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.’

New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1943, Day of Fire.

Men and Poetry

Men write poetry,
 If they can.
Poetry! Poetry!
 What a thing is man,
Dreaming, scheming,
In the gloom or in the gleaming,
To find redeeming
 In a line’s thin span!

`A cry that echoes,
 An echo that cries,’
Takes him, wakes him
 To Paradise.
The strong verse, thundering
Through the brain blundering,
Sets him wondering,
 Unseals his eyes.

Wars bellow round him.
 They will blow by
And be forgotten
 Before the cry
Of a voice lifted
Over the rifted
Desert, sand-drifted,
 Where the bones are dry.

Evil Days

The field constricts,
 The view narrows.
Poor Hope conflicts
 With the slings and arrows.

The storm rises
 And overtakes.
The squall surprises,
 The wave breaks.

Ours is no light
 And healthy mood.
Old griefs bite.
 Sick thoughts intrude.

What we did ill
 Is written plain,
Against our will,
 Across the brain.

What we did well
 Can play no part
In the strange Hell
 Of the strange heart,

To itself a stranger,
 Staring with dim
Eyes at danger
 Beyond the rim

That all things known
 Obscurely girds
And will not own
 The rule of words.

Though Hell unchain
 The cataract,
Never complain!
 Act! Act! Act!

The Bulwarks Break

Now all the bulwarks sunder
 That stood so strong before.
We and our kind go under
 The slow wave of war.

We shall not judge all matters
 Henceforward from afar.
For now disaster batters
 At all we were and are.

The instant of decision
 Too openly has shown
The dullness of our vision,
 Our thought’s dim monotone.

The scheme of things that fitted
 Some pattern that we knew
Now proves device half-witted,
 Which we ourselves see through.

What if our every blunder
 Show clear in ghastly light?
Though all the bulwarks sunder,
 Now look alive and fight!

What Our Enemies Ignore

By force or indirection,
 In ignorance unchecked,
They seek their own subjection,
 Who labor to subject.

To the Huns and those who lead ’em
 This never has been known:
Only in others’ freedom
 Can nations find their own.

Zero-Hour

Now in the hour when our hopes tremble,
 When they whom we abhor decide,
It does not help us to dissemble,
 Though triumph be as yet denied.

Their conquest? In the end what victory
 Can crown a system and a plan,
In every aspect contradictory
 To the vision and the hope of man?

To every faith, to every dream,
 That moves sweet creatures young or old?
We must not pander to that scheme,
 Accept the domination cold

That palsies man into a type,
 A marionette in uniform,
Contented with a Sergeant’s stripe,
 And `kept mechanically warm.’

God send we keep ourselves as free
 As the great woods our fathers knew,
As waters of ‘the Ocean-Sea’
 Their crank blunt cock-boats blundered through.

From William James’s Pragmatism.

I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying ‘no play.’ I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strung-along successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one’s self:

  A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
  Bids you set sail.
  Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,
  Weathered the gale.

New at IWP Books: Arthur Guiterman, 1924, A Poet’s Proverbs.

Don’t tell your Friends abour your Indigestion:
“How are you!” is a Greeting, not a Question.

A House begins to be a Ruin, when
A Fallen Tile is not put back again.

The Past’s a Book wherein some Truths are found,
But not a Chain by which Men’s Feet are bound.

If all the World looks drear, perhaps the meaning
Is that your Windows need a little Cleaning.

No Path can give Delight
To him whose Shoes are Tight.

Adventurers who dare not sail their Ships
Till Wind and Tide are fair, will make Few Trips.

Sailor bold, be not too bold;
The Ship is Young, the Sea is Old.

He that’s called the Fearless One
Oft is he that Feared to Run.

You’re sure that you are Right? How fine and strong!
But were you never just as Sure — and Wrong?

Who takes one Stroke in turn at Every Tree,
Fells None, however sharp his Ax may be.

If Errand-running be your Part,
Raise Errand-running to an Art.

The Wise must seek the Dull, else Wisdom dies;
For hardly will the Dull seek out the Wise.

“Our Cause is Just!” so all Men say
“God send us Victory!” But long
I look for One who dares to pray,
“God send Defeat if I am Wrong!

Men often think they do not Care to do
The Deeds they really do not Dare to do.