New at IWP Books: Aphorisms by John Morley, 1887.

New at IWP Books: Woodrow Wilson on Walter Bagehot, 1895, 1898. “Woodrow Wilson, who learned so much from Bagehot, and who has written the best short study of him…” (Jacques Barzun).

From the Translator’s Preface to Invertebrate Spain: “The first three essays herein presented were taken from the volume whose Spanish title, España Invertebrada, provided the subject as well as the title for this book. The others were chosen from other volumes of Señor Ortega’s work because they shed added light on problems which he indicated in that famous analysis, or because they were pertinent to aspects of the present struggle.” Not a full translation, then, of España Invertebrada.

From Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain:

…the amalgamating process which takes place in the formation of any great nation is a labor of totalization; in that process, social groups which have hitherto led independent lives become integrated as parts of a whole. Disintegration is an inverse process: parts of the whole begin to live as separate groups. I call this phenomenon particularism… The essence of particularism is that each group ceases to feel itself part of a whole, and therefore ceases to share the feelings of the rest. The hopes and needs of the others mean nothing to it, and it does nothing to help them win their hearts’ desires. Since the current of sympathy is cut, the woes that afflict a neighbor have no effect on the other groups, and he is left abandoned in weakness and misfortune. On the other hand, hyper-sensitiveness to one’s own ailments is a characteristic of this social state. Disagreements or difficulties which are easily borne during periods of cohesion come to be intolerable when the spirit of a national life in common has disintegrated.

Is it, then, so strange that the majority of Spaniards, and even of the best Spaniards, should finally begin to ask themselves, “What are we living together for?” Because living is something done with a forward motion, it is an activity which moves from the present toward the immediate future. For living, an echo of the past is not enough, and much less for living together. That is why Renan said that a nation is, by the very act of existing, a daily plebiscite. Every day, in the secrecy of every heart, there is a fateful balloting which decides whether or not the nation can, in truth, go on being a nation. In what activity is the government going to ask our enthusiastic collaboration tomorrow? For a long, long time, indeed for centuries, the government has been pretending that we Spaniards existed merely that it might give itself the pleasure of existing. As the pretext grew more and more meager, Spain went on wasting away…. Today we are not so much a people as a cloud of dust that was left hovering in the air when a great people went galloping down the high road of history.

Amiel on La Fontaine (Journal Intime, July 17, 1877).

Yesterday I went through my La Fontaine, and noticed the omissions in him. He has neither butterfly nor rose. He utilizes neither the crane, nor the quail, nor the dromedary, nor the lizard. There is not a single echo of chivalry in him. For him, the history of France dates from Louis XIV. His geography only ranges, in reality, over a few square miles, and touches neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the mountains nor the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this what an adorable writer, what a painter, what an observer, what a humorist, what a story-teller! I am never tired of reading him, though I know half his fables by heart. In the matter of vocabulary, turns, tones, phrases, idioms, his style is perhaps the richest of the great period, for it combines, in the most skillful way, archaism and classic finish, the Gallic and the French elements. Variety, satire, finesse, feeling, movement, terseness, suavity, grace, gayety, at times even nobleness, gravity, grandeur — everything — is to be found in him. And then the happiness of the epithets, the piquancy of the sayings, the felicity of his rapid sketches and unforeseen audacities, and the unforgettable sharpness of phrase! His defects are eclipsed by his immense variety of different aptitudes.

One has only to compare his “Woodcutter and Death” with that of Boileau in order to estimate the enormous difference between the artist and the critic who found fault with his work. La Fontaine gives you a picture of the poor peasant under the monarchy; Boileau shows you nothing but a man perspiring under a heavy load. The first is a historical witness, the second a mere academic rhymer. From La Fontaine it is possible to reconstruct the whole society of his epoch, and the old Champenois with his beasts remains the only Homer France has ever possessed. He has as many portraits of men and women as La Bruyère, and Molière is not more humorous.

