself, and would go to great lengths to defend himself against even frivolous charges, both at home and in society. On such occasions, notes Chesterton, “even in being on the right side he was in the wrong place”, for he wasted a great deal of energy to little purpose. He cannot have been easy to live with, and his inability to consider that he might be wrong, coupled with his impulsiveness and apparent lack of concern for the impact of his whims on the lives of others, was surely a factor in the eventual failure of his marriage. We are left with the impression of a man so carried away by his own energies that he often ran rough-shod, wittingly or not, over the lives of his family and friends.

Occasionally his letters reveal glimpses of more pedestrian aspects of his life and personality that nonetheless round out our picture of him: Ackroyd writes of “How he liked to bathe in cold water in the mornings; how he read The Times every day; how he never wore a nightcap; how he carried a Gladstone bag with him on his travels; how he autographed his bottles of wine; how he was a good carpenter and “handy man”; how he hated to be called “Sir”; how his favourite colour was light orange; how he preferred cold, bright weather; how he had a mania for opening windows to the fresh air; how he kept his own books neatly in a row, in the order of their publication; how he wrote out instructions to the various servants about their various duties; how he loved candle-light; how the flag was hoisted above the house when he was in residence.” I don’t know that I have ever heard of anyone else for whom orange was a favourite colour.

***

A great deal might be written about Dickens’ politics, but I shall dispatch the subject quickly. He has, of course, especially on the strength of novels like Oliver Twist or Hard Times, been associated with “radical” policies aimed at reforming society to improve the lot of the poor and vulnerable, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that he was, to use the modern parlance, a man “of the left”. He did have a special concern for social problems surrounding child labour, poor education, industrialism, and so forth, and his own novels were widely credited with motivating reforms along those lines in English society, but he was also an advocate of strict public morals and a harsh penal system, and he expressed abhorrence of mobs and revolutions. He thought government should have some involvement in education and sanitation, but not much else. To my great surprise, he actually took the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War! (“He believed the Federal cause to be based on dollars and cents with the anti-slavery cry as no more than mere camouflage for the grosser economic motives.” [Ackroyd]) But his political opinions may in the end not bear much scrutiny, for his thinking was not fundamentally political in nature, and his political principles remained largely inchoate. Ackroyd writes, “It could be said… that his political principles sprang from emotional needs and not from argument; as a result they are not really susceptible to rationalisation, and cannot be said to form a coherent whole [...] He knew what he was against but found it far more difficult to give a convincing or even half-substantial idea of what precisely he was for.”

***

Great barrels of ink have been spilled over Dickens’ religious views, and controversy remains. One camp maintains that he was basically a faithful, if largely dispassionate, member of the Church of England; in their defence they can cite The Life of Our Lord, a narrative of the New Testament which Dickens wrote for his children, Dickens’ own avowal that “All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit”, and his reference, in private correspondence, to “the truth and beauty of the Christian religion”. He is known to have prayed every morning and evening. Others argue that his Christianity was nominal, diffuse, and un-doctrinal, and that he lacked any particularly strong religious commitment beyond “generalized benevolence”. He is on record as rejecting the “hard doctrines” of original sin and last judgement. In his novels, clergyman are never attractive figures, and churches are not attractive places (apart from an occasional dose of the picturesque).

As one would expect, both parties are on to something. Ackroyd writes that he “seems to possess a religious sensibility without any religious beliefs”, and Chesterton complains that he had “that dislike of defined dogmas, which really means a preference for unexamined dogmas”. He did, however, believe in Providence (and was therefore not a Deist) and good works, and he said that he saw the role of the novelist as reflecting that of God within the confines of the story, arranging things for the best. He disliked Catholics (and Anglo-Catholics) and Dissenters, and (we may safely surmise) anyone who took religion more seriously than him.

There is one fascinating episode in his religious history, however, which bears repeating. Ackroyd recounts that, during an extended stay at the Palazzo Peschiere in Genoa, Dickens had a dream of Mary Hogarth, the sister of his wife, who had died young and with whom Dickens had had a complicated relationship. Dickens, divining in the dream that he was communicating with the dead, posed a question: “But answer me one other question! What is the True religion? You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? Or perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? Perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?” Interestingly, the vision answered, “For you, it is the best.” This dream seems to have shaken Dickens for a time, but, perhaps because, as already noted, he had no great savour for self-examination, it seems to have eventually faded from his mind. On a later visit to Rome he expressed an “amused contempt” (Ackroyd) for the rites and accoutrements of Catholicism, which prompts Ackroyd to observe:

Not for him any understanding of the terrible consolations of the faith, nor of the history that supported its elaborate framework of worship. He was so out of sympathy with the Catholic Church that he saw only its surface. He saw its comedy. In this regard, at least, he had no real cultural or theoretical sensibility; he saw only the illusions and idiocies of the present, not the presence of the past.

