New at IWP Books: E. M. Forster (1934) Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. W. H. Auden (Foreword to the Abinger Edition, 1973):

I read this book when it came out in 1934. Rereading it now, it seems to me even better than I remembered… That this biography should be the great book it is, seems to me a miracle. To begin with, it is not easy to write justly and objectively about a personal friend, a situation which, Goldie wrote, when asked to review a book by Forster, “leads us Cambridge people to under-estimate virtues and gifts for fear of being too partial”. Then nothing is more difficult than writing an interesting book about a really nice person. The biographer of a monster, like Wagner, has a far easier task. Bad behaviour always has a dramatic appeal. Forster imagines Mephistopheles asking him why a memoir of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson needs to be written, and when he answers, “My friend was beloved, affectionate, unselfish, intelligent, witty, charming, inspiring,” the devil says, “Yes, but that is neither here nor there, or rather it was there but it is no longer here.” Forster can only reply:

“These qualities in Goldie were fused into such an unusual creature that no one whom one has met with in the flesh or in history the least resembles it, and no words exist in which to define it. He was an indescribably rare being, he was rare without being enigmatic, he was rare in the only direction which seems to be infinite: the direction of the Chorus Mysticus. He did not merely increase our experience: he left us more alert for what has not yet been experienced and more hopeful about other men because he had lived. And a biography of him, if it succeeded, would resemble him; it would achieve the unattainable, express the inexpressible, turn the passing into the everlasting. Have I done that? Das Unbeschreibliche hier ist’s getan? No. And perhaps it only could be done through music. But that is what has lured me on.”

New at IWP Books: Leo Stein (1947) Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose. From the Introduction:

Conventional thinking uses conventional classifications that are taken to be natural and inevitable, although in great part they lead to confusion. People speak as though they mean one thing when they really intend something else. A typical instance is that of the British Constitution, which even such clever politicians as the Founding Fathers did not really understand because the words used to describe it were fictitious. Not till Bagehot, well on in the nineteenth century, described it in terms which actually fitted it, did people stop thinking and speaking of it in terms that did not fit. It is a misfortune of our present culture that so much of our creative energy goes into our enormously available propaganda and so little into the precising of meanings, which is for the most part left to the men of science. Veracity means not lying, and nothing more stands in the way of veracity than words like democracy, liberty, good will, liberal culture, ideals and hundreds of other words, which sound as though they mean something particular but really mean anything or nothing. Instead of talking with detailed precision, which would show one’s hand, or more precisely, one’s mind and morals, one uses these inspirational, but to the critical mind, depressing words. There is no flattering unction laid to the soul more damning than holy words that cover realities with which holiness has nothing to do, and the first need of a substantial education is to learn the relation of words to things.

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence:

Ortega y Gasset died at mid-century, but in his treatment of the arts, education, psychology, and social theory, this aptest observer of his period delineated the leading features of the next. That he was not much cited or quoted after his death does not amount to a settled judgment upon him. [The book to read is: Ortega y Gasset: A Pragmatic Philosophy of Life by John T. Graham.] Sooner or later he will have to be heard as a witness — and not alone. To know the whole century adequately, historians will have to listen to the words of several others who also belong to its formative time. To cite only three Americans: John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock, and Leo Stein.

Books by Ortega y Gasset, John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock and Leo Stein at IWP Books.

Leo Stein on William James (American Mercury, 1926). Soon at IWP Books: Stein’s (1947) Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose

From E. M. Forster (1940/1951), “Tolerance” (Two Cheers for Democracy):

Tolerance, I believe, will be imperative after the establishment of peace. It’s always useful to take a concrete instance: and I have been asking myself how I should behave if, after peace was signed, I met Germans who had been fighting against us. I shouldn’t try to love them: I shouldn’t feel inclined. They have broken a window in my little ugly flat for one thing. But I shall try to tolerate them, because it is common sense, because in the post-war world we shall have to live with Germans. We can’t exterminate them, any more than they have succeeded in exterminating the Jews. We shall have to put up with them, not for any lofty reason, but because it is the next thing that will have to be done.

Two Cheers for Democracy at IWP Books. Review by Jacques Barzun at IWP Articles.

New at IWP Books: E. M. Forster (1951) Two Cheers for Democracy. From Jacques Barzun, “Why Not the Third Cheer?” (The Griffin, 1951, volume I, no. 1):

Reading E. M. Forster’s new book makes it perfectly clear that he is first and foremost a novelist. Two Cheers for Democracy is a book of essays that constitute an affirmation of political faith, but it is the characteristic affirmation of an author who can scarcely keep from writing fiction.

Do not mistake me: I do not mean that his facts are false. I mean that the strongest impression left by the book is of dialogue, dramatis personae, vivid settings, and that confident hand of the master showman to which the novels have accustomed us. Whether the author describes in exquisite slow motion how a chicken casserole was spilled over his only good suit in South Africa, or whether he brings to life the figures of T. E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, he is unmistakably there, contriving to exhibit to its best advantage the contours of a reality that his clear imagination seeks and grasps. We se things all the better because he himself is so tangibly present, and also, of course, because he has no thought of showing himself of. On the contrary, he dismisses himself over and over again with the irresistible humor of one who prefers to be less important than his scene or subject, of one who expects to have the sauce spilled on his trousers and rejoices that he can make so much more of it than anyone else.

This atmosphere and this technique may seem far removed from politics but they are not actually so. The combination of being present and being unobtrusive is what Mr. Forster means by being an individual and a democrat. It is the point of his definition, which one will not discover in any single passage of the book but which arises unmistakably from the sum of his statements. These statements concern a great variety of subjects, ranging from general discussion of the arts and criticism to particular treatments of T. S. Eliot, Voltaire, Gibbon, Milton, Edward Carpenter, Auden, Stefan George, Tolstoy, and a number of obscurer men; from excellent pieces on war aims to sketches of travel in America, India, Africa, and Europe; from autobiography to obituaries and full-dress reviews of major writers. But because the democratic faith is truly in Mr. Forster, and because he has endlessly examined its grounds, he can impart it and show its relevance to whatever he touches. This power is in fact the result of what he means by “being an individual,” that is to say being not perfect but complete. And this in turn is what makes Two Cheers for Democracy a Portrait of the Liberal in Stubborn Mood.

George Santayana (Selected Critical Writings, 1968) on Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson:

My other friend at King’s [was] Lowes Dickinson. His classicism was not of the rough, coarse, realistic Roman kind, but Greek, as attenuated and Platonized as possible, and seen through Quaker spectacles. I liked his Greek View of Life, but it wasn’t Greek life as depicted by Aristophanes or by Plutarch; it was what a romantic Puritan of our time would wish Greek life to have been. War, lust, cruelty and confusion were washed out of it. Dickinson was super-sensitive, hard-working, unhappy, and misguided. His gift was for form; his privately printed poems seemed to me admirable; but his subject-matter was perverse, even in those poems, and much more, I think, in his philosophy and politics. He prayed, watched, and laboured to redeem human life, and began by refusing to understand what human life is. Too weak to face the truth, he set himself a task too great for Titans: to shatter this world to bits, and put it together again on a moralistic plan. If at least that plan had been beautiful, he might have consoled himself for his practical impotence by being an avowed poet; but his plan was incoherent, negative, sentimental. It was that no one should suffer, and that all should love one another: in other words, that no one should be alive or should distinguish what he loved from what he hated.

Poor Dickinson came once or twice to America, the first time to give some Lowell Lectures in Boston. It was winter, and he suffered from the cold, as well as from the largeness and noise of the town. I remember his horror when the electric car we were in got into the subway, and the noise became deafening; also his misery when one evening we walked across the Harvard bridge, and he murmured, shivering: “I have never been so cold in my life.” The cocktail, he said, was the only good thing in America. He hated the real, bumptious, cordial democracy that he found there; he would have liked a silent, Franciscan, tender democracy, poor, clean, and inspired. If he could have visited New England sixty years earlier he might have found sympathetic souls at Concord or at Brook Farm. He wouldn’t have liked them, reformers don’t like one another; but at least he might have imagined that the world was moving towards something better. As it was, he found that it was sliding hellwards with a whoop of triumph.

Books by G. Lowes Dickinson at IWP Books, including A Modern Symposium, “the Bible of Tolerance” (E. M. Forster). Soon at IWP Books: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson by E. M. Forster (1934).

New at IWP Books: E. M. Forster, 1936, Abinger Harvest. Which, according to Aldous Huxley, “contains some of the most delicately witty writing of our century.” From the Chapter on Wilfrid Blunt:

Which side are you on, Gog or Magog? O solemn question. Behold the two worthies, each a little moth-eaten but still hale and trailing a venerable beard. Fine work can be done under either banner, but which is it to be? Choose. Gog stands for — well you can see what he stands for, and Magog stands for opposition to Gog. So choose, and having chosen, stick, for such is the earthly destiny of man.

Hypnotized by the appeal, we choose. Sometimes we choose without thinking, sometimes sort our memories, prejudices, interests, and ideals into two heaps, call one Gog and the other Magog, and plump for the larger. In the first case our choice is known as instinctive, in the second as rational, but in either we are duly enrolled under one of the banners. It is seldom, very seldom, that a dreadful thing happens — an almost unmentionable scandal — and one of us refuses to choose at all, says: “I don’t understand,” or “Dummies don’t interest me,” and strolls away. He might, at all events, have the decency to keep away. But sometimes he will not even do that. He strolls back and begins interfering, just as if he had never forsworn his birthright. He sees what shouldn’t be seen and says what shouldn’t be said, he taps Magog’s head and, lo! it sounds hollow; he slits Gog’s breeches and out pours the bran. “Go away,” everyone shrieks, but he won’t go away. There is a flower he wants to pick, and a friend he wants to help irrespective of banners, and menaced by such an intruder Gog and Magog relinquish their hoary feud and make alliance. Here is the real enemy — the man who does not know how to take sides — and they agree that such a man shall never become powerful. He never does — giants can effect thus much. But he may be the salt of his age.

On Wilfrid Blunt, see, too, “Shooting with Wilfrid Blunt,” in Desmond MacCarthy’s Memories (PDF).

From Jacques Barzun, “Beliefs for Sale: 1900–1950” (2001/2002, The Georgia Review, v. 55/56):

I was reminded just a few days ago when Lord Lindsay died, of an address that he gave at Columbia shortly after he had become master of Balliol College. He began his remarks by saying, “Gentlemen, I should tell you that I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist.” Some of the audience were naturally bewildered, but Lord Lindsay went on to explain that he meant something which should by now be perfectly obvious… He meant that as a free man endowed with independence and originality — gifts of nature — he wanted a liberal regime; as a propertied man, a student of history, and a political philosopher, he wanted to conserve some of the great institutions and great traditions that his own country and Western culture generally put at his disposal; while as a man of the twentieth century he recognized the needs created by technology and the rise everywhere of popular states, of universal democracy. He knew that new institutions — whether called socialist or democratic or anything else — must arise to meet the demands of community life. The occasion for them may be public hygiene or flood control or the regulation of the airways: one need not specify here (nor be systematic anywhere) as regards the purview of the new collective institutions. The important thing is rather to recognize that the three traditions of the Western world can no longer be taken as mutually exclusive choices. The problem is not whether to stay a liberal and fight the conservatives, or else join hands between liberals and conservatives to fight the socialists. The problem is to find a way of compounding what is livable in all three so that a stupid, doctrinaire socialism will not down the liberal individual; so that a stupid, doctrinaire liberalism will not let the nation and the economy fritter itself away; and so that a stupid, doctrinaire conservatism will not sulk and dream, and resist the forward-moving reality.

Available at IWP Books:

• 1923, On the Margin
• 1925, Along the Road
• 1926, Jesting Pilate
• 1927, Proper Studies
• 1929, Do What You Will
• 1930, Music at Night
• 1934, Beyond the Mexique Bay (NEW)
• 1936, The Olive Tree
• 1937, Ends and Means
• 1941, Grey Eminence
• 1947, Science, Liberty and Peace
• 1950, Themes & Variations
• 1956, Adonis and the Alphabet
• 1958, Brave New World Revisited (NEW)

From “Books for the Journey” (Aldous Huxley, 1925, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist):

India paper and photography have rendered possible the inclusion in a portable library of what in my opinion is the best traveller’s book of all — a volume (any one of the thirty-two will do) of the twelfth, half-size edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It takes up very little room (eight and a half inches by six and a half by one is not excessive), it contains about a thousand pages and an almost countless number of curious and improbable facts. It can be dipped into anywhere, its component chapters are complete in themselves and not too long. For the traveller, disposing as he does only of brief half-hours, it is the perfect book, the more so, since I take it that, being a born traveller, he is likely also to be one of those desultory and self-indulgent readers to whom the Encyclopaedia, when not used for some practical purpose, must specially appeal. I never pass a day away from home without taking a volume with me. It is the book of books. Turning over its pages, rummaging among the stores of fantastically varied facts which the hazards of alphabetical arrangement bring together, I wallow in my mental vice. A stray volume of the Encyclopaedia is like the mind of a learned madman — stored with correct ideas, between which, however, there is no other connection than the fact that there is a B in both; from orach, or mountain spinach, one passes directly to oracles. That one does not oneself go mad, or become, in the process of reading the Encyclopaedia, a mine of useless and unrelated knowledge is due to the fact that one forgets. The mind has a vast capacity for oblivion. Providentially; otherwise, in the chaos of futile memories, it would be impossible to remember anything useful or coherent. In practice, we work with generalizations, abstracted out of the turmoil of realities. If we remembered everything perfectly, we should never be able to generalize at all; for there would appear before our minds nothing but individual images, precise and different. Without ignorance we could not generalize. Let us thank Heaven for our powers of forgetting. With regard to the Encyclopaedia, they are enormous. The mind only remembers that of which it has some need. Five minutes after reading about mountain spinach, the ordinary man, who is neither a botanist nor a cook, has forgotten all about it. Read for amusement, the Encyclopaedia serves only to distract for the moment; it does not instruct, it deposits nothing on the surface of the mind that will remain. It is a mere time-killer and momentary tickler of the mind. I use it only for amusement on my travels; I should be ashamed to indulge so wantonly in mere curiosity at home, during seasons of serious business.