His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of grossness. This, no doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike him. The religious note is absent from his lyre; there is nothing in him which shows any contact with Christianity, any knowledge of the sublimer tragedies of the soul. Kind nature is his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne his gospel. In other words, his horizon is that of the Renaissance. This pagan island in the full Catholic stream is very curious; the paganism of it is so perfectly sincere and naïve. But indeed, Rabelais, Molière, Saint Evremond, are much more pagan than Voltaire. It is as though, for the genuine Frenchman, Christianity was a mere pose or costume — something which has nothing to do with the heart, with the real man, or his deeper nature. This division of things is common in Italy too. It is the natural effect of political religions: the priest becomes separated from the layman, the believer from the man, worship from sincerity.

From Gary Saul Morson’s Review of On The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.

As Herbert Butterfield famously argued in The Whig Interpretation of History, the closer we get to developments, the less they fit a pattern or reveal some essential story. “The thing that is unhistorical,” Butterfield argues, “is to imagine that we can get the essence apart from the accidents.” Things change “not by a line but by a labyrinthine piece of network,” and so a major development that looks inevitable is in reality “born of strange conjunctures, it represents purposes marred perhaps more than purposes achieved, and it owes more than we can tell to many agencies that had little to do” with a coherent plot. The simple story we trace in retrospect represents what Tolstoy called “the fallacy of retrospection.” Solzhenitsyn was concerned to project “the Russia that might have been,” Hasegawa to create the sense of multiple turning points that could have led elsewhere.

New at IWP Books: Josephine Tey, 1952, The Singing Sands. From Barzun & Taylor, A Catalog of Crime: “Published posthumously, which may account for certain defects that the author might have altered in proof. The plot seems overwrought and the chief characters occasionally fall out of drawing. But other features come out of Miss Tey’s best vein, and the work belongs in the middle range between bad and superb.”

From The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Edited by Samuel Titan, Translated by Tess Lewis (2019).

I recount this old tale for those who would like to try figs or Falernian wine, borscht or a peasant lunch on Capri. There once was a king who had all the power and treasures of the world at his command, but who was nonetheless unhappy and became more melancholy with each passing year. One day he summoned his personal cook and said to him: “You have served me faithfully for many a year and filled my table with the most magnificent dishes. I am well-disposed toward you. Now, however, I would like to put your art to a final test. You must make me a mulberry omelet such as I enjoyed fifty years ago in my earliest childhood. My father, at the time, was waging war against his evil neighbor to the east. He conquered us and we had to escape. And so we fled day and night, my father and I, until we reached a dark wood. We wandered through it and were on the brink of perishing from hunger and exhaustion when we stumbled on a little hut. In it lived an old woman who most warmly bid us rest and set to work at the stove. It wasn’t long before the mulberry omelet appeared before us. The moment I took the first bite, I felt a wonderful sense of consolation and my heart swelled with hope. I was a mere child then and I did not think of the relief this delicious food provided. But when I later had the woman searched for throughout my entire realm, neither she nor anyone able to prepare a mulberry omelet could be found. If you can grant me this last wish, I will make you my son-in-law and heir to my throne. But if you cannot satisfy me, you must die.” The cook replied: “Your majesty, you must then summon the hangman at once. I know well the secret of the mulberry omelet and all its ingredients, from the common cress to the noble thyme. I know well the spell one must say as one stirs and how the boxwood whisk must always be turned towards the right lest our labor be rewarded only with trouble. But nevertheless, oh King, I must die. Nevertheless my omelet will not satisfy you. For how shall I season it with all that you savored at the time: the danger of battle and the alertness of the pursued, the warmth of the hearth, and the sweetness of rest, the foreign present, and the dark future?” Thus spoke the cook. The king remained silent for a time and not long after, he released the cook from his duty richly rewarded. (1930)

From Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld:

Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity — intellectual, emotional and moral. Respect for the word-to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth-is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race. To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.

New at IWP Books: G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, 1909.

Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist with violence) that he shall always be very much pleased when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his barber whom he has seen, how shall he love the Japanese whom he has not seen?