The next to next to last batch

 On Morandi

Morandi was free of the organizing prejudice of perspective. Go look at a Cézanne after seeing this show. It will seem old-fashioned. Conventional pictorial space remained a safety net for the great Frenchman, whose influence Morandi subsumed. Even Picasso didn’t as fully abandon perspective smashing it to localized bits in his Cubism, letting it creep in where it was convenient thereafter. Morandi fumbled, thrillingly, amid the ruins of mental concepts of space. He reversed the thrust of his beloved early Renaissance inventors of perspective. In an Uccello, say, we register both a mathematical formula of spatial recession and the fact that it is clumsily artificial. Even the majestic Piero fell short of dissolving the preéminent appeal of the painted surface into the fiction of a window view. (Leonardo would do that.) Morandis eye and mind lived in the surface, marooned there by honest, anxious skepticism. Dramatic uncertainty intensified in his work as he aged. In one of the show’s last paintings (the one I want to take home), a jug, whose ochre hue interpenetrates with that of the wall behind it, abuts a tall box in livid, very pale blue; a corrugated ball, half ochre and half greenish blue, rests on the gray table in what would be the foreground—were not the picture, in its effect, all foreground.  His comprehension of art history skips the Baroque and every other type of synthesized illusion.

P Schjeldahl

On Django 

“Django” is a Romany word—the first-person singular of the verb meaning “to awake.” It was the Gypsy name that Djangos mother gave him when he was born, in January of 1910, in a caravan on the road in Belgium. Romany families in those days seem to have given their children both a public name—the new baby’s was Jean—and a private name. (This was partly a time-honored way of avoiding conscription; the government not only never knew where you were but never quite knew your name.) Django’s family, Dregni explains, were Manouche—one of the two bands of Gypsies living in France in those days. (The others called themselves Gitans.) The Manouche, it seems, were the kind of Gypsies who caused other Gypsies to raise their eye brows, draw in their breath, and ask if perhaps these people might not be just a touch too wild and unreliable. Django, Dregni emphasizes, was not merely “of Gypsy descent”; he was, and remained, an honest-to-God caravan-and-tarotcard Romany, illiterate until well into his adulthood (and only semi-literate even then), who, when he was a celebrated musician on tour in England, still liked to stroll off into the farmland to wring the neck of a stolen chicken or two. Django’s father abandoned the family when the boy was still young, and Django bounced between his powerful mother and a fourteen-year-old Gypsy girl named Naguine, whom he stayed with, off and on, for the rest of his life. (A brief teen-age marriage to another Gypsy girl produced a child but not a permanent attachment.) They lived on petty theft, fortune-telling, and pass-the-hat music, and what food they could find; the Reinhardt family, in Manouche fashion, had a particular fondness for niglos—feral hedgehogs roasted whole with their needles on. 

The lineup of the Hot Club varied, but usually included Dyango’s brother Nin-Nin on one rhythm guitar, the Gypsy-gangster guitarist Baro Ferret on another (Ferret was by reputation as good a soloist as Django, but Django kept him tightly locked), Louis Vola on bass, Grappelli on violin, and Django on lead guitar. Their sound had two pillars, a French rhythm and a French guitar. The rhythm was that pompe taken over from musette; the guitar was the Selmer, and Django’s music wouldn't have happened without it. The Great Guitar Problem, throughout the nineteen-thirties, was that the instrument was too soft to be heard over a band. The Selmer modeéle Jazz guitar, invented by Mario Maccaferri, has a resonator built into its acoustic body. It is a vibrant, jangling, steelstringed instrument, but capable of soft breezes and overheard whispers in the eye of the hailstorm. In photograph after photograph from the period, Django clutches his Selmer, with its small sounding hole, as though it were his wife. 

In a bizarre turn of history, it was the Occupation, and collaboration, that produced a true mania for jazz in France. 1 That was when the zazous, French jitterbuggers,emerged in Paris, to do at least dance-hall battle with the German soldiers. The zazous, tolerated and then suppressed, took what until the war had been a largely highbrow enthusiasm and turned it into a form of popular protest. For the first time, Delaunay had an audience for his music. Since he was not allowed to publish American tunes, he put French names on the recordings; “St. Louis Blues” became “La Tristesse de Saint Louis,” the sadness of St. Louis, with a deliberately coded reference to the distant great Armstrong. It was during the zazou period that Django recorded his most famous slow tune, the beautiful, lulling “Nuages,” which became one of the anthems of the Occupation. 

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On Greene

Borges, in one of his enigmatic parables, imagined an empire in which the art of cartography had “attained such perfection” that a map was exactly the same size as the area it covered. At well over two thousand pages, Norman Sherry’s authorized biography of Graham Greene, a writer whose slender novels are distinguished by a near-phobia of the extraneous, occasionally seems in danger of reaching a similar condition. The third volume of “The Life of Graham Greene” (Viking; $39.95) has at last arrived, fifteen years after the publication of Volume I, and thirty years after Greene designated Sherry his biographer. 

Sherry’s sluggish pace owes something to the difficulty of summing up the career of this stunningly prodigious writer. During a writing life of more than sixty years, Greene published twentysix novels, in an almost unseemly variety of genres, ranging from early thrillers and “entertainments” such as “Brighton Rock’ and “This Gun for Hire,” through the famous “Catholic trilogy” of his middle years, to a more experimental later phase that includes such uncategorizable works as “Travels with My Aunt” and “Monsignor Quixote.” He also produced short stories, plays, film scripts, memoirs, and travel books, plus a vast quantity of correspondence, to much of which Sherry has had exclusive access. (Because of an ambiguous comma in a document Greene signed on his deathbed, other scholars were forbidden to quote from unpublished material until Sherry’s project was complete.) 

The mention of Graham Greene inevitably evokes “Greeneland,” reviewers’ shorthand for the fictional terrain where all of Greene’s novels seem to be set—a desolate colonial outpost with unforgiving weather, which is inhabited by midlevel civil servants, simple-hearted locals, and adulterous wives. Greene was always annoyed by this trope, insisting that his books “carefully and accurately described” the world as he experienced it. As if to prove his point, he extracted from Sherry a promise to “follow in his footsteps” to wherever he had set a major work—Mexico, Liberia, Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other inhospitable locations. In the course of fulfilling this promise, Sherry contracted gangrene, which required the removal of part of his intestines. His relief at bringing the project to completion is written all over this third volume; in eight pages of acknowledgments, he thanks his Buick dealer, his periodontist, his postman, and “Nellie the night janitoress, who nearly always caught me in the late hours working.” 

Operating under the assumption that every place Greene went and every person he met is significant, Sherry has inevitably become bogged down in the most minute details. But he did discover that Greene had based a number of his characters on real people, the most important of whom, Sherry argues, was himself. This presents a particular problem. Greene lived his life to extremes: he had serious affairs, sometimes simultaneously, with at least three women, amid a host of more casual liaisons; he spied for MI6, smoked opium, visited prostitutes. However, he displayed a remarkable equanimity in the midst of chaos, maintaining a matutinal regimen of five hundred words regardless of the circumstances. Combine this with a delight in secrecyGreene was given to writing two versions of a diary entry to conceal a visit to a prostitute, to using the names of his characters as aliases on his business cards, and to sending two postcards to his mistress, a chaste version addressed to her and her husband at home, and a more intimate one for her to collect elsewhere—and he is a difficult subject indeed. He once wrote to Catherine Walston, one of his longtime lovers, “If anybody ever tries to write a biography of me, how complicated they are going to find it and how misled they are going to be.” 

The fourth of six children, Henry Graham Greene was born October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, England. The family lived at Berkhamsted School, where Greene’s father worked his way up to headmaster, and later in life Greene recalled the “green baize door” that separated the safety of the family’s living quarters from the alien world of the school. A shy boy, devoid of athletic talent, he suffered severe depressions as a teen-ager and became fascinated with suicide. His autobiography, “A Sort of Life,” details experiments with Russian roulette, but Sherry also reports less convincing early attempts such as eating a tin of hair pomade and going swimming after taking more than a dozen aspirin. (In an unauthorized biography, Michael Shelden alleged that there was a more serious incident, in which Greene tried to hang himself in a potting shed.) At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a London psychoanalyst. Though he flourished in the cultured atmosphere of the analyst's home, the treatment did little to banish the allure that suicide held for him, which manifested itself repeatedly in his work. 

While a student at Oxford, where he dabbled in literary activities and pubdlished a book of poetry, Greene fell in love with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a teen-age convert to Catholicism who refused to be involved with him unless he converted as well. He pursued her avidly, writing her as many as three letters a day and even offering a celibate marriage to appease her fear of sex. (Sherry’s first volume quotes an inordinate number of these youthful romantic blatherings, even reproducing the back of an envelope on which Greene had repeatedly scribbled “143,” their code for “I love you.”) After leaving Oxford, in 1925, he moved to Nottingham to work the night shift on a local paper, and began the process of conversion. He and Vivien were married two years later. 

It is almost impossible to imagine what kind of writer Greene would have been had he not become a Catholic. His impassioned and tortured relationship with his faith is the backbone of his best work, particularly the three novels that form the centerpiece of his career: “The Power and the Glory,” “The Heart of the Matter,” and “The End of the Affair.” Books that do not explicitly concern themselves with the theme of religion cannot altogether stay away from it. Yet his motivations for converting seem to have been less than pious; a friend remembers advising him, “If you need this for your fuck, go ahead and do it.” And from the start he had trouble reconciling the mathematical logic of his mind with the superstition and mystery of the Church. He called himself a “Catholic agnostic” and, at his confirmation, took the name Thomas, after the doubting apostle. In his autobiography, he wrote, “If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible.” 