Still, I cannot help but wonder what might have happened if that seed had fallen in more fertile soil. We shall never know!

***

I was going to say a few words about Dickens’ relationships with women, which is another of the subjects that rends the body politic and generates great fortunes for makers of ink, but frankly it doesn’t interest me enough.

***

The reason Dickens interests us at all is not because of his life, of course, but because of his books. Before wrapping up these notes I turn, therefore, to consider his place in our literature and the special qualities of his stories that continue to recommend them to our attention. It is here that Chesterton’s little book is invaluable, for it is teeming with insights about the attractions and greatness of Dickens’ fiction. It is the sort of book from which one is tempted to quote at length, and repeatedly. (I have not been able to resist this temptation; see below.) His is not an uncritical adulation — “He wrote an enormous amount of bad work,” Chesterton merrily concedes — but he nonetheless claims that, when time and the bell have buried the day, “Dickens will dominate the whole England of the nineteenth century; he will be left on that platform alone.”

Ackroyd seizes upon Dickens’ description of fairy tales as composed of “simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance” and applies it to Dickens’ own work. We find, he argues, in Dickens’ stories, “reality suffused with wild fancy so that it both is and is not the same”, and this is apt, I think, so far as it goes. We do have that feeling when reading him that the world which is recognizably our own has somehow been infused with more energy, as though everything were a little larger than life. “He saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives,” writes Chesterton, “he saw all his cockney villas as top-heavy and wild, he saw every man’s nose twice as big as it was, and very man’s eyes like saucers. And this was the basis of his gaiety. . .” Or again, “His art is like life, because, like life, it cares for nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing.”

For Chesterton Dickens’ claim to greatness resides principally in his characters, rather than his plots. Smiling, he writes that “Dickens’s characters are perfect as long as he can keep them out of his stories.” In another place he elaborates:

Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves. It was not the aim of Dickens to show the effect of time and circumstance upon a character; it was not even his aim to show the effect of a character on time and circumstance. . . Once the great characters are face to face, the ladder by which they climbed is forgotten and falls down, the structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot is abandoned; the other characters deserted at every kind of crisis; the whole crowded thoroughfare of the tale is blocked by two or three talkers, who take their immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise. For they do not exist for the story; the story exists for them; and they know it.

In his later novels Dickens put more stress on plot, working harder to ensure that they had a satisfying dramatic shape, rather than being episodic in the way his earlier books were, and in some sense this was an improvement — certainly it brought those later novels, like David Copperfield, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities into the orbit of other great works of nineteenth-century fiction — but Chesterton argues that this greater verisimilitude resulted in a neglect of his unique talents as a caricaturist. Acknowledging that the later works are more true to life, Chesterton nonetheless wistfully remarks that “He who remembers Pickwick and Pecksniff, creatures like Puck or Pan, may sometimes wonder whether the work had not most life when it was least lifelike.” Or, again (and it is evident that I am now just stitching together Chesterton’s thoughts, but what else can I do?), he writes rather wryly that

Those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority of the later books. Beyond question they have less of what annoys us in Dickens. But do not, if you are in the company of any ardent adorers of Dickens (as I hope for your sake you are), do not insist too urgently and exclusively on the splendour of Dickens’s last works, or they will discover that you do not like him.

Prior to reading Chesterton’s book, I would have counted myself among those who prefer his later books. I suppose that I still do, but I am now less confident in that judgement. I need to revisit the early books, especially The Pickwick Papers, with Chesterton’s argument in mind.

Now, there are (if I can speak in hushed tones for a moment) those who do not like Dickens at all. There are some who look askance at the buffoonery and high spirits and wish for something more refined. “If those people are ever refined it will be by fire,” is Chesterton’s response, but he does acknowledge that Dickens poses some special problems for modern critics. There is something in his writing that is out of temper with our times, a sense that a critical apparatus which can seize upon Thackeray or Eliot with a firm grip will somehow slip and grasp emptiness when applied to Dickens. Chesterton noted this already a century ago, and ascribed it to the powerful simplicity of Dickens’ genius:

Dickens has greatly suffered with the critics precisely through this stunning simplicity in his best work. The critic is called upon to describe his sensations while enjoying Mantalini and Micawber, and he can no more describe them than he can describe a blow in the face. Thus Dickens, in this self-conscious, analytical and descriptive age, loses both ways. He is doubly unfitted for the best modern criticism. His bad work is below that criticism. His good work is above it.

Or, if you do not find that convincing, perhaps some struggle with Dickens because he “exaggerated life in the direction of life”, whereas their inclination is in the other direction. “To them the impossibilities of Dickens seem much more impossible than they really are, because they are already attuned to the opposite impossibilities of Maeterlinck.”

