Tracy Lee Simmons
The Year My Future Began with the Past
Joseph Pearce
H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and the Conversion of C. S. Lewis
D. T. Sheffler
The Cultivating Animal
Martin Cothran
Mark Teaches Julia Latin: A Meditation
Carol B. Reynolds
The Beckoning Path of Mahler's Music
Poetry & Reviews
James Matthew Wilson | Jerry Salyer
by Tracy Lee Simmons
Reading changed for me over the torrid summer of 1968. Which was just in time for the rest of the world to change too. A child braves the wider world in his own way, mercifully unaware of the storms that grownups natter about while tossing back highballs and filling rooms with loud opinions and cigarette smoke—though my parents' friend Chuck, who had parachuted into Normandy a quarter century before on the eve of D-Day, added cigar smoke, which has had me thinking well of cigars ever since. Note to the righteous young: Good people still smoked around children in those days and remained good people, though my mother did bring out the Ozium spray as soon as everybody left to neutralize the lingering effects, an aroma that still recalls to me the sudden and sad stillness attending the departure of large voices and the laughing elation of adult banter.
There was a lot to talk about that year. Turbulence had been buffeting the United States with multiple traumas. The world seemed to be coming apart. The Vietnam War, a distant conflict that made little sense to a child—and, as I started to learn, to many adults around me—had smoldered and flamed interminably, making a president with a sleepy drawl into a villain, and young men I knew as lifeguards at our swim club begin to disappear the summer before into the armed forces. The news kept showing images of something the microphone people were calling "race riots," and for the first time in our lives we saw soldiers sent not only into rice paddies on the other side of the world—what did they have against rice?—but into parts of town we usually didn't drive through anyway. They weren't real soldiers, we were told, they were National Guardsmen, but they looked real enough to us; they had guns. And two political assassinations that spring and summer poisoned an already poisoned well, rolling aftershocks in the wake of an even bigger assassination that had happened a few years before, which some of us couldn't remember.
Many books have been churned out on American life in the 1960s, but a book remains to be written on what it was like to be a child during that time, in those days before the tyranny of algorithmically-ordered screens when children were allowed to range outside and spend hours of unsupervised time in the woods, climbing trees and getting wet in creeks, and then turning up for supper just in time to avoid harsh words for being late as we took off muddy shoes before padding into the house (taking off muddy shoes without being told showed you were growing up). TV was for the most part dull even when we were al-
lowed to watch it, though the music that scratched out of my brother's transistor radio seemed agreeable enough. But everywhere we looked, in newspapers, magazines, and on TV, we kept seeing flag-draped caskets, and it is that image of caskets draped with flags that has provided me with my dominant visual picture of that larger world in which the adults worked, laughed, and drank.
Still, a child's mind tends to protect him from that larger world as he is too busy acclimating himself to his smaller world.
The Christmas before that hot summer, I received an odd gift: a small typewriter that I don't recall asking for. Perhaps my mother saw what my future would become and sought to quicken it. More likely, though, she despaired over the fact that her youngest child would always be hopeless with proper penmanship—probably a painful thought for her since she wrote in a flowing, clear hand—and writing conveyed in type might be the only way she would ever be able to read anything I put out in the world.
I adopted that typewriter. Not that I wrote anything of my own. What was there for a seven-year-old to say? I simply took books off shelves and typed out words and sentences that had already gained legitimacy simply because they were printed in real books. And so real books became a mental refrain. I aspired one day to read "real books," the kind of books you read more than once and talked about with whoever would listen, not the dull kind you got saddled with in school, books which were spent as soon as you put them down. School books weren't "reading." Reading was what you did at home, on your own, and, most deliciously, when nobody was looking. It was a solitary pleasure, and whatever you read about became a part of your own world.
One of the books I copied from with that typewriter had been another gift from the year before called Presidents of the United States, a De Luxe Golden Book. I think a teacher owned a copy of this book and I must have asked to look at it so many times that my mother just bought me a copy of my own out of embarrassment so I would stop bothering the teacher. So began my adventure with those thirty-six men—at that time—who had held that exalted office. I liked their names, their faces, and their peculiar attire in the illustrations and photographs. Mostly, though, I liked the way they were written about. They mattered. They had weight. They had done important things. And there they were, elevated to print. It's one thing to do the writing, I gathered, but quite another to be worthy of someone else's writing about you. For my part, I was happily hunkered at the bottom of the hill, neither writing nor being written about. I was just the copy boy paying homage to all those men whose names rang like bells.
So as the summer of 1968 approached, I knew who the presidents were. I could not have named them off in order yet, but I could look at the pictures and place each in his century by, as I thought of it, costume. I also knew that I was an Amer-
ican who belonged to the same country they did—that I, in some sense, belonged with them. Those men, all but three of whom were dead by that summer, provided checks with which to mark distant time, which is one little-noted advantage of imbibing history: one becomes a citizen of Time, an honorary habitué of periods he never saw for himself but developed enough imagination to see nonetheless. One may be planted decisively in one's own era, but that era remains, in the end, just another era for the student—formal or informal—of history.
