A Catalog of Montaigne’s Beam Inscriptions.

Arthur Krystal on Jacques Barzun.

Theodore Dalrymple Montaigne’s Humanity.

“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, something which is implicit in what I have been saying about liberalism, conservatism, and materialism. 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.” (Jacques Barzun, 1952, “Beliefs for Sale: 1900 — 1950”)

“To me the worst kind of disillusionment was that connected with universities and historians. Hardly a voice was raised from those places and persons to maintain the light of truth. Like the rest, moved by passion, by fear, by the need to be in the swim, those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place. In a moment, as it were, I found myself isolated among my own people. When I say isolated, I do not mean in any sense persecuted. I suffered nothing in Cambridge except a complete want of sympathy. But I learned once for all that students, those whose business it would seem to be to keep the light of truth burning in a storm, are like other men, blindly patriotic, savagely vigilant, cowardly or false when public opinion once begins to run strong. The younger dons and even the older ones disappeared into war work. All discussion, all pursuit of of truth ceased as in a moment. To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propaganda utterly indifferent to truth.” (G. Lowes Dickinson, Recollections)

“Whether we examine our political or our business methods, our press, our theatre, or our social life, we find the same giddiness and superficiality, — a sort of supernormal love of the excitements of the moment. The proofs of our strangely depleted mental condition and of its cause lie on all sides, and every road leads to them. To-day we in America are passing through an access, a tornado, a frenzy of prosperity. Can we survive it? Shall we be rescued by some timely difficulties that create a wholesome moral pressure; or shall we lose all the strong, manly qualities that blessed our origins, and go under, as so many nations have done, through the influence of pride, luxury, and comfort? The danger that faces the Republic arises, as we all know, from the destructive power of wealth. Almost all the degradations that we see in the United States can be traced to the influence of prosperity.” (John Jay Chapman, 1926, The New Dawn in Education)

“If there be such a thing as “treating” a whole nation at once for the “fear complex”, that is what we need in America to-day. All our business men need the treatment, all our politicians, all our writers, editors, and publishers, the children in our schools, and their mothers and fathers in their homes. The man in the street needs it, the preacher in the pulpit, the philanthropist in his sanctuary, the clerk at his desk. Every educational, political, or industrial danger that faces us is due to the prevalence of the fear complex. A general diminution of fear, though it were but relieving to a very small extent the secret timidities of each individual, would set every one of our problems on the road to a happy solution.” (John Jay Chapman, 1925, America’s Fear Complex)

Joseph Brodsky on W. H. Auden: “I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender’s place in London. Wystan was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in his left, holding forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED were put under him by the mistress of the house. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat.” (Brodsky, 1983, To Please a Shadow, in More Than One)

“If we know where free democracy resides and what it consists in, and if we want to preserve it, we must naturally defend our Bill of Rights and Constitution and fight war and fascism. But fully as important is our obligation to let a democratic breeze into the chambers of our own house and our own brain, for it is there that democracy begins and also there that it begins to decay. It is not enough to protest against flagrant public violations. Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths, are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigidly excluded than vermin because felt to be more dangerous? It is a constant fight to besiege these live fortresses. Death and martyrdom abroad become vivid irrelevancies compared to the guerilla fought from day to day under threat of dislike and dismissal by those in whom democracy is a practical and particular passion, and not merely an opportunity for frothy partisanship.” (Jacques Barzun, Of Human Freedom)