Be that as it may, I like Dickens, and if you are still reading this (God bless you!), you must as well. We are free to enjoy our enjoyment, and to ponder its object. I will close with Chesterton’s “deepest lesson of Dickens” for our mutual consideration:

If we are to look for lessons, here at least is the last and deepest lesson of Dickens. It is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies. This is the truth, not merely of the fixed figures of our life; the wife, the husband, the fool that fills the sky. It is true of the whole stream and substance of our daily experience; every instant we reject a great fool merely because he is foolish. Every day we neglect Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings, Simmerys and Flashers. Every day we lose the last sight of Jobling and Chuckster, the Analytical Chemist, or the Marchioness. Every day we are missing a monster whom we might easily love, and an imbecile whom we should certainly admire.

This is the real gospel of Dickens; the inexhaustible opportunities offered by the liberty and the variety of man. Compared with this life, all public life, all fame, all wisdom, is by its nature cramped and cold and small. For on that defined and lighted public stage men are of necessity forced to profess one set of accomplishments, to rise to one rigid standard. It is the utterly unknown people who can grow in all directions like an exuberant tree. It is in our interior lives that we find that people are too much themselves. It is in our private life that we find them swelling into the enormous contours, and taking on the colours of caricature. Many of us live publicly with featureless public puppets, images of the small public abstractions. It is when we pass our own private gate, and open our own secret door, that we step into the land of the giants.

***

Did I say that I was closing? Yes, but I’d first like to back away from Dickens himself to say a few quick words about the two books which have occasioned this post.

Ackroyd’s biography is a treasure-trove. He says at some point that during his research he had written out an index card for each day of Dickens’ life, and it shows: the level of detail is meticulous. He evades being tedious by the excellence of his writing and the thoughtfulness and affection that he brings to his subject; I can honestly say that I was never bored. In another place he remarks that in preparation for writing the book he read all of Dickens’ published work — both novels and correspondence — at least three times, not to mention reading the secondary literature listed in the bibliography (which runs to about 400 titles)! The book is a major accomplishment, which for any author could justly be considered the crown to a life’s work. That Ackroyd has also written over fifty (!) other books is all the more amazing. Interleaved with the biographical material are several imaginative fantasies: Dickens meeting his own characters in the streets of London, Dickens in conversation with Ackroyd, Ackroyd interviewing himself about his book, and so on. All of them are great fun. In the self-interview, Ackroyd asks himself, “Why did you decide to write the book in the first place?”, to which he replies, “I don’t know. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.” I love it.

I have already sung the praises of Chesterton’s book, but I can remember the tune: I could say that it is unquestionably among his finest literary criticism, which is true, but I would fail to convey just how insightful and delightful it is. Ackroyd says in his book that Chesterton is “perhaps Dickens’ best critic,” and it is easy to believe. As evidence, I will close with a string of quotations from the book that I was unable to work into the text of this post. Happy reading.

***

[Dickens' talent for caricature]
We talk of the power of drawing people out; and that is the nearest parallel to the power of Dickens. He drew reels and reels of highly coloured caricature out of an ordinary person, as dazzlingly as a conjurer draws reels and reels of highly coloured paper out of an ordinary hat. But if anybody thinks the conjuring-trick is easy to perform, let him try it with the next ordinary person he sees. The exaggeration is always the logical extension of something that really exists; but genius appears, first in seeing that it exists, and second in seeing that it will bear to be thus exaggerated. That is something totally different from giving a man a long nose; it is the delicate surgical separation or extension of a living nerve. It is carrying a ludicrous train of thought further than the actual thinker carries it; but it requires a little thinking. It is making fools more gloriously foolish than they can be in this vale of tears; and it is not every fool who can do it.

[The character of Dickens' stories]
Those who see in Dickens’s unchanging characters and recurring catch-words a mere stiffness and lack of living movement miss the point and nature of his work. His tradition is another tradition altogether; his aim is another aim altogether to those of the modern novelists who trace the alchemy of experience and the autumn tints of character. He is there, like the common people of all ages, to make deities; he is there, as I have said, to exaggerate life in the direction of life. The spirit he at bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking wine together and talking through the night. But for him they are two deathless friends talking through an endless night and pouring wine from an inexhaustible bottle.

