The Saint, the Book, and the Lily - The Catholic Thing.
.'A Free Agent Capable of Choosing the Good'
Like a growing number of our ancestors (those not forgotten entirely), Lord Acton (1834-1902)has been reduced to a single sentence, often misquoted: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Because we intuitively know this to be the case, though some will deny it, Acton’s apothegm, originally written in a letter to Mandell Creighton, an Anglican bishop, is treated as a readily disregarded cliché. If a cliché retains some kernel of lasting truth, and if it remains applicable to the world as we know it, is it still a cliché and should it be scorned? In her first book, Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics(1952), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) examines Acton’s observation and writes:
“The great temptation of history to which most men succumbed, it was apparent to many of Acton’s contemporaries, was power. It had taken the shattering experiences of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the nationalist revolutions to explode the illusion of the Enlightenment that power itself was ethically neutral, that its potential for good was as great as for bad, that a benevolent despot was the best of all possible rulers.”
If the historical events cited by Himmelfarb aren’t enough to cure us of our naïveté, two world wars, the Holocaust and Communism should have completed the job. Here is the sentence that follows Acton’s best-known observation: “Great men are almost always bad men . . .” Himmelfarb writes:
“By this maxim, Acton takes his place squarely in the tradition of political and philosophical pessimism. His pessimism worked its way into every corner of his thought, into his politics, religion and history, and it took every emotional tone from passionate indignation through exasperation, despair, and what seemed to be a world-weary resignation.”
I’m reminded that the late Terry Teachout described himself as an “ebullient pessimist.” People have the mistaken notion that a pessimist must be gloomy and grim, a real drag to be around. Pessimism lightens the burden of existence. With fewer illusions, fewer obligations to be bubbly and tediously extroverted, you are liberated to enjoy the best in life, including writers like Himmelfarb and Teachout. The former writes:
“What saved Acton from the unredeemed bleakness of pessimism and gave meaning to his indignation was his refusal to succumb to philosophical or historical determinism. Man, he believed, for all his propensity to evil, was a free agent capable of choosing the good, and though original sin was always there to dog his steps, it did not always succeed in tripping him up.”
Laugh at Gilded Butterflies'
Only once before had a fragment of poetry showed up while I was dreaming. Twenty years ago or more, I was swimming in a dream, treading water, no land in sight, a wooden raft nearby. No sense of panic. My dreaming mind dredged up a sliver from Allen Tate’s poem “The Swimmers,” which has little to do with swimming: “Kentucky water, clear springs.” This was followed by my dream-self trying to remember the German word for “swimming.” It’s a close cognate to the English, Schwimmen, but I couldn’t come up with it. That’s it. Puzzling, blandly entertaining, but ultimately ineffable, like most dreams, a random firing in the limbic brain.
It happened again early Friday morning. The setting was a familiar one from thousands of previous dreams: a deserted factory. Bare concrete walls, indistinct machinery. I’m on an upper floor looking through a wide gap in the wall onto a paved courtyard. I became conscious of these lines: “[We’ll] take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies.” That’s Lear speaking to Cordelia in Act V, Scene 3. Here’s the larger context:
“No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds I’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.”
The King and his daughter soon are dead. This is a passage and a play I know as well as any in all of literature. It is our species’ artistic summit, rivalled only by Dante. Why did that fragment of text show up in my dream? No answer available in the literal-minded now. Interpreting dreams with certainty is a mug’s game. I accept and sometimes enjoy them. Dr. Johnson writes:
“. . . I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”
I thought of Blunden (1896-1974), best known for his Great War poems, when R.L. Barth sent me a link to the Times Literary Supplement review of the English edition of his most recent collection, Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems(Greenwich Exchange, 2021). The reviewer is Clive Wilmer, a good English poet, who writes:
“What marks him as a poet is severity, as well as a concision that – the metaphor is inescapable – has the force of a grenade. He is an epigrammatist in a line that runs from Martial through Ben Jonson to J. V. Cunningham, with a hint of Kipling’s Epitaphs of the War (1919).”