Late that spring or very early that summer—about the time, as I recall, of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a grotesque reminder after the murder of Martin Luther King two months before, even to a child, that we were not living in normal times—my mother and I walked into one of those small-scale department stores, a sort of five-and-dime, that we used to see more of back then. On a long table display, their covers face-up, lay a set of books, The American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans. I picked up volume one, a red book with the prominent painting of George Washington we all knew staring out (American children knew Washington by sight back then), flipped through it, closed it, held it in my hand, felt its weight, and flipped through it again with a little more care to read a few sentences and look at the pictures.
"I want this," I firmly declared to my mother, who didn't take orders and was maternally resistant to all such demands.
"You already have a book about the presidents," she said. "Besides, this book is about just the first two presidents. You get them all together, but I'm not buying the whole set." (That last phrase—I'm not buying the whole set—was one of the saddest of my young life.)
Yes. Twelve volumes. I was asking her to commit to buying my first set of grown-up books of history, which was certainly a commitment on her part, however small, but she would make the purchase my commitment too or no deal.
After delicate negotiations and promises to be a better child than I was ever capable of being even on my best days, she agreed. "But only the first book today."
"But," I protested, "it's a set. You can't get just one. You said so." (Where do children learn to do this?)
"I can do that today and I will," she shot back. "We have to see whether you really want them. If you throw this one in a corner as soon as we get home, then we'll know."
Maybe I thought my honor had been impugned, but the battle was joined. The deal turned out to be slightly more complicated, though. I could have volume one now, and if I truly read it, in my fashion, page by page, and could then tell her facts—many, many facts—about George Washington and John Adams after a week or so, then we would go back to the store, buy volume two, and run the same course before buying volume three, four, and so on.
And so my presidential summer began. While the rest of the country was struggling with an endless war, sweltering in civil unrest, and wondering what would become of doped-up youth taking over college campuses, I was setting myself to the serious business of reading and immersing myself in American history when not playing outside and learning to swim. Those books were richly anecdotal, and I was memorizing facts, real facts, about presidents and their times, the spouting of which could make me amusingly entertaining to the adults (though only very briefly) when they dropped by to visit.
Eventually, the terms of the deal were fulfilled and I collected the entire set, earning my way through each one until, by the end of August, I had all twelve.
As I look back on that summer now, the sharpest memories of which are attached to the words and images of those books, I suspect I was taking in my first shallow draughts of adulthood. I was not homeschooled, but this deal between my mother and me was much like a homeschooling project: read, learn, recite—but, most of all, enjoy. Enjoy the sense of accomplishment with every name uttered, every birth year recalled, and every birthplace found on a map. (Oh, the joy of maps. Why do people resist geography?) Those men, along with their wives and other characters walking the stage with them, became something akin to friends. I could match names to faces. In the end, my mother really didn't have to enforce the terms of that deal. I was a colt in clover, reading real books about grownup things, and I was doing so on my own.
The books in that American Heritage series, I hasten to add, were not really for children my age. They were clearly aimed at older young people, and a casual browse even now shows that they make decent reading for anybody of any age. Adults included. Read them today and you'll know more about American history than you probably learned in high school; in college too— especially if you happened to major in history. I was punching well above my weight. But that was part of the fun. Because another friend from the shelves I made that summer was the dictionary, which was (and is) about as useful an item as useful gets. I learned new words, tried to pronounce them to see how they swished around in my mouth, and awarded to myself a private graduation certificate every time I used one of them in conversation, which must have made me annoying even to the indulgent. But that's how we learn words, not simply by memorizing vocabulary lists—though that's a fine place to start—but by doing commerce with them. We don't know words fully until we have introduced them to our tongue.
Since that time, I have never laid aside my stubborn conviction that children should always be encouraged to read just above their ability. If they beg off, you can back off; timing differs for different people. But the world of adult reading should always be held out as a fruit, as a reward, not as a penalty for getting
beyond picture books. Until words can make pictures for you too, you're not reading, you're deciphering. (Incidentally, children who never see their parents reading a book and who never hear the words "Not now, I'm reading—later" are having something precious withheld from them, which is the knowledge that they're not sitting at the center of the universe at every waking moment.)
Most gratifyingly, those books also show 1968, despite all, still to be a patriotic time. Yes, the news was bad, almost unrelievedly so if you read, listened to, and watched it. But schools had not yet become madrasas of anti-American propaganda. America had not yet been reduced merely to the sum total of her sins. Primary schoolteachers taught patriotically, no matter their private views, which didn't insinuate themselves into the classroom anyway. We were Americans being taught to revere our own country. Black spots on the canvas of our history, like slavery, were not denied, as I recall, and indeed they were taught, conspicuously. But those spots were not used as pretexts for tearing down a great country. We could oppose a war on the other side of the planet that summer and still attend Fourth of July parades, picnics, and fireworks displays and hoist up our American flags without fear of social media backlash. In short, as a country we had not yet become both ungrateful and stupid, which is a lethal mixture, culturally speaking.