[Early and late Dickens]
That original violent vision of all things which he had seen from his boyhood began to be mixed with other men’s milder visions and with the light of common day. He began to understand and practise other than his own mad merits; began to have some movement towards the merits of other writers, towards the mixed emotion of Thackeray, or the solidity of George Eliot. And this must be said for the process; that the fierce wine of Dickens could endure some dilution. On the whole, perhaps, his primal personalism was all the better when surging against some saner restraints. . . For my own part, for reasons which I shall afterwards mention, I am in real doubt about the advantage of this realistic education of Dickens. I am not sure that it made his books better; but I am sure it made them less bad. He made fewer mistakes undoubtedly; he succeeded in eliminating much of the mere rant or cant of his first books; he threw away much of the old padding, all the more annoying, perhaps, in a literary sense, because he did not mean it for padding, but for essential eloquence. But he did not produce anything actually better than Mr. Chuckster. But then there is nothing better than Mr. Chuckster. Certain works of art, such as the Venus of Milo, exhaust our aspiration. Upon the whole this may, perhaps, be safely said of the transition. Those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority of the later books. Beyond question they have less of what annoys us in Dickens. But do not, if you are in the company of any ardent adorers of Dickens (as I hope for your sake you are), do not insist too urgently and exclusively on the splendour of Dickens’s last works, or they will discover that you do not like him.

[Why do some not like Dickens?]
It is evident, in short, why even those who admire exaggeration do not admire Dickens. He is exaggerating the wrong thing. They know what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only impossible characters can express it: they do not know what it is to feel a joy so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express that. They know that the soul can be so sad as to dream naturally of the blue faces of the corpses of Baudelaire: they do not know that the soul can be so cheerful as to dream naturally of the blue face of Major Bagstock. They know that there is a point of depression at which one believes in Tintagiles: they do not know that there is a point of exhilaration at which one believes in Mr. Wegg. To them the impossibilities of Dickens seem much more impossible than they really are, because they are already attuned to the opposite impossibilities of Maeterlinck.

[Dickens' literary genius]
His literary genius consisted in a contradictory capacity at once to entertain and to deride — very ridiculous ideas. If he is a buffoon, he is laughing at buffoonery. His books were in some ways the wildest on the face of the world. Rabelais did not introduce into Paphlagonia or the Kingdom of the Coqcigrues satiric figures more frantic and misshapen than Dickens made to walk about the Strand and Lincoln’s Inn. But for all that, you come, in the core of him, on a sudden quietude and good sense. Such, I think, was the core of Rabelais, such were all the far-stretching and violent satirists. This is a point essential to Dickens, though very little comprehended in our current tone of thought. Dickens was an immoderate jester, but a moderate thinker. He was an immoderate jester because he was a moderate thinker. What we moderns call the wildness of his imagination was actually created by what we moderns call the tameness of his thought. I mean that he felt the full insanity of all extreme tendencies, because he was himself so sane; he felt eccentricities, because he was in the centre. We are always, in these days, asking our violent prophets to write violent satires; but violent prophets can never possibly write violent satires. In order to write satire like that of Rabelais — satire that juggles with the stars and kicks the world about like a football — it is necessary to be one’s self temperate, and even mild. A modern man like Nietzsche, a modern man like Gorky, a modern man like d’Annunzio, could not possibly write real and riotous satire. They are themselves too much on the borderlands. They could not be a success as caricaturists, for they are already a great success as caricatures.

[Dickens' sense of the strangeness of the world]
The chief fountain in Dickens of what I have called cheerfulness, and some prefer to call optimism, is something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is, after all, an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence. And this word “eccentricity” brings us, perhaps, nearer to the matter than any other. It is, perhaps, the strongest mark of the divinity of man that he talks of this world as “a strange world,” though he has seen no other. We feel that all there is is eccentric, though we do not know what is the centre. This sentiment of the grotesqueness of the universe ran through Dickens’s brain and body like the mad blood of the elves. He saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives, he saw all his cockney villas as top heavy and wild, he saw every man’s nose twice as big as it was, and very man’s eyes like saucers. And this was the basis of his gaiety — the only real basis of any philosophical gaiety. This world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. Its merit is not that it is orderly and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and utterly unexplained. Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.

[ENVOI]
The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.

Abandon hope: Dan Brown is back

We had been enjoying the respite, but it now seems that Mr. Dan Brown has gone and written another book:

Brown, one of the world’s bestselling authors, will publish his fifth novel on 14 May, his publishers announced this morning. Langdon, a Harvard professor of “symbology” who sports a “charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers”, will be adventuring through the “heart of Europe” this time round, where he will be “drawn into a harrowing world centred on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces”.

This ought to be good. And just what is the masterpiece that has had the misfortune to attract Mr. Brown’s attention? None other than Dante’s Inferno.

It is a canny (though, naturally, unhappy) choice: Inferno has an imposing reputation and a certain allure, though relatively few people have actually read it. Thus Mr. Brown gets them in the door, after which he can pretty much do what he wants. And I’ve no doubt he will, on both counts.

It is a hard thing to see a beloved book disfigured by a nincompoop, and quite a few mean-spirited witticisms occur to me. I am going to resist. It is probably too much to hope that the book will be a flop, so I content myself with this: I hope this is not the first volume in a trilogy.