A Birthday Wish by Aldous Huxley (G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Works)

Erasmus was the best-seller of the sixteenth century; all Europe read Voltaire; all the world has read or listened to George Berand Shaw. Works of art having a reasonableness-appeal can, if good enough, achieve a popularity almost equal to that accorded to sex-appeal and sect-appeal. The fact may seem surprising. But homo, after all, is sapiens as well as amans, credens and bellicosus. When an enormous talent places itself at the service of sweet reasonableness, the sapient and asthetic sides of human beings respond with enthusiasm. As artists, the apostles of rationality are admired and loved; as practical teachers, alas, they are ignored. If people had been content not merely to read Erasmus’s books, but to take his advice, there would have been no wars of religion, perhaps no revival of polytheism in its form of nation-worship; if they had done what Voltaire so brilliantly implored them to do, there would have been no French revolution, no Napoleonic imperialism, no universal military conscription; and if, instead of just applauding Mr. Shaw’s plays and chuckling over his prefaces, we had also paid some serious attention to his teaching, what remains of our civilization might not now be lying under sentence of death. But, as usual, homo amans, credens and bellicosus has proved to be a great deal stronger than homo sapiens. Reason continues to be used, in the main, as the instrument of passion. Science and technology are still the servants, not of truth, or liberty or happiness, but of nationalistic idolatry and the lust for political or economic power. As in the past, first-rate minds proclaim by their actions that they are ready to forward policies of unspeakable silliness and wickedness. According to the investigating psychologists at Nuremberg, Messrs. Schacht and Seyss-Inquart have IQ’s of over 140 and must therefore be placed in the “genius” category. Field-Marshal Goering is a close third, with a score of 138. Like patriotism, intelligence is evidently not enough. Then what is enough? Let us all wish Mr. Shaw as many happy returns of the day as will suffice him to distil his ripened wisdom into the answer which our world so desperately needs.

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1947, Philosopher’s Quest. From the book:

I think the finest of human beings are the true humanists, the true relativists. They are those who, like Montaigne, see the possibilities of all human points of view, who are convinced only that there is no absolute single set of convictions that are absolutely provable and true. Perhaps another name would be better for the more benign species of the unconvinced, I’d rather call them the unchained. They subscribe to no orthodoxy, cling to no doctrine, cram no literal faith down other people’s throats. But they have the tentative faith of the true humanist, they have the audacity of hope and the daring of adventure. They win converts by persuasion, by opening up horizons which they invite others to explore with them. They know… that:

…All experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

Ulysses didn’t wait for logic to force him to go on; he needed only a distant gleam. Drink to the gleam!

From Jacques Barzun’s Clio and the Doctors:

Assuming receptivity, history exerts its many-sided formative and reformative effect. It heightens resistance to the superstitions of the day, the flood of conventional knowledge — all of it plausibly wrong — that the surrounding sources of information keep spreading like a sterile sort of manure over contemporary thought. To believe that the persecution of witches was rife in the early Middle Ages “before the rise of scientific ideas”; that France was not prosperous but impoverished in 1789; that ancient Greece was a peace-loving democracy, peopled entirely by artists and patrons of art; that murder has for centuries been punished by death, and property similarly protected because valued as highly as life; that Magna Carta is the original charter of democratic rights, that scientific discovery precedes technological advance; that the first universities were established to teach the liberal arts and did teach them; that Roman law is the antithesis of the English Common Law and contributed nothing to it; that Machiavelli was a ruthless, immoral cynic, Macaulay an apologist for the Whig interest, and Plato a liberal rationalist; that until Darwin nobody knew about evolution and that only after him did religious faith begin to totter; that Hegel was the theorist of Prussian state tyranny and Nietzsche an advocate of world conquest by Nordics; that as the year 1000 approached all Europe feared the end of the world — to believe these and a hundred other pieces of “common knowledge” causes error and blindness in current decisions about science, religion, art, education, criminology, revolution, and social action generally. There need be no conscious reference to the beliefs; they act as the accepted base, or rather as the springboard, from which “educated” thought takes flight.

“In 1931 Macmillan published a book by an unknown English writer named Louis Arnaud Reid. He was attached to the University of Liverpool and his book was called A Study in Aesthetics. Few people read the book then, and although a book club adoption of the reissue in 1954 widened its circle of readers, I see no signs that its ideas have taken hold of the general mind. Reid is as unappreciated in the United States as is Collingwood. Yet Reid’s Study should be the bedside book of every critic and every amateur of the arts: it is the only work since Santayana that expounds a philosophy of art while giving evidence that the little three-letter word is to the author a living reality. And Reid’s aesthetics is the more catholic and truer of the two — a remarkable performance.” Jacques Barzun, Outstanding Books, 1931–1961

From Philosopher’s Holiday by Irwin Edman.

Left meant left when I was a lad,
And Right meant right — not simply bad;
These terms, both simple and geographic,
And principally used in directing traffic,
Were each of them spelt with a quite small letter.
Not even the teachers knew any better.
Now each has become a Moral Sign,
Dividing the race by a bitter line,
So that each of us knows who is good and bad,
Which none of us knew when I was a lad.

And the same holds true of Red and White,
Once the names for lovely forms of light,
The red of lips, or of skies at dawn,
Or geraniums glowing near a deep green lawn.
And I sigh for the days when left meant left
And weep in a world of peace bereft,
For the days when red meant a summer rose,
And white meant a mountain clad in starlit snows.

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1938, Philosopher’s Holiday.

“I choose Philosopher’s Holiday because it so well represents the mind and manner of Irwin Edman (for, after all, it is minds and men that we mean when we speak of books). His comprehensive range, his amused yet balanced assessment of ideas and persons as they are manifested in the goings-on in our little world, and his rare clarity of expression give this popularly conceived work an enduring freshness. Edman carried on the tradition of our great teachers and it is not extravagant to suggest that he enriched it by his contribution to the scholarship of our day.” B. W. Huebsch, Outstanding Books, 1931–1961

The Conquerors by Phyllis McGinley

It seems vainglorious and proud
Of Atom-man to boast aloud
 His prowess homicidal
When one remembers how for years,
With their rude stones and humble spears,
Our sires, at wiping out their peers,
 Were almost never idle.

Despite his under-fissioned art
The Hittite made a splendid start
 Toward smiting lesser nations;
While Tamerlane, it’s widely known,
Without a bomb to call his own
 Destroyed whole populations.

Nor did the ancient Persian need
Uranium to kill his Mede,
 The Viking earl, his foeman.
The Greeks got excellent results
With swords and engined catapults.
 A chariot served the Roman.

Mere cannon garnered quite a yield
On Waterloo’s tempestuous field.
 At Hastings and at Flodden
Stout countrymen, with just a bow
And arrow, laid their thousands low.
 And Gettysburg was sodden.

Though doubtless now our shrewd machines
Can blow the world to smithereens
 More tidily and so on,
Let’s give our ancestors their due.
Their ways were coarse, their weapons few.
But ah! how wondrously they slew
 With what they had to go on.

(Times Three, 1960)

New at IWP Books: Irwin Edman, 1926, Richard Kane Looks at Life.

Jacques Barzun’s review of the book.

Hiram Haydn on Edman (and Barzun): “I considered Edman, [Christian] Gauss, [Harlow] Shapley and Irita Van Doren immortals. Soon Barzun joined their company.” (Words & Faces)

From Abinger Harvest.

Nice Mr. Grey and Mr. Brown
Have recently arrived from town,
Their country’s interests to promote.
I wonder how I ought to vote?
Each is so pleasant and so rich
I scarce remember which is which,
Each has a wife and a cigar,
Two daughters and a motor-car.
Each wears a watch-chain, and of course
Each has a Military Cross,
Won, during the Allies’ advance,
Somewhere behind the lines in France,
And shares in steel and poison-gas,
And oil, and coal, so that — alas! —
I scarce distinguish what they say,
Nice Mr. Brown and Mr. Grey.

“Our difference” (they say to me)
“Lies in our fiscal policy.”
Mr. Brown’s a Conservative,
And certain products that arrive
From certain countries, he would tax —
I think he mentioned sealing-wax —
While Mr. Grey’s a Liberal,
And wouldn’t tax such things at all.
Each of them wears a fur great-coat:
I wonder how I ought to vote?

For if to either I impart
The word that’s graven on my heart,
Nineteen-fourteen, they smile and say,
“We do not want a war today,
We don’t want war as yet; our aim
Is (save for sealing-wax) the same.
We’re merely wanting to get in,
And then — why then we can begin.”
And behind Mr. Brown there stands,
With glittering prizes in his hands,
And jolly words about the dead,
The Lord High Galloper Birkenhead.
And behind Mr. Grey I see
Great Churchill of Gallipoli,
Who did immortal glory win
Through Kolchak and through Denikin.
Saved Antwerp, pacified the Turk,
And now is needing further work.

And thus, whichever way I vote,
I get into the same old boat,
And Mr. Brown and Mr. Grey
Are rowing in the same old way —
The way of blood and fire and tears
And pestilence and profiteers —
The way that all mankind has been
Since nineteen hundred and fourteen.
Nice Mr. Grey! Nice Mr. Brown,
Why trouble to come down from town?

Jacques Barzun on Phyllis McGinley’s A Short Walk from the Station (American Panorama, 1957)