That series of books put out by American Heritage should remind us all of what splendid work can be produced by a middle-of-the-road publisher out to serve middle-class Americans who feel pride in their nation and simply wish to know more about it without tendentious posing and "virtue signaling" by the kind of people who never had the luck to benefit from those books. Any such series of titles on American history released now would require vetting for noxious heterodoxy of the fraudulent "1619 Project" kind before exposing them to impressionable minds. Fortunately, no such worries vexed my mother that summer. For children, the world was still safe for reading new books.
And then there was the writing itself. Despite all the new and exotic words festooning the mind of a young boy, the prose in those books was, I think, middle-of-the-road as well, which isn't as easy to achieve as some may believe. The American Heritage "style," if there can be said to be one, was marked by a simple, direct clarity that made the reading smooth (at least for adults) without being condescending. It was unpretentious, mature writing.
Years after reading those books, I went on myself to write and publish about many things, history included, and I reckon that those books taught me more than a little about writing, about how to handle dense and sometimes intractable material that doesn't always lend itself to easy understanding, and I learned not only about the obligation to be clear but to be, at least on a good day, engaging as well. With respect do I recall the stable of writers for
the old American Heritage magazine—which had included the learned likes of Clinton Rossiter, Bruce Catton, David McCullough, and the redoubtable Barbara Tuchman—not only for their clarity but for doing the humble work of subordinating themselves to their material and not straining to be the star in every article. They didn't write for tenure; they wrote to be read. They knew that history is about stories or it isn't anything at all. And they knew what they were writing about, another assumption we can no longer make in this age of the "dead degree" where credentials are bestowed for minimal effort and mark, for too many, negative intellectual growth. American newspapers, journals, and internet news and opinion sites are now staffed almost exclusively by young zealots who know practically nothing about their nation or its past, denigrate what little they know, and who feel utterly free to pass facile judgments. These books did not grow out of that polluted soil.
My future began that summer with a long, sustained swim into the past, a past filled with names and dates and paintings and photos, but most of all with words—glorious words. That's the year I believe I became an American citizen in full. Those books peopled my mind. I can still remember the very smell of the ink. Yes, it was too heady for a young child to take onboard all at once. But that's what re-reading is for, and those books were read many more times over the next few years, until they were replaced by other books. But by few, I think, more worthy.
The summer ended, predictably enough, with riots disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the garish images of bedlam splashed from the TV. But I let the adults think about all that over their cocktails. I had been given better, more enduring things to think about that summer. The future loomed ahead: Cub Scouts, swim teams, and, coming soon, something called Latin (though I was fairly sure this last item would play no large part in my life). September brought cool air, new pencils, and a return to the regimentation of homework.
We Americans have a history worth knowing and knowing well, one filled with unlikely heroes, gaudy scoundrels, and magnificent examples of lofty and arduous achievement—as well as instances of mistakes, blunders, and failures made good. Of course, the books I collected that summer cannot take you past LBJ, but it's a nice jaunt until that point. No doubt some errors or occasional misstatements dot those pages, but the story is real, the mosaic shines, and young Americans should still have those books to hand when the electronic gadgets are shut down and a quiet room invites quiet reading.
The American Heritage Book of the Presidents and Famous Americans series has long been out-of-print, but one can still find second-hand copies of it online. Grab them. The young especially may need their companionship for the long march ahead to recover what has been lost.
by Joseph Pearce
Most people will know H. G. Wells as the author of pioneering works of science fiction, such as The Time Machine , The Invisible Man , and The War of the Worlds . Yet one of his most popular and influential works was not a work of fiction but a history of the world. Wells' The Outline of History , published in the 1920s, was an international bestseller, making Wells a very wealthy man.
Wells' History was an expression of the author's philosophical approach to history and reality. It was informed by "progressive" scientism and atheist humanism, a belief that the technological fruits of science would ensure that humanity would "progress" beyond religion and superstition, which he saw synonymously, towards a golden age of luxury, comfort, and peace.
The tacitly anti-Christian stance of The Outline of History is epitomized by the fact that Wells devotes more space to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than to the figure of Christ. This is understandable enough, considering the philosophy of materialistic determinism that animated Wells' understanding of history. If human "progress" is unshakeable, unstoppable, and utterly inexorable, the inevitable consequence of invisible and immutable evolutionary forces, then the figure of Christ is an irrelevance and a distraction. Like the legendary King Canute, the superstitious carpenter's son from Nazareth was destined to be swept away by the tide of progress. Why waste time and space on such an ultimately futile figure?
The impact of The Outline of History on the faith and historical perspective of the two million people who bought it and read it in the years following its publication was significant. Taking but one example, Joy Davidman, an eightyear-old Jewish girl in New York City, read Wells' History in 1923 and immediately declared herself an atheist.1 She would later become a communist and still later a Christian. We will return to her presently because her conversion to Christianity, like her conversion to atheism, is connected to Wells' book.
The most vociferous and vituperative critic of The Outline of History was Hilaire Belloc, a Catholic historian, poet, and essayist.
Belloc's first attacks against Wells' History were published in the London Mercury and the Dublin Review . Thereafter, he systematically dissected Wells' book in a long series of articles in The Universe , accusing Wells
1. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (HarperCollins, 1996), 696.
of a prejudiced provincialