New at IWP Books: George Crabbe, 1810, The Borough.

But fix our Scholar, and suppose him crown’d
With all the glory gain’d on classic ground;
Suppose the world without a sigh resign’d,
And to his college all his care confined;
Give him all honours that such states allow,
The freshman’s terror and the tradesman’s bow;
Let his apartments with his taste agree,
And all his views be those he loves to see;
Let him each day behold the savoury treat,
For which he pays not, but is paid to eat;
These joys and glories soon delight no more,
Although, withheld, the mind is vex’d and sore;
The honour too is to the place confined,
Abroad they know not each superior mind:
Strangers no wranglers in these figures see,
Nor give they worship to a high degree;
Unlike the prophet’s is the scholar’s case,
His honour all is in his dwelling-place:
And there such honours are familiar things;
What is a monarch in a crowd of kings?
Like other sovereigns he’s by forms address’d,
By statutes governed and with rules oppress’d.

When all these forms and duties die away,
And the day passes like the former day,
Then of exterior things at once bereft,
He’s to himself and one attendant left;
Nay, John too goes; nor aught of service more
Remains for him; he gladly quits the door,
And, as he whistles to the college-gate,
He kindly pities his poor master’s fate.

Books cannot always please, however good;
Minds are not ever craving for their food;
But sleep will soon the weary soul prepare
For cares to-morrow that were this day’s care:
For forms, for feasts, that sundry times have past,
And formal feasts that will for ever last.

“But then from Study will no comforts rise?” —
Yes! such as studious minds alone can prize;
Comforts, yea! — joys ineffable they find,
Who seek the prouder pleasures of the mind:
The soul, collected in those happy hours,
Then makes her efforts, then enjoys her powers;
And in those seasons feels herself repaid,
For labours past and honours long delay’d.

No! ’tis not worldly gain, although by chance
The sons of learning may to wealth advance;
Nor station high, though in some favouring hour
The sons of learning may arrive at power;
Nor is it glory, though the public voice
Of honest praise will make the heart rejoice:
But ’tis the mind’s own feelings give the joy,
Pleasures she gathers in her own employ —
Pleasures that gain or praise cannot bestow,
Yet can dilate and raise them when they flow.

Recommended: E. M. Forster’s “George Crabbe and Peter Grimes” (Two Cheers for Democracy).

By A. H. Clough, 1839

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace!
Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.

On stormy nights while wild north-westers rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast
Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

From Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee.

“If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavor to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side. From this Sir John Lubbock concludes that the intelligence of the bee is exceedingly limited, and that the fly shows far greater skill in extricating itself from a difficulty, and finding its way. This conclusion, however, would not seem altogether flawless. Turn the transparent sphere twenty times, if you will, holding now the base, now the neck, to the window, and you will find that the bees will turn twenty times with it, so as always to face the light. It is their love of the light, it is their very intelligence, that is their undoing in this experiment of the English savant. They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too logical action. To them glass is a supernatural mystery they never have met with in nature; they have had no experience of this suddenly impenetrable atmosphere; and, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the feather-brained flies, careless of logic as of the enigma of crystal, disregarding the call of the light, flutter wildly hither and thither, and, meeting here the good fortune that often waits on the simple, who find salvation there where the wiser will perish, necessarily end by discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them.”

From Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.”

George Crabbe: “Let one mind one, and all are minded then.”

From Hannah Arendt’s Society and Culture.

“Richard Blackmur… has brilliantly shown that the present malaise of the intellectual springs from the fact that he finds himself surrounded, not by the masses, from whom, on the contrary, he is carefully shielded, but by these digesters, re-writers, and changers of culture whom we find in every publishing house in the United states. And these ‘professionals’ are ably assisted by those who no longer write books but fabricate them, who manufacture a ‘new’ textbook out of four or five already on the market, and who then have, as Blackmur shows, only one worry — how to avoid plagiarism. (Meanwhile the editor does his best to substitute clichés for sheer illiteracy.) Here the criterion of novelty, quite legitimate in the entertainment industry, becomes a simple fake and, indeed, a threat: it is only too likely that the ‘new’ textbook will crowd out the older ones, which usually are better, not because they are older, but because they were still written in response to authentic needs.

“The state of affairs, which indeed is equaled nowhere else in the world, can properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses nor their entertainers, but are those who try to entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture, or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and educational as well. The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”

From Jacques Barzun’s Administering and the Law.

“…in institutional life and in the public mind, it is considered trivial and below one’s dignity to bother with details. It shocked some of my colleagues when as dean I gave my mind to revising some forms used by the graduate admissions office. Next I took up some one hundred twenty models of letters used in reply to inquiries and reduced them to about twenty, making the choice easier and more uniform. I also reduced them to intelligible English. With help from reluctant academic colleagues, I prepared a faculty handbook, a student guide, and an administrative guide, which provided quick means of finding out how to get, without friction or floundering, what anyone was entitled to, from a sabbatical leave to a larger wastebasket. These scholarly works not only reassured faculty and students about the fairness and efficiency of the central administration, they contributed to both — by holding the supporting staff and the faculty to their duties and by stating the norm that would justify complaints.

“While I was doing this supposedly dreary work, I was not making pronouncements in defense of the liberal arts or hammering out a new definition of the educated man. Some would say that I was not playing my proper role of educational leader. But I knew that I had eighteen thousand qualified colleagues across the country defending the liberal arts and giving eighteen thousand new definitions of education. So I could take time off to do a little practical work in education itself.”

From George Crabbe’s The Library.

But what strange art, what magic can dispose
The troubled mind to change its native woes?
Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see
Others more wretched, more undone than we?
This Books can do; — nor this alone; they give
New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:
Their aid they yield to all: they never shun
The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:
Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,
They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
Nor tell to various people various things,
But show to subjects what they show to kings.

With awe, around these silent walks I tread;
These are the lasting mansions of the dead:
“The dead!” methinks a thousand tongues reply;
“These are the tombs of such as cannot die!”
Crown’d with eternal fame, they sit sublime,
“And laugh at all the little strife of time.”

But man, who knows no good unmix’d and pure,
Oft finds a poison where he sought a cure;

What thought so wild, what airy dream so light,
That will not prompt a theorist to write?
What art so prevalent, what proof so strong,
That will convince him his attempt is wrong?

From George Crabbe’s The Newspaper.

A daily swarm, that banish every Muse,
Come flying forth, and mortals call them News:
For these, unread, the noblest volumes lie;
For these, in sheets unsoil’d, the Muses die;
Unbought, unblest, the virgin copies wait
In vain for fame, and sink, unseen, to fate.

New at IWP Books: Roy Campbell, 1939, Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain. Peter Alexander in Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography: “The poem is easily the most undisciplined he ever wrote, linked as it is by nothing except the violence of his invective against the Left. There is no ‘plot,’ and no attempt to impose a structure on the work.”

When Bolshevism’s left upon the hob,
With no one else to murder or to rob,
Then suicide becomes its only job —
Wolves wolfing wolves, bears over-bearing bears,
And Socialism slaughtering its heirs,
Lest mere experience should teach these comics
Some rudiments of life or economics…

For he who puts mere Labour to the fore
Will drive the finer angels from the door
And slay the myth by whose creating fire
Adam was first ignited from the mire —
The finest workers and the first on duty,
Who subject labour still to love or beauty,
Win far more grace and far less duties shirk
Than those who make a gospel of their work:
And man’s true need, beyond another thing
In ruling nature, is to shine and sing,
Wherever this is so, his triumph’s plain
As you may see in liberated Spain.
No drudgery performed this peerless feat
The surplus of a million tons of wheat,
But normal effort between song and prayer
Though only half the harvesters were there —
Less than on strength or numbers, work depends
On mood: and that, upon the purposed ends…

Sancho the servant was a great success
But when he ruled the island made a mess,
Nor can you raise the menial to a crown
Though on his pate you pulled Olympus down!
Work’s but the simplest way of getting bread
No hardship but a privilege instead:
No special dignity to it attaches —
Though more than to the plight of selling matches,
To living on a woman, pimping, thieving,
Or printing lies for other folk’s believing.
That one can crank a car or wash a dish up
Entitles nobody to roast a bishop,
With rights of life and death over one’s neighbour
To rape, to burn, to torture, and belabour.
It may be true of the Slavonic nation,
But two, in Spain, can play at “liquidation.”
The Left possessed the all-compelling arms
Which drove us from the factories and farms
Strike after strike was ordered and compelled
And it was death if honesty rebelled.
For they resented willingness and skill
And that we could go fighting up the hill —
As if a race of drones with guns and knives
Crazed with a creed that grudges and deprives
Can better men in whom the Faith survives
Or clean the world before they clean their lives.
The reformation of the whole world’s sin
Is not in other people, but within.

From Leonard Bacon’s Day of Fire.

Easter Evening, 1942

Is this the time to speak? Shall we tell the strong
What they already know? Or tell the weak
What not to fear? Divide the right and wrong
With the musical tongue in the poetic cheek?

Shall we lift up some outcry, when our fate
Moves on us like a hurricane or flood?
With a few syllables make more delicate
The spectacle of violence and blood?

No! There is only this. And no Tyrtaean
Sentence is worth the expenditure of ink.
We need no marching song, nor any paean,
Only reality in what we think

And the mere valor of the common man,
That always will continue and persist,
That can endure all grief, and knows it can,
And, till it wins, will not unclench the fist.

It is beginning of wisdom when we withdraw
From the pleasant places where all things went well.
That’s over. We obey the ancient law
That makes strange Heaven in as strange a Hell.

Many are cowards. Many others lie.
The cowards must learn courage, the liar learn
Not to invent disasters in the sky,
Where, he has said, only cross planets burn.

‘Not for some victory,’ not for any race,
Or dull dominion of this world we fight
But for all strength of thought, kindness, and grace
That made ‘the feud with chaos and old Night.’