Once, on being asked why he had become a writer, Greene replied, perhaps facetiously, that “there seemed nothing else to do... . It has become a habit and it’s too late to change now.” Certainly, the part about habit was true. He established early the work routine that he followed throughout his life: a letter to Vivien notes the “terrifying thought” that if he continued writing five hundred words a day for forty years, that would add up to seven million three hundred thousand words, “not allowing for leap years. Darling! I should get a cramp!” His friend Michael Meyer observed him at work during a trip to Tahiti in 1959, when he was writing “A Burnt-Out Case”: 

He wrote in longhand with a fine pen in a very small, almost illegible script, for two hours each day; no more, no less. In those two hours he would write seven to nine hundred words, the equivalent of two to three printed pages. ... At 9 a.m. he would stop. This was when I got up, and as I walked along the verandah to the shower room he would look up and say, somewhat complacently I felt: “Nine hundred words this morning,” or, even worse, “Finished my work for the day”—a depressing remark with which to be greeted when I hadn’t yet begun and the thermometer was climbing towards ninety. 

Greene’s first two novels were rejected; the third, “The Man Within,” appeared, in 1929, to positive reviews, but then two more failures nearly ended his career. His first commercial success came in 1932, with “Stamboul Train” (published in the United States as “Orient Express”), the story of eccentric passengers on a train from Ostend to Constantinople. In 1935, on an impulse, Greene travelled to Liberia, chiefly because “the most reliable map available still showed large blank areas with only the word ‘Cannibals’ written across.” Here he conceived a hatred of imperialism that lasted the rest of his life. “Everything ugly was European,” he wrote in “Journey Without Maps,” his first travel book. “If there was anything beautiful in the place it was native.” His next journey, in 1938, took him to southeastern Mexico to report on the persecution of Catholics by socialist revolutionaries. Travelling by boat, plane, and mule among the jungle towns of Chiapas and ‘Tabasco, he heard harrowing stories of religious icons destroyed and priests executed or forced to marry, and these events became the material for “The Power and the Glory.” 

With this book, Greene developed the creative method that served him throughout his career. The novel’s atmospherics, such as the descriptions of the seedy, rundown port town, derive directly from Greene’s own experience, but the story itself, while based on contemporary events, is pure invention. The main character is a persecuted “whisky priest,’ who views himself as a sinner; years ago, he fathered a child with a parishioner. Although his actions endanger his own life and that of anyone he comes into contact with, he continues to travel from town to town offering to hear confessions and perform baptisms. After a dramatic flight to safety across the border, he allows himself to be lured back, and into a trap, by a sinister man identified only as “the mestizo.” Greene works him into the story subtly, building the suggestion of his menace through almost imperceptible details: 

The mule came to a stop of its own accord beside a hammock. A man lay in it, bunched diagonally, with one leg trailing to keep the hammock moving, up and down, up and down, making a tiny current of air. 

-Ruth Franklin  

On Pyncheon by Wendy D.

The characters are mostly men and boys, with occasional appearances in secondary roles by such females as “coeds,” mothers, “chicks,” and “brown-haired beauties.” The situations for several of the stories draw upon life in the army and or the navy, while the last one centers on a gang of schoolboy practical jokers. The language is casually tough: “lousy,” etc. There are the tics of a young writer, such as an overuse of explanatory verbs in dialogue—~something that carries over, too, into Crying (“remembered Oedipa,” “squinted Di Presso,” “allowed Di Presso,” “Metzger explained”)—and there are skilled epithets and descriptions (“When he spoke it was with precise, dry Beacon Hill accent”), colorful names, ang economical dialogue (“He went over to where Picnic way eating and said, ‘Guess what.’ ‘I figured,’ Picnic said”), What is interesting is the complex position of the author/narrator in relation to the book, characters, lan. guage itself, and reader at this stage in Pynchon’s writing career. With both books, he is working in the traditional mode: author adopts persona of narrator (third person omniscient) narrating in a certain tone and vocabulary the events of a collection of characters. In the stories, the author/narrator stays more in the background, less noticeable for his verbal flair; the illusion of some sort of familiar but alternative reality is maintained. In The Crying of Lot 49 he comes more to the fore, and we are constantly aware of the clever narrator and, through or behind him, the playful author, partly because of the easy mix of highly educated vocabulary (“annular corridor,” “radial aisles,” “moue”) with pop-cultural references (Road Runner), and especially because of his clever pu ning in the naming of his characters: we know we af not being asked to believe in a woman named Ocdi Maas or a man named Stanley Koteks, and our atte® tion is distracted from the story to the artifice and artificer. What is shared by the two books is a sense of tig control by the author over the characters, the langua the book, and probably the reader. Sometimes the trol is achieved through his mastery of a gracefu style or an appealing notion (“Creaking, or echoing left as dark-ribbed sneaker-prints in a fine layer of dam ° 

A rather appealing specimen of early Pynchon, “The Secret Integration” was first published in The Saturday Evening Post more than forty years ago (one year after V. appeared) and places its gang of schoolboy jokesters in a setting rich in possibilities for the childish imagina-. tion: an old town with a new development, a sprawl ing estate with a derelict mansion, a natural landscape open to exploration, a downtown complete with a seedy hotel. In a deftly described scene, the boys coast on their bikes down a long hill in the early evening toward the hotel, “leaving behind two pages of arithmetic homework and a chapter of science” as well as “a lousy movie, some romantic comedy” on TV. Because all the telewsions in town receive only one channel, the boys, as they fly by, can follow the progress of the movie from house to house, through doors and windows “still open for the dark’s first coolness,” as it advances. 

In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon remarks rather diffidently that he likes more than he dislikes the story. In fact, it is so likable that one envies the boys theif comfortable society and the fields, streams, street cor’ ners, and alleyways of their games. Their collaboratio# and apportioning of assignments is charming—develop an arsenal for sabotaging the railroad, enlist malcontent first-graders for destroying the boys’ latrine, infiltraté PTA meetings. The elaborateness of their schemes is in’ pressive, as are some of their successes, and the anim tion of the central character, Grover, the boy genius particularly savory, with his enormous vocabulary, fund of information, and flights of hilarity. 

The pranks they plan are potentially devastating to the community, yet, as Pynchon lets us know, the boys would never actually take “any clear or irreversible step” because “everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.” There is a quiet lyrical humanity in this story, an almost unapologetic gentleness, inviting and inclusive, that contrasts with the weightier complex pessimism and bravado of the later novels, in which perhaps it is more difficult for the characters to go home and be comforted at the end of the day. 

And on Montaigne, Mark Lilla

Readers need to be just as cautious with authors who say they are baring their breasts, and Montaigne’s most penetrating readers always have been. That other master of deception through confession, Rousseau, knew one when he saw one: “J place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.” T.S. Eliot, though resistant to Montaigne’s allure, or perhaps for that very reason, appreciated his cunning: 

Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument. 

When I play with my cat, Montaigne famously wondered, how can I be sure she’s not just playing with me? The same might be asked of Montaigne the author. Once we get past the charming anecdotes and reveries, essay after essay turns out to be darker and more paradoxical than it seemed at first blush, and about much more than Michel de Montaigne. But you must stay alert to see what he is doing—and not doing. 

The deeper into the book we go, the more connected and mutually reinforcing the essays appear, and more ambitious, too. Just compare the Essays to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which I can’t help thinking they were intended to supplant. It was Augustine, mentioned only once in passing by Bakewell, and not Montaigne who first employed the rhetoric of transparency and self-exposure to promote his doctrines, by making readers first identify with, himself. By recounting and no doubt embellishing the story of his fruitless search for meaning find tranquility among the philosophical sects of late antiquity, the depression brought on by the loss of a friend (not unlike Montaigne’s reaction to the losing of Etienne de Ja Boétie), his unruly sexual desires, the stealing of some pears, and the drama of his conversion, Augustine has made millions of Christians ever since ask themselves, “How did he know all that about me?” 

It was by pretending to offer himself up “without straining or artifice” in the form of a book-length prayer and who lics to God? that Augustine persuaded early Christians that free philosophical speculation and virtuous self-cultivation could never suffice, since they could never erase the most basic fact about being human” that we are creatures fallen into self-love, amor sui, the sin from which all unhappiness flows. By telling the story of one man, Augustine showed that noone is sufficient; to truly become-ourselves we must, paradoxically, surrender our Selves. “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). 

The turning point in thé Confessions comes when Augustine says, “I have become a problem to myself.” There are no turning points in Montaigne’s Essays, no epiphanies, and certainly no conversion, which he considered as abdication of moral and psychological responsibility. His response to Augustine’s dramatic self-doubt was simply to ask, “What’s the problem?” We are what we are; let’s accept that: 

For fifteen hundred years, Christian civilization had been built on the assumption that we can and must become other than we are. The Essays propose the most sweeping revaluation of Western values since the Confessions, and succeed because they meet Augustine on his own psychological terrain. In essay after essay Montaigne uses Christian interiority against itself, entrancing us with what he finds within and getting us to laugh at our pretense of self-mastery. (Long befure Twain, Montaigne knew that nothing withstands the assault of laughter.) Bu‘ above all he makes it seem pointless to talk about anything but ourselves-our very selves, not “man” or the “soul.” The “nature of all things”? Who could possibly know anything about that? The nature of God? The same, and besides, don’t you see the violence and cruelty brought on by arguing about such things? So let’s stop talking about God, shall we? Let’s talk about you. There, isn’t that better? As a student of mine put it, Montaigne’s genius was to divert us with ourselves. 

Pascal, Montaigne’s greatest reader and most formidable critic, took the ful} measure of his challenge to Christianity, and the Pensées are largely a manic attempt to refute him. The Church had early on devised, ways to cope with Greek philosophy, first by rejecting it and later by domesticating it. But how in the world could it respond to this Shameless, slippery defense of amor sui? Montaigne was differént from his Renaissance predecessors, the philosophers who placed humans at the center of the cosmos, or the artists whose figures, all bulging muscles and twisting torsos, had a Promethean air. He actually agreed with Augustine, and Pascal, that Prometheanism was the human problem. But his chosen adversaries were the popes and Protestant divines who pretended to speak for God, and the scholastic theologians who pretended that their syllogisms could unlock metaphysical truths about Him and His creation. These people were the source of our troubles, Montaigne thought, and especially of the religious wars then tearing France apart. The antidote to their fanaticism lay not in loathing and surrender of the self, or in humanistic self-perfection. It lay in reconciliation with the imperfect selves we already are. No one before Montaigne had dared to say that. 

Pascal’s response was powerful in its own right. He didn’t deny the truth of Montaigne’s psychology, in fact he adopted it wholesale, and the Pensées are full of unattributed quotations and paraphrases from the Essays. He accepted that we are inconstant and easily distracted creatures, but wasn't amused, seeing in this the sign of an unhappiness that our anxious, idle divertissements could never lift. What he did deny is that Montaigne told the whole truth about us. The air brushed self-portrait we find in the Essays leads us to think that Montaigne never dreamed of transcendence, never longed to escape his time or his station or his physical and psychological limitations. He relished sublime moments when they came, such as his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie, which was cut short by the latter’s death and inspired Montaigne’s achingly beautiful essay “Of Friendship.” (Bakewell has a superb chapter on this episode.) But by his own account he did not seek out such moments or expect them from life; they were happy accidents, nothing more. 

The yearning for transcendence only shows up in his stories and anecdotes about others, where it appears as a psychological mutation, a misfortune, or, most often, as the result of social indoctrination by zealots and despots. That part of you that experiences hope and guilt, that dreams of a beyond, that’s willing to die for the greater goodthat’s not really you, he says, because it’s never been me. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Pascal knew Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned. Under the pretext of authentic self-disclosure, Montaigne was peddling a new, and truncated, ideal of human nature. 

What would a world of such people look like? To judge by Montaigne’s self-portrait, it would be a safer, gentler, and more easy-going place, where toleration of everything but crueltyfor him, the cardinal sin—would be the norm. But it would be a world without heroes or saints or sages. Conscious of fortune’s caprice and death’s finality, Montaigne’s ideal man would be indifferent to glory; aware that his feelings are naturally and marvelously inconstant, he’d renounce self-mastery; and knowing how subject his knowledge is to moods and the limits of his experience, he’d only smile at the pretense of Aristotle or even the ancient skeptics, who were wrong to think they knew they knew nothing. After all,'who . knows? Above all he’d learn to relax, knowing that truth just isn’t that important, that ideas “are true and sound enough if they are useful and pleasing.” (The “what, me worry?” school of philosophy was founded by Montaigne, not William James or Richard Rorty.) And even if he were totally ignorant, would that be such a tragedy? The least contemptible class of people seems to me to be those who, through their simplicity, occupy the lowest rank.... The morals and the talk of peasants | find commonly more obedient to the prescriptions of true philosophy than are those of our philosophers. The common people are wiser, because they are as wise as they need to be (Lactantius). 

Stated in a positive sense, Montaigne was the first liberal moralist. Ancient virtues like valor and nobility, and Christian ones like piety and humility, were unattainable for most people, he thought, and only made them vicious and credulous. But rather than say that directly, a suicidal act, Montaigne sang a song of Montaigne, giving himself virtues that we accept without question today as being more reasonable and attractive: sincerity, authenticity, self-awareness, self-acceptance, independence, irony, open-mindedness, friendliness, cosmopolitanism, tolerance. He was an idealist, though, not a realist. And his ideal reshaped our reality. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the reason Montaigne knows us so well is that he made us what we are (or at least what we profess to be). 

But he did not entirely remake us. His psychology, for all its capaciousness and alertness, was limited by a certain blindness to the human desire for something more, something beyond. What must not be, cannot be. Yes, heroes can do damage; but does it follow from this that we should live like valets? Montaigne considers this possibility and doesn’t blink: 

I am attached to the general and just cause only with moderation and without feverishness.... I would easily carry, in case of need, one candle to Saint Michael and one to the dragon. 

In whatever way we can put ourselves in shelter from blows, even under a calf’s skin, I am not the man to shrink from it. For it is enough for me to spend my life comfortably. i am content fo enjoy the word without being all wrapped up in it, to live a merely excusable life. 

The value of the soul consists not in flying high, but in an orderly pace. Its greatness is exercised not in greatness, but in mediocrity. 

Something in us, or at least many of us, flees this mediocre life, the life beneath the calf’s skin, and not simply out of melodramatic quixotism. Pascal understood that, which is why, in this respect at least, he was the wiser psychologist. “J’homme passe l’homme.” he wrote, man susurpasses himself. This causes us endless problems, but it also keeps us dissatisfied with g mere animal existence. Montaigne uses many animal examples in the Essays, sometimes to remind us that we aren’t gods, sometimes to show that we’ve become worse than beasts, but always to persuade us that we need to live more as they do, our heads down, sniffing the ground rather than baying at the moon. Pascal saw trouble ahead: 

It is dangerous to show man too often how much he resembles the beasts without showing him his grandeur And it is even more dangerous to show him too often his grandeur without also his baseness, It is more dangerous still to let him ignore both. 

By refusing to recognize the grandeur in our desire for transcendence, Our urge to understand what is, to experience rapture, to face and overcome danger, to create something bold and lasting, Montaigne offered no guidance for coping with it, let alone directing it to good ends, And his silente had consequences. The Essavs not only inspired a skeptical Enlightenment that aimed to make modern life softer, freer, and more humane, with some success; they also, through Rousseau, helped inspire a Romantic cult of the self that beatified the individual genius and worshiped his occult powers—also with some success. The easy inner reconciliation Montaigne offered his readers has proved as impossible for them to attain as sainthood was for his Christian contemporaries. Suggesting, perhaps, that the most we can ever hope to achieve is reconciliation to the fact that we will never be reconciled. 

Edmund Crispin

 Helen was in her room, writing letters. It was a large room, light, airy, and meticulously clean and tidy, and although most of the furniture and ornaments were not hers, she had succeeded, as women always can, in impressing on them the stamp of her own individuality without any striving after effect. Beyond that, Nigel noted, there was also the generic aspect: it was unmistakably a woman’s room, the reason being—thought Nigel, succumbing to the masculine habit of analysis ...the number of small objects which it contained... unmistakably feminine.

On Art and Other Things

 NYR 

Updike on Ernst

It was all about dépaysement, according to McNab: the word translates literally as being outside your own country, but its meaning also encompasses exile and disorientation..... Dépaysement also defined a favored Surrealist mood, the feeling we all get when we arrive somewhere new for the first time, our senses sharpened by wonder and tinged with anxiety. 

The exhaustion as well as the disorientation of travel was courted as a means to fresh perceptions. Surrealists walked from Paris to Blois, and took steamers to Cuba, the Amazon, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Freud had discovered a new territory within, the subconscious, and dreams, drugs, word games, séances, automatic writing, virtually random collage, and impulsive exotic travel were ways of exploring it. There was a political dimension to dépaysement. direct experience of France’s Pacific colonies confirmed the surrealists’ antagonism to the jingoistic, otten brutally exploitative colonizers, and to the European establishment. 

Of course, breaking through the shell of reason and accepted order to protounder truths beneath is an idea as old as shamanistic trances, Greek oracles, and the mind-emptying exercises of yoga and zen. Rimbaud, along with Gauguin a stellar example of selfexile, in 1871 had famously asserted that the poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and deliberate “déreglement de tous les sens.” 

Gala, Ernst, and Eluard achieved a déréglement of social custom with their ménage and their escape to Saigon, where the three reassembled. Back in Paris, Eluard described it as a voyage idiot, a stupid trip, and in fact their triune rapport was never the same. Ernst returned later than the Eluards and took up separate residence in a Montmartre studio; Eluard entered a tuberculosis sanitarium, from which he wrote Gala longing letters.

Updike on Kierkegaard

This was no joke; Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe.  He offered himself as a corrective to idealism from Plato to to Hegel.

the assault of ridicule launched by the scurrilous journal The Corsair against not only Kierkegaard's ideas but his physical person, has descended to posterity the impression that the philosopher was conspicuously deformed. A series of caricatures in The Corsair by Peter Klestrup show a swaybacked, even hunchbacked, figure with a sharp nose, tall hat, stick cane, and comically thin legs, whose trousers, more comically still, are of unequal length. It was this last oddity that the populace of Copenhagen fastened upon as the subject of gibes and taunts, making Kierkegaard’s cherished daily perambulations in the streets a torment; jis spoke of “that slow death, being trampied to death by a flock of geese.” ‘The characterization was witty, but the experience was painful, remembered in his journals long after it had subsided as analogous “to the gladiatorial animal combat of pagan times.” If Christ were to return to the world, he wrote, “he would perhaps not be put to death, but would be ridiculed. This is martyrdom in the age of reason.”

“Yes, he was somewhat high-shouldered and his head tilted forward a bit, probably from all that reading and writing at his desk.” (In curious bitter retrospect, her ex-fiancé confided to his journal, “She did not love my well-formed nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet—nor my clever head—she just loved me, and yet she did not understand me.”) The reminiscences of others mention Kierkegaard’s “high shoulders, the restless, somewhat hopping gait,” whose zigzags made him difficult to walk beside, and claim that his back was “a bit curved.” The hospital examination soon after he was admitted recorded nothing abnormal about his spine. His enemy and admirer Aron Goldschmidt, the editor of The Corsair, left the most sensitive impressions of Kierkegaard’s physical aspect: 

The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty. ... He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed. 

Gopnik on Voltaire 

... Voltaire’s sense of outrage may have been galvanized by the hideous execution in Paris of the would-be assassin of Louis XV, the mad Damiens, in 1757. Damiens was pulled apart alive, his limbs attached to four horses and the horses driven in different directions, for public instruction in the center of Paris. Voltaire was no fan of regicide. It was because he was for the execution that the public torture frightened him: it was a sign of how quickly civilities could disintegrate under threat. (“Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men,” he wrote. “The common people will always be fanatical.”) He coined his most famous phrase, Ecrasezl’in dme—‘Crush the horror’—and began to use it, in jauntily (and evasively) abbreviated form. Historians have fussed for centuries about exactly what Voltaire meant by it—the Catholic Church? the Court?—but it’s clear. The horror was the alliance of religious fanaticism with the instruments of the state, and the two combined for torture and official murder. 

Candide is said to have been occasioned by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a tsunami-like event, and is meant to satirize the optimism associated with Leibniz. It is also usually said to be unfair to Leibniz, a great philosopher, who was among the inventors of calculus. Leibniz’s view, after all, was not that everything was good but that our world was the best possible. Given that God could have considered every world before he made it, he must have chosen the best one—so that if there is suffering and evil in it, these things must have a cause in the mind of God. Given that the deity is benevolent, small-scale pain must be part of some universal balance, or, as Pope puts it in his “Essay on Man,” “All discord harmony not understood; / All partial evil, universal good.” Leibniz and Pope after him are arguing not that life will always be happy but that the world is optimally designed. Suffering is explicable—not defensible but explicable. 

But Voltaire was not unfair to Leibniz. He understood exactly what Leibniz was saying, and has Pangloss say it. On the tutor's first appearance, he gives the classic instance: pigs are made to be eaten and so we have pork. It seems hard only from the narrow point of view of the pig. “Those who have suggested that everything is good have spoken obtusely,” Pangloss explains, in Kaffel's rendering. “What they should have said is that everything is for the best.” Voltaire’s point was that the two ideas are, in concrete terms, the same idea. Insisting that everything is for the best means finding the best in everything. To subsume individual suffering or pain within a larger equilibrium is to accept the logic of the slaughterhouse. The pig has a right to his protest. 

Voltaire’s target throughout “Candide” is not optimism in the sense of fatuous cheerfulness but optimism in the sense of optimal thinking: the kind of bland reassurance that explains pain with reference to a larger plan or history. In this way, the Christmas tsunami cannot have for Voltaire’s readers today anything approaching the force that a natural disaster like the Lisbon earthquake had for the eighteenth century. Few people any longer believe in a benevolent naturemuch less a benevolent nature sitting in for a providential God. We can feel comfortably superior to Leibniz’s particular brand of optimism, which is centered on natural law of this kind, since we no longer believe that nature is part of an inherently balanced or benevolent system. 

On E Wilson

The marriage to McCarthy was a mistake that neither side wanted to be first to admit. When they fought, he would retreat into his study and lock the door; she would set piles of paper on fire and try to push them under it. Wilson's fourth marriage, to Elena Mumm Thornton, came closest to conventional domesticity, but they did not live all the year together, and Wilson still pursued other women, with whom he achieved varying degrees of sexual intimacy, 

Wilson was an intent observer of anatomical detail, and he left written records of quite a few pudenda.

Denby on Sontag

 In that same piece, she quoted Walter Benjamin's remark that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” Godard, Bergman, Syberberg, and Fassbinder, it turned out, had reached a series of stunning dead ends, dissolving not only genres but criticism, too. Sontag had run out of aesthetic revolutions. And the culture that supported revolutionary work had changed. “Stripped of its heroic stature, of its claims as an adversary sensibility,” she wrote in 1979, “modernism has proved acutely compatible with the ethos of an advanced consumer society.” She was talking, of course, about what soon came to be known as postmodernism. “Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions—of the unlimited proliteration, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself.” Her hopes had fallen victim to the dismaying larger trend in which every radical development in modernism degenerated into routine: by the eighties, avant-garde techniques from the films of the sixties were showing up in commercials and music videos. Art had not only become commodified, as the Marxists like to say; it decorated corporate culture. The breaking of forms had led not to an agonized “reorganization of sensibility” but to an amiable shrugging off of seriousness in art and the levelling of all cultural activity. Like her long-ago mentors among the New York intellectuals, she had come to the end of the redemptive capacities of the avant garde. When the breaking of forms no longer enlarged the soul, she gave up writing about movies—that was the disappointment behind the 1995 farewell to criticism. 

Continued excavations

 D Johnson on Jane A.

... modifies many present-day assumptions about early-nineteenth-century marriage and the family, in the light of which we might easily misread Austen’s work. Perry argues that by Austen’s day, earlier “kinship orientation based on blood relations” was in the throes of changing to “a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties,” that is, the family you married into was becoming more important than the one you were born into. Women who found themselves on the cusp of this broad social change in real life, and the heroines of fiction, depended on marriage for the happiness and the financial security that might have formerly come from their birth family. She finds evidence that in Austen’s day, moreover, manners and morals were becoming more strict and women’s place more restricted and precarious than at previous periods in English life, the alteration explored in Austen’s books. The world was becoming Victorian. 

At the same time there were changes in the management of inheritance. Wealth, which had often been distributed more equitably among family members of both sexes, was now, with the newly prevalent system of primogeniture, transmitted vertically from eldest son to eldest son, leaving daughters and younger sons at the mercy of the heir. This is a situation often seen in Austen’s novels, one familiar inStance being Mr. Collins’s hold over the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice. Besides challenging our understanding of some canonical early-nineteenthcentury fiction, Perry notes that in understanding the novels, “social historians and literary critics often pass over sibling or parental relationships as irrelevant to the ‘real story,” because today we assume that a story should be about the founding of a conjugal couple, a marriage. 

Have we been misled “by the conjugal bias intrinsic to twentieth-century concepts of evidence and research methods”? In Perry’s view, previous definitions of the family have been based on incorrect inferences from Statistical norms and prescriptive conduct manuals. Statistics taken from public records of marriages and births ignore “many of the other filaments in the web of kinship that located people psychologically in the period,” because there arc no published records of such filaments a maiden aunt, like Austen living with the family, for example, would not appear in any record. And where modern readers assume that a novel will contain a love story, the main story the author had in mind might in fact be about a bad or good brother, a long-lost relative, fathers separated from daughters, a devoted aunt, or some other aspect of the birth family (with mothers often missing or unimportant, as in Austen). Such elements were more important than love stories in the novels Austen read, like Tristram Shandy or The Castle of Otronto. Perry takes special issue with the influential scholar Lawrence Stone, who, in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977), established a view she feels is misleading, of an evolution toward “companionate marriage,” meaning a marriage of intellectual equals, which in turn encouraged better education for women. The better-informed wife and mother was supposed to devote herself to husband and children. Perry questions not so much whether this happened as whether it was a positive development. “Stone’s male-centered fantasy,” she remarks, “assumes that educating women to be companions for men was the best thing that ever happened to them,” but ignores the hidden disadvantage that in this role many women became isolated from their biological families, lost status as sisters and daughters, and were more dependent than ever, but now on their husbands.  This loss of female authority was accompanied or explained by other social factors that were not in women’s interest: the growing “dispersion of communities, and the growing power of individualism,” and changes in property laws and marriage settlements that left sisters and daughters less well provided for than they had been, and with little legal leverage. Inheritance issues drive most of Jane Austen’s plots and subplots; and because she was on the cusp of changes that would increasingly commodify women and virginity for the marriage market, trends masked by conventions of romantic love, she came to seem to some later readers as somewhat hardhearted in the practicality of her views, for instance (in Perry’s example) her implicit mockery in Sense and : Sensibility of Marianne Dashwood’s “ardent belief in a first and only love,” a belief that would have made no sense in an earlier period, when a third of all marriages Were second marriages, after the death of a Spouse, but was| fashionably new in Marianne’s day. Perry’s elucidation of the plots of eighteenth and early-nineteenth century novels in the light of these  broad social changes goes a long way toward explaining why many of them do not move us today; the reunion of long-lost fathers and daughters, for instance, or the intense relation of brother and sister no longer seem especially affecting. The long-lost relative plot simply had more emotional force when the “consanguinal” family  rather than the “affinal” family was the principle focus of emotional life.

She....came under the influence of Wordsworthian theories of memory and emotion. He finds that Mansfield Park is dominated by the Wordsworthian use of substitution, of loved ones and objects—Fanny’s beloved mementos and the transparencies of Tinturn Abbey in her room. 

Both he and Knox-Shaw emphasize that it is important to remember that Austen’s writing career was divided into two phases, the early three novels —Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbeywritten in the eighteenth century by a very young woman; the last three‘Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion—written in the Romantic period by a mature woman, after a silence of seven years, which can account for many of the differences in tone and outlook on some issues, and more of a sense of the disappointments and compromises in any life. 

The narrator of Mansfield Park says it is about “the cure of unconqucrable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments.” Ino mocking, unchanging passions that can be cured, is she endorsing fidelity or laughing at people who believe in it? Our understanding of Austen’s intentions is complicated by her habitual, ironic tone. Critical arguments surrounding authorial intention are always something of a problem, because they presume that an author actually executes his intentions, and critics tend to forget that the gap between what.a writer plans and does is enormous. And any writer is aware that critics sometimes seem to have very little sense of how a work is actually written or believe inevitable things that are in fact arbitrary and conscious choices, like point of view, or even characters’ names; and treat as arbitrary things that are really determined, compelled by the writer’s experience or personality. Austen critics are obliged: by the dearth of information about her to cling to small bits of information—a single reference in the letters to the slave trade or Evangelicalism, for instance, losing sight of the rather loose way in which an author’s reading and her work are connected.

Her technical brilliance is the focus of Richard Jenkyns’s “appreciation.” He points out that the famous aphorisms that begin Pride and Prejudice’ . are meant as a pair, statement and “balancing contradiction,” a formula from Anglican liturgy and familiar to Austen from a lifetime of churchgoing. The rest of the first chapter is an extended dialogue, a little play, a tour de force derived from Austen’s interest in theatricals; to know her attitude is perhaps to shed light on the theatricals in Mansfield Park, disapproved of by Sir Thomas Bertram, Edmund, and Fanny herself, but beloved by Austen. Jenkyns is especially interesting on the form of Pride and Prejudice—its carefully constructed mirror-image chapters and its reliance on techniques borrowed from the theater. 

An understanding of how Austen got her effects could bring us closer to an understanding of her writing than if we were to consider content alone. It is through the patterns and pairings, the formal divisions (chapters, etc.), proportion of dialogue to indirect discourse, length of scenes, and the placement of surprises that the reader discerns the writer’s intention, and reading this way places the reader in an uncon— scious dialogue not with the characters but with Austen herself—the artist making choices—and this, notwithstanding the critical fashions of the recent past—is one of the most enjoyable activities of reading. 

On Dinah Washington 

B ecause we now tend to think of the blues and jazz of the swing era nostalgically and associate the music with older listeners, it is surprising to imagine someone like Dinah Washington, whose portrait has even been on a US postage stamp (depicted with graying hair which she never lived to have), as she was when she first attracted national attention: a hypersexual eighteen-year-old. The fact is, Washington represented the norm for what was then a music made primarily by and for young people. Hampton was playing dance music derided in its time as juvenile and vulgar. Indeed, like Washington, most of the singers (and many of the instrumentalists) in big bands during World War II were teenagers speaking to their peers when they made their first records: Ella Fitzgerald was seventeen; Doris Day, sixteen; Billie Holiday, eighteen; Mel Tormé, nineteen. (The heart of Hampton’s theme song, “Flying Home,” was an exhilarating tenor saxophone solo by the late Illinois Jacquet, who was nineteen when he recorded it.) 

She had a strict policy of recording only one take of a song, thereupon terrorizing the producers, the conductors, and the musicians playing in the sizable orchestras which frequently accompanied her in an era when records were made “live” in the studio, without overdubbing to patch flubbed notes. As one of her producers, Clyde Otis, warned the arranger Belford Hendricks, “Work out all the kinks in the orchestration.... If she’s gonna give you one take, that’s what you’re gonna get.” At least once, Washington left a recording session before others were satisfied; as Cohodas describes the scene, she headed toward the door and said, “It’s not going to get any better. You fix it.” 

As a result of her refusal to give more than one take, her work lacks the refinement that we tend to associate with the music of café society, but it has the fire, the tension, and the surprise often lacking there. It is also impressively short on vocal errors, although Washington sometimes avoided them by simplifying the melodies.

On Rembrandt by R Hughes

Sometimes Rembrandt’s subjects are too connected to the commonplace world for everyone to like them. There is an extremely vulgar side to Rembrandt. This in itself is no surprise, given the bawdry for which seventeenth-century Holland was notable. It may well be that giving vent to it was Rembrandt’s compensation for the anal obsession with neatness and cleanness that characterized Dutch domestic life. He did etchings of a man peeing and a woman defecating. A dog, tensely extruding a large turd from its backside, appears in the foreground. And his large painting of the infant Ganymede snatched up into the sky by Zeus in the form of an eagle shows the child uncontrollably pissing in terror, which must be about the most anti-classical rendering of a scene from the classics ever given by a major artist—though it is certainly what you would expect a baby boy to do under the circumstances.

Cognate with this is Rembrandts capacity for conveying unvarnished, unedited pain. In that he had something in common with the as yet unbom Goya, and with hie own con temporary the great Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera (1591 1682) Probably the most fearsome example in Rem brand's work was that enormous canvas The Blinding of Samson, a monument of sadistic fury which the painter sent as a gift to Constantyn Huygens, secretary to the Stadtholder and author of the first memoir to heap praise on the then young painter. It ts a perfect horror show of a painting, fully in accord with Jacobean taste. 

Such is the spint of The Blinding of Samson, except that the good, or at least the not bad, are doing the bleeding. There are soldiers pinwaing the belpless strongman, there » Delilsh, rotaping wilh scasor in onc band and his mat of be in the other, and Unere anuolber solucr, Like some gicamung and mahkynant becile wm by armour amid the coulucd taagke of Limbs and wrapoas, purhuag the dagger intu Samaun’s cre wehbe Lbeie & ho record of wheter Huygens bed uhis repubive aad cao, prescne, oF hung it 10 bes bows; Mh icons & striking example of the diplomatic ineptitude which, in combinauon with Rembrandt's persomal extravagance and his general financial incompetence, would eventually lead bim to bankruptcy. 

......

But this, of course, raises problems for the modern picture-lover, which begin with the supposed supremacy of “handwriting” as a test of authenticity. Beginning with the pseudo-scientific physiognomist Giovanni Morelli, on whose work Bernard Berenson based his own criteria for identifying Italian artists of the distant past, it was assumed — often correctly —that a painter will reveal who he is in those very parts of the painting over which he takes the least conscious control: the “handwriting,” the squiggles and tweaks with which he semiautomatically draws an earlobe, a nostril, an eye. This is all very well, and it is useful much of the time, but the curious thing about Rembrandt’s disciples is that they so often managed to reproduce the characteristic hooks and crotchets of their master’s line with astonishing and, it seems, convincingly unconscious fidelity. Hence the sharp and even embittered character of arguments about Rembrandt attribution. There can be few people left who believe he painted the Berlin Gemaldegalerie’s Man with the Golden Helmet, which was once not only accepted without demur but revered as a touchstone of Rembrandt’s work by such authorities of yesteryear as Jakob Rosenberg, W.R. Valentiner, and the muchfeared Wilhelm Bode, and also by a huge public. 

Today the focus of Rembrandt insecurity is the Frick Collection’s The Polish Rider which has been “questioned” (as the ominous term has it) by the muchfeared Rembrandt Research Project, Amsterdam .

And on A. Wilson

Mr. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such plays as ‘Fences’ and ‘“‘The Piano Lesson,” denounces society’s failure to support all-black theater companies, and argues that the values of the black community are compromised if black actors, directors and playwrights can only work within the structure of the mainstream, white dominated theater.

Mr. Brustein, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and the longtime theater critic of The New Republic, says that Mr. Wilson’s position reminds him of the arguments for black separatism that were heard in the 1960’s, and that it goes against the American tradition of integration. 

The struggle between the two men has galvanized the theater world for the better part of a year, ever since Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address last June at the national conference of the Theater Communications Group, an umbrella organization of nonprofit theaters.. Titled ‘The Ground on Which I Stand,” the speech was an impassioned call for a separate black theater, without which, Mr. Wilson contended, black actors and directors were participating only in ‘‘art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society.” 

Mr. Wilson’s anger is fueled, at least in part, by the contention that of the 66 major companies solid enough to belong to the League of Resident Theaters, only one is black; and that foundations and other supporters of black theater have chosen to put their money into increasing the presence of blacks in white-dominated theater organizations rather than into building new theaters within the black community. He also denounced one of liberalism’s prize achievements in the theater, the recent trend toward ‘‘nontraditional,”’ or colorblind, casting, which has Opened up numerous employment opportunities for black actors. 

‘“‘To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our Own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans,’ Mr. Wilson stated. 

' Mr. Wilson went on to attack Mr. Brustein, who, as a longtime critic of multiculturalism, has often said that social goals have come to take precedence over purely artistic ones in financing of the contemporary arts. Mr. Brustein, for his part, says he views Mr. Wilson’s demands as a cultural version of affirmative action, and he fears that their acceptance would have the effect of lowering standards, much as.critics of affirmative action assert that traditional standards are compromised by its use in admissions and hiring at universities and corporations. To Mr. Wilson, this claim is nothing more than racism by another name. “The truth is that often where there are esthetic criteria of excellence, there are also sociological criteria that have traditionally excluded blacks,’’ Mr. Wilson said in his June speech, whose ripples were magnified when it was reprinted last fall in American Theater magazine. ‘I say raise the standards and remove the sociological consideration of race as privilege, and we will meet you at the crossroads, in equal numbers, prepared to do the work of extending and developing the common ground of the American theaer.” 

Mr. Brustein did not take this quietly. In an essay titled “Subsidized separatism” in The New Republic he called Mr. Wilson’s Speech a “rambling jeremiad’” with ‘echoes of 1960’s radicalism, particularly the language of black nationalism.” He suggested that Mr. Wilson, as a playwright who had achieved wide success, in the mainstream theater, was something of a hypocrite for arguing in favor of a black theater. 

‘“‘Wilson’s pervasive tone of victimization, in fact, is oddly inappropriate for a playwright whose six plays all found their way to Broadway, where they won two Pulitzer. Prizes and I don’t know how many Tonys,”’ Mr. Brustein declared. . 

He concluded: “I don’t think Martin Luther King ever imagined an America where playwrights such as August Wilson would be demanding, under the pretense of calling for healing and unity, an entirely separate stage for black theater artists. What next? Separate schools? Separate washrooms? Separate drinking fountains?”’ 

Such rhetoric is worthy of a play in itself, and each side has been reveling in its hyperbole as the noise level has increased. But both men are too smart, and too politically savvy, to believe in the pure, unfettered and exaggerated positions’ they have been advocating. In a telephone con.° versation last week from his home in Seattle, Mr. Wilson was calm and reasoned, stating: “It just comes down to how we are going to participate in the American theater. If we had 9 or 10 black theaters instead of one, our contribution would be larger. In order for blacks to make tReir best contribution, we need theaters to develop our artists. Blacks do not have a history of going to the theater, and you need to develop that audience.’’ 

Mr. Brustein, speaking from London, where he was in the midst of a | week of theatergoing, was courtly if not conciliatory and said he viewed the debate leSs as an issue of the theater than as ‘‘a crucible for clarifying the conflict between the old methods of integration — Martin Luther King’s position — and the separatism that’s associated with black power,”’ 

“Equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal results,’ he said. 

Hovering over all of this is, finally, another issue. August Wilson is the nation’s pre-eminent black playwright, and Robert Brustein is one of the few critics who has not admired his plays. A secondary theme of this whole debate has to be the perennial power struggle between artists and critics: the artist, frustrated at the critic’s lack of sympathy for his work, lashes out, ascribing to him not merely a difference in taste but blame for much of the world’s ills. . The critic, stunned that his negative views seem to have done nothing to slow the artist’s meteoric rise, strikes back to assert his power. Soon they are calling each other every name in the book, and pushing each other toward positions more extreme than either might, on his own, have taken, locked together ina dance of ideology that goes far beyond anything either man ever conceived. , 

Scads more

 

Anthony L. On JMB

...like Roald Dahl, he admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose hardening and cooling into casual sadism, as in this line about Tootles, one of the pirate boys in Neverland: 

He has been in fewer adventures than any of them because the big things constantly happen while he has stepped round the corner; he will go off, for instance, in some quiet hour to gather firewood, and then when he returns the others will be sweeping up the blood. 

The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself. He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we regard him as airy and innocuous. In truth, he is mean and green, a mini-monster of capering egotism; could there be any more dazzling proof of self-regard than a boy who first shows up in pursuit of his own shadow? In the early versions of the play, there is no Captain Hook, because there is no need for him. Peter supplies all the cruelty that is required.

All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be thankful that he didn't live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie's birth and thus, one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan’ — “that terrible masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies.

On Thucydides and Herodotus

Herodotus in his Histories treated the international conflict of the Persian Wars between 491) and 479 BCE as a turning point in Greek history, in fact devoting most of his vast text to reconstructing the war itself and the events leading up to it, all prefaced by lengthy ethnographic descriptions of the numerous, and far-flung, provinces of the Persian empire that it involved. About the Scythians, for example, he said that they 

take the seeds of... cannabis, creep [into a tent-like structure], and throw the seeds onto the blazinghot stones within. When the seeds hit the stones, they produce smoke and give off a vapor such as no steam bath in Hellas could surpass. The Scythians howl, awed and elated by the vapor. This takes the place of a bath for ihem, since they do not use any water at all to wash their bodies. 

Archaeology confirms this account in detail. 

D uring the past half-century, however, Thucydides’ almost superhuman reputation has come under severe critical scrutiny, while Herodotus’ stock has correspondingly risen—a fact to which Robert Strassler’s new Landmark volume of translation and commentary bears substantial witness. The change does little more than belatedly reflect a fundamental revolution in Western cultural values that has taken place during the last two hundred years. Greece, in particular the Athenian democratic ideal, only came to be privileged over Rome after the Greek, French, and American revolutions gave imperialism a decidedly shopworn look. Thucydides’ main virtue for the seventeenth-century monarchist Vhomas Hobbes had been that “he made me realize how silly is che mocracy.” (This is hardly surprising. For true democracy Thucydides had no more time than did that aristocratic intellectual Plato; he welcomed the authoritarianism implicit in Pericles’ de facto rule as first citizen, and his favorite acknowledged form of government was in fact a limited oligarchy.) The swing toward idealistic republicanism was further developed in the English-speaking world’ by the banker George Grote’s unprecedentedly liberal History of Greece, published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, which praised not only democracy but the Sophists as the true heralds of freedom. 

This was the most radical change in Western assumptions about the ancient world since the Renaissance, and it prepared the ground for many other changes. Alexander the Great, for example, hitherto looked up to as the imperialist conqueror par excellence, now had to have his career of conquest explained and justified as a crusade designed to bring Hellenic culture to the benighted East (Victorian missionary work in Africa and Polynesia helped to support this view of him). The century-long struggle by feminists from the suffragette movement onward meant that eventually their automatic exclusion from the Thucydidean historiographical canon would be seriously questioned. 

On Liebnitz and Spinoza

 For many Christian thinkers of the time being a godless Jew and leading a morally excellent life was a dreadful contradiction if thewell contradiction if there was no God in one's life anything bad was possible yet by any 17th century standard of morality Spinoza led an exemplary life Stewart mentions that his only indulgences were smoking and wearing silver shoe buckles. 

Like Spinoza, Leibniz was a philosopher of propositions. He held, for example, that there must be a sufficient reason why something is the way it is and not otherwise. This means that everything that happens can be explained and nothing happens just by chance. This is Leibniz’s well-known principle of sufficient reason. He also advocated the principle that things that have no discernible difference with respect to their properties, say, two indistinguishable drops of water, are identical; there is, he concluded, only one such drop. This is his princtple of the identity of indiscernibles. But unlike his Dutch counterpart, Leibniz did not try to turn his propositions into a way of life: he was a fashionable diplomat, not a sage. In Stewart’s words he was “the ultimate insider,” whose work in metaphysics and philosophy coincided with an intense involvement in worldly affairs and often took the form of letters of advice written to powerful patrons. By the time he was twenty-four, Leibniz was a leading figure in German efforts to contain the expansionist policies of Louis XIV. (He tried to persuade the French king to launch a crusade against Egypt, as a way to divert the French army away from Germany.) When he and Spinoza met, his income as a diplomat was eleven times higher than Spinoza’s as a lens grinder. He died rich, leaving his nephew a huge sum of over 12,000 thalers. When the nephew’s wife heard of this windfall, “she fell to the floor in a frenzy and died of joy.” 

Leibniz was engaged in speculative philosophy, looking at philosophy as a mirror (speculum) of life rather than as a guide. Leibniz made a distinction, which greatly influenced Kant, between the universe as it really is—or rather as it is viewed by God = and the universe as it iS presented to us finite human beings. The universe in itself is the proper subject of metaphysical speculation. The world as it appears to us is the realm of science. Science deals with appearances—with what we actually sce —not with ultimate reality, with which it need not concern itself. In making this distinction Leibniz freed science from the yoke of metaphysics and religion. 

With the help of such guiding principles Leibniz speculated about the nature of ultimate reality. It consists, he thought, of nothing but a multiplicity of soul-like entities that he called monads. Space, time, material particles, cause and effect, are all appearances and not part of ultimate reality. In the world of monads each monad mirrors the whole universe. God, in this account, is a super-monad, a necessary being that by its very existence provides sufficient reason for everything that could have been otherwise. Monads, unlike atoms, do not interact but evolve by preestablished harmony the way clocks are synchronized. The synchronizer is God. 

With the help of this rather weird conception, Leibniz tried to solve nagging problems in Christian doctrine such as the problem of evil: how the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God created a world in which evil exists. He hoped that his speculations would help support conventional Christian beliefs and practices.

Spinoza was an atheist in a particular sense of the word: not godless, but one who denies the existence of a theistic God. The theistic God is a person. He expresses himself by his will. He is a supreme being, omniscient, Omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent. In the historical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam the theistic God created a world distinct from himself by free will. The theistic God sustains the world out of his goodness and is worthy of our devotion and worship. The source of our knowledge about the theistic God, according to the historical religions, is revelation to prophets and messengers. Spinoza found the idea of a theistic God profoundly superstitious. Reason, not revelation, he believed, should be our source of knowledge about God. Revelations are dreams and fantasies of self-appointed prophets. Spinoza’s God, as one and the same as Nature, is not transcendent and separated from the world. Everything in the world follows causally and necessarily from the nature of God in the same way that the sum of the angles in a triangle equaling 180 degrees follows from the nature of the triangle. The world is not created and sustained by the will of a person any more than the will of the triangle is what makes the sum of its 3 angles equal 180 degrees. The theistic God can live without the world. Spinoza’s God cannot exist apart from the world; 4°. he is immanent in the world or, —if you like, he is the world. By ‘contrast, Leibniz wanted to retain the attributes of the theistic God as understood by Christianity and provide them with proper philosophical underpinnings. The main attribute of God is freedom to choose. God is a being who was free to choose this world Out of all possible worlds. He sustains this world out of his goodness hence our world is the best possible world. 

On white jazz

Applied to jazz, such realignment of perspective (allied with the kind of ex post facto condemnation of long-ago social norms known to historians as ‘‘presentism’”’) has also produced an imbalance, a shoe-on-the-other-foot reconception of jazz history that minimizes the role of whites or, in some prominent instances, airbrushes them out of the picture altogether. 

Cultural and racial politics have deeply divided even jazz musicians themselves. Those responsible for the schism, whatever their motives, have fostered fractiousness and fracture, rivalry and mutual suspicion, near-beatification of some figures and shameless neglect of others. In sum, a dynastic view of jazz history: black masters, and white (when present at all) acolytes and exploiters. 

It’s been too easy to justify such tampering as feeding a noble goal: granting American blacks — particularly urban, high-risk black youth — the worthiest of birthrights, a lineage brimming with estimable role models. In that visualization, every black child Erowing up in the United States in the next century Can place himself or herself at the core of what is best in the popular culture 

But the architects of that vision have falsified the record, indulging in what Pins calls, in “The Republic,” the “‘Noble Lie". Some circumstances allow “beneficial fictions,” perversions of fact in the interests of outcome, or the higher good, Plato has Socrates telling Glaucon. In the case of jazz, the noble lie is achieved at great cost. The true losers may be neither the white musicians of the historical past nor their descendants, now laboring against strong racial currents in today’s music business, but rather the intended beneficiaries, American blacks; the message they receive is of a black cultural preserve, invaded and colonized by white America, and now being “reclaimed.” At its heart, it is a message of divisiveness and disunity, of balkanization.

Black jazzmen of the pioneer generations were unhesitating in expressing respect for white musicians like Bix Beiderbecke, Adrian Rollini, Joe Venuti, Jack Teagarden, Miff Mole, Frank Trumbauer, Steve Brown, Benny Goodman, Dave Tough and Eddie Lang. More than once, Louis Armstrong hailed Bunny Berigan, a white, as his favorite &4mong fellow trumpeters, The tenor saxophone pioneer Coleman Hawkins advised young fans to listen to his band of choice, the white Casa Loma Orchestra, for lessons in ensemble teamwork. Records played a key role, crossing color lines with ease, permitting black and white musicians to hear and learn from one another with a regularity seldom available on the job. The saxophonist Eddie Barefield loved to recall the expression on 17-year-old Lester Young’s face when, one snowy night in Bismarck, N.D., the future ‘‘Prez’’ first heard ‘‘Singin’ the Blues,” as performed on record by Frank rumbauer, whose dry, witty saxophone yle became Young’s chief inspiration. 

D. Denby on the Scottish Enlightenment

...a vivacious and erudite celebration of the flowering of Scottish intellectual life in the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment, as people now call it—maintains that Aikenhead’s execution “haunted” the century that followed. Just six decades after the student's rant to his friends, an Edinburgh ecclesiastical assembly attempted to excommunicate the freethinking Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume, perhaps the most thoroughgoing skeptic in the history of philosophy, believed that religion is a portrait not of how the cosmos works but of how the human mind works—of what men and women want and need. His view of life was worldly and sociable. Like many of the learned Scots, he revered the new science of Copemicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton; he believed in the experimental method and loathed superstition. Hume was admired in Edinburgh by some, disdained or dismissed by many others. But, after a tumultuous debate, the motion to excommunicate him failed, by a vote of fifty to seventeen. Hume's chief tormentor, a splenetic clergyman named George Anderson, died a few months later, and, Buchan concludes, “an ecclesiastical era drew to an end.” 

In the years between the two trials, Edinburgh had changed from a dour near-theocracy to a cosmopolitan center. Not just Hume and Adam Smith and James Boswell but a host of superb lesser fires burst into public acclaum. 

The fountainhead was Francis Hutcheson, a kind of pan-Enlightenment figure, who, from 1729 until his death, in 1746, held the chair in moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where he broke with tradition by lecturing in English as well as Latin. Hutcheson, a frequent visitor to Edinburgh, was Adam Smith's teacher and he encouraged Hume's early efforts. He was suspicious of metaphysics or any claims not based on observation or experience. Empiricism and the inductive method was the clarion call of the Scottish Enlightenment. Space. time, mass, movement, force—these things could be known in a way that such metaphysical imponderables as “divine purpose” and “final causes” could not. 

The intellectual break wih the past was drastic and seeming irreversible. In 1770, James Hutton, a farmer, began poking at the peculiar shapes and textures of the Salisbury Crags, the looming, irregular rock formations in Edinburgh. Hutton noticed something astonishing—fossilized fish remains embedded in the rock. The remains suggested that volcanic activity had raised the mass from some depth in the sea. In 1785, he delivered a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which included the remarkable statement that “with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.” Coolly discarding Biblical accounts of creation, the book that he eventually published, “The Theory of the Earth,” helped establish the foundations of modern geology. Shortly before Hutton’s investigation, in 1769, James Watt refashioned the steam engine. In recent years, scholars have traced the rudiments of modern psychology, anthropology, the earth sciences, and theories of civil society and liberal education to eighteenthcentury Scotland. 

For those who keep track of such things, the Scots, in current accounts of intellectual history, have caught up with the French as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought. Yet the learned Scots were remarkably unlike the French philosophes; indeed, they were unlike any other group of philosophers that ever existed. 

In “Leviathan,” published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes had developed a mechanistic view of human behavior: men were en tirely amoral; they reacted positively to anything that gratified their seIf-interest, calling it “good,” but the reaction was no more than a mechanical response to a stimulus. Unless they were overawed by a strong central authority, men would quickly be at one another's throats. The Scots were also familiar with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s “Maximes,” a wickedly funny collection of aphorisms that dissolved virtue in the acid of selfinterest. If we performed a benevolent act, La Rochefoucauld suggested, we did so in order to stoke our vanity or to seek a return of favor. But I lutcheson, and also Hume and Smith, were repelled by such fashionable cynicism; they were determined to prove that virtuc was grounded in human nature itself. H could so many modern ways of thinking have emerged in so seemingly backward a place? Buchan, a journalist, essayist, and novelist, describes the physical substance of Edinburgh with enormous gusto. In 1700, the city had its towers, its ancient castle, and a magnificently broad long strect running down its center. A walled city built on a high butte with a gentle lake on one side, Edinburgh was stunningly beautiful but dirty and poor, a foul-smelling, mucky place whose citizens tossed their wastes onto the street at night while a cloud of peat smoke hung in the sky above—“auld reckie,” it was affectionately called by its inhabitants. The common dict, dreary and conducive to alcoholism, consisted of fish, pottage, milk, kale, and a great deal of home-brewed small beer. James Boswell, when he was not in London pursuing Dr. Johnson and women, may have been Edinburgh’s most famous drunk, but there were many others. Everyone, including children, drank whiskey, claret, rum, and ale. By the middle of the century, there were six hundred drinking establishments servicing a town of only forty thousand. Buchan says that there were few public buildings, so that all legal, civic, and ecclesiastical business was conducted in dark taverns. 

Early in his career, David Hume devoted a chapter in “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” (1748) to disputing miracles. One might have supposed that miracles were beyond proof and therefore beyond argument, but saune didn’t think so. “A miracle is a stolat:on of the laws of nature,” he asservs, and then engages in a lawyerly intexrogation of the evidence. What’s the number and reliability of the witnesses? How close are they to the event itself? For Hume, the question is not whether miracles happen but under what conditions belief in them spreads. He moves the discussion from revelation to epistemology and arrives at the following mis_, chievous conclusion: “No testimony is suf| ficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the | fact, which it endeavours to establish.” 

Hume was greatly impressed by the recent news that nature operated according to laws provable by repeated experiment; he must have feared that the uncritical acceptance of Biblical miracles put at risk our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. If it was possible to clear away the superstition and speculation that had passed for science in the past, could something analogous be done in political and moral philosophy? , 

Wisdom, for Hume, begins with the acknowledgment of uncertainty—of the _ Limits of what we know. We have perceptions of the world in the form of impressions, Hume says, some of which, in recollection, become ideas—that is, the ideas have the force of impressions, without which they are meaningless. We're able to navigate our way through the world because such impressions of it are coherent, they support one another with respect to time and space. But the power of reason to prove much of what we know is weak, and Hume denied that our beliefs about the world could be ascertained with anything like scientific certainty. Events occur in a particular sequence (a billiard ball, struck by another, moves forward), yet reason cannot establish that one event necessarily causes another. Sequence should not be confused with causality. The best we can say is that our repeated experience of the sequence allows us to believe that it will occur in the future. Hume was fascinated by what we would call consciousness, but he always leads us back to experience, which is the arena, the test, the goal. 

Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. His father was a lawyer who died when the boy was very young, his mother the daughter of a prominent judge. Hume was being groomed for law when, at the age of thirteen, epic poetry and philosophy overwhelmed him; he read obsessively until, at eighteen, he developed hypochondriacal tendencies and suffered a kind of nervous breakdown, an event from which he recovered by exercising and by eating a great deal (a lifelong habit—he became enormously fat). A convivial bachelor, he required company, preferably a dinner party at home (he prided himself on his “cookery”) or a debate at the Select Society, a group of fifty of Edinburgh’s most clubbable and erudite minds. Hume had no recorded romantic life, though he enjoyed the company of elegant women in Edinburgh and in Paris, where he was certifiably a success (“/e bon David”) among the aristocratic ladies who entertained intellectual luminaries. His friend Adam Smith, born a little later, in 1723, was an asexual bachelor, too. The men shared temperamental quirks, derived, perhaps, from similarities in their childhoods. Both were reared by their mothers—Smith’s father, a customs inspector, died before he was born, and as a middle-aged man Smith still lived with his mother (and his maiden cousin). Except for the recklessly energetic Boswell, who recounted his heroic copulations in his journal, the Scottish intellectuals were given less to sensuality than to the comforts of a solitary domestic routine and easy fellowship with friends. Sociability was whit mattered, and in their writings the world, teeming yet measurable, is always with them.

Defining certain regularities ir one’s experience of the world—if not with scientific precision, then at least with observational rigor—was central to the problem of moral theory. What were the social arrangements in which these regularities appeared and in which our moral life was carried out? By the mideighteenth century, the Scots had realized that the acts of kings and queens and the words of religious or humanist sages were less important—less formative of social life—than such things as modern manufacture, commerce, and international trade. 

Early in “The Wealth of Nations,” the colossal book published in 1776 but first conceived many years before, Adam Smith announced, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.” Looking about him at mid-century, Smith saw a great deal of “trucking” and bartering—a vast, buzzing, articulated landscape of productive and commercial activity that connected everyone to everyone else. In a stirring passage, he evokes the seemingly rude existence of a day laborer. The man’s woollen coat, kitchen implements, and glass windows can be produced only by the combined labor and codrdinated exchange of literally thousands of individuals (“ship-builders, sailors, sailmakers, rope-makers . . .”), as well as by the contribution of such institutions as farms, mines, mills, smithies, shipping companies. National wealth, Smith insisted, consists in the sum total of productive activities, such as those which furnish the laborer’s house—and not, as earlier economic theory maintained, in the amount of gold and silver hoarded in state treasuries, or the total agricultural output protected by tarifts. Smith's analytic framework amounts to a shift in consciousness of how the world works, of how individuals fit into a national economy? it is the birth of the gross domestic product, the recognition that national wealth is something created by the entre populace. . 

For Smith, commerce was the glue that held the show together. “The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so,” Smith said in an early lecture. “And in this manner everyone is practicing oratory on others through the whole of his life.” The men and women in this vast system of speech are performing as rational agents, freely selling their labor and goods, exchanging, buying, and consuming. This rational actor calculates his best advantage in any given situation and gets what he wants by appealing to the same calculating instinct in others. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” What Smith is describing is the ethos that came to be called capitalism. A startling irony proceeds from his formulation, an irony confounding to the literal-minded and outrageous to those who demand moral consistency of the world. Each man, imagining that he’s working for his own advantage, is at the same time inadvertently working to increase the general wealth. The mechanism that transforms the many self-advancing efforts into general affluence is, of course, the market, along with its attendant bodyguard and ruthless enforcer, competition—the two of them, in tandem, ceaselessly setting wages and prices, adjusting supply and demand, goading, redirecting, enlarginy, rewarding, annihilating. 

In Smith's system, commercial man might not be docile, exactly, but he could be governed, and, just as important, he could learn to tolerate his neighbor's religion in order to do business with him. In the nineteenth century, Smith's happy view of life in commercial society was rejected by the Romantics as insipid and by the Marxists as naive, a mask for the despair of alienation. The later development of industrial capitalism, including the emergence, after Smith’s death, of dangerous factories and the immiseration of workers jammed into enormous sordid cities, was not something that Smith had envisioned. But his frequently stated belief in minimal government interference with the economythe doctrine of laissez-faire—should not be taken as passive acceptance of the depredations of capitalism. Adam Smith was not an earlier version of Milton Friedman or Jack Kemp. He would not have been pleased with the inequities of income in the United States today. He defended the rights of labor and deplored the withering effects of specialization on the individual worker. Smith was a liberal in both the modem and the classical sense. Buried in the work Of the great framer of Capitalism as a vast impersonal system, there is a modern humanist. 

Modern market societies, Smith and Mice thought, made men more reasonable, even more “polite,” but neither of them supposed that commercial relations provided all the values that men needed to live by. Their mentor Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, had suggested that, just as people derived infF voluntary pleasure from beauty, so they spontaneously delighted in nerforming, \ or observing benevolent actions. Benevolence made us feel good in the same way that a Greek statue does. The moral response matched the aesthetic response; disgust at ugliness was matched by disgust at cruelty; together, these responses constituted a kind of natural moral sense. Hutcheson was so sure that we enjoyed the spectacle of virtue that he made a weird kind of hedonic calculation, a numerical system in which different acts were rated according to the pleasure they gave. Hutcheson, who invented the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,” which the ufhitanans made so much of in the next century, reflects the peculiarly sunny temperament of the Scotush moralists. His system depends on our possession of favorable innate tendencies; to him, the moral sense was just thit—a sense, akin to sight or smell. Hume, in “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals” (1751), tries to put a little muscle into Hutcheson's pleasant ideas. He begins by admitting, as always, the limited powers of reason: by itself, reason can no more give us notions of virtue and vice than it can prove a necessary connection between events. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” Hume once said, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Reason lacks power to command, judge, or reform behavior. Common observation suggests, on the contrary, that morality is based on sentiment and passion: we look at Nero, or at a neighborhood thief, and we feel disgust. Like knowledge of the world, moral sentiment begins with particular impresstons—a key idea, since it suggests that we should make moral judgments individually rather than by category. 

What causes the impressions? It turns out that there are a few kindly elements in human nature, caused by the experience of family love in childhood, that could be called universal: 

It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity, cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove, kneaded into our frame, along with the clements of the wolf and serpent. | et these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be tnsufhuent to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must sall direct the determimatians of our mund, and where cvery thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous. A moral distinc tron, therefore, immediately arises; a general sentement of blame and approbation; a tendency, however faint, to the abjects of the one, and a proportionable aversion to those of the other. 

In describing the benefits of human nature, Hume sounds almost plaintive; he asks for our belief in a minimal case for human decency. Beginning with this minimal case, Hume, in an earlier book, “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1740), laid out a genealogy of morals. In the family unit of primitive society, people acted generously toward one another, so there was no need for formal rules, But when families banded together for vonvenienc°, safety, and support, property fell into dispute, and formal rules, which is what Hume means by “justice” —what'’s yours and what’s mine—became necessary. As communities develop in size, men’s natural selfishness, without disappearing, is joined by enlightened self-interest—an approval of what is good for the community and thus good for you and me. That common standard created by enlightened self-interest is what we call morality. In Hume's language, universal traits like benevolence, kindliness, and love for one’s children are “natural” virtues, while socially necessary traits like courage, honesty, justice, and loyalty are “artificial” virtues; that is, they are engendered by our need to live with one another. All societies admire such virtues and disdain cowardice, dishonesty, treachery, and meanness. We are angered by criminal behavior even if we are not hurt by it personally. Everyone, or almost evcryone, weeps or smiles at the same point ina play. F{uman nature exists, and moral codes created by our need to live together exist, too. 

You can see the common standard , Hume says, by noting the Janguaye tt people use. [fF somcos e designates another as “adversary,” he sveaks only for hirnself; if he describes .n ther as “odious,” he is appealing tu wic pread feelings of distaste. Hume i> speakin.s not only of the comnion lang. we of b is.ness or law but of tie gossip a. the vege able market and the water we'l. Eicbbes and La Rochcfoucauld and he other moral skeptics, it turns out, vere partly night in their description of human nature, but, in the end, paradoxically, a moral code is created, not defeated, by self-interest: we create a code precisely because we have mutually opposed interests but must leam to live with one another. If one studies the language, Hume urged, one can see that most people approve of what is socially useful, disapprove of what is socially destructive, and remain indifferent to acts that express individual self-interest. We can build morality on the first two and allow the third a free existence without judging it one way or another. 

Hume's “Principles of Morals” lacks beauty, passion, and drama. There is no perversity or darkness in this worldly view. Hume's is the everyday view, the life-as-it-is~-commonly-lived view, a forerunner of both utilitarianism and pragmatism. Human nature, sentiment, and sociality itself create morals. In a society held together by commerce and property, and by law based on property—modem democratic society—such commonsense ideas offer the minimal but necessary faith, Hume and the other Enlightenment Scots anticipated a civil order in which most people would continue to adhere to religion but would rely less and less on God as a guide to everyday lite. Such reliance would be replaced by a modified confidence in the successful functioning of institutions like the legal osstem, the civil service, schools and universities, and business and commerce. The administration of such enterprises is the ideal of “instrumental rationality,” as Max Weber called it, by which things run impersonally and reasonably well for evervone—not a spiritually impassioned wav of life, to be sure, and by no means suthcient to satisfy many of our desires, but one that allows, as an over-all framework, for the greatest individual development, the greatest freedom. It’s a framework that most Americans, even very religious Americans, actually depend on from day to day—the unspoken rationale of American secular liberty. Capitalism and liberal society dont seem especially heroic until threatened by fanatics; only then do people have to fight for what they’ve taken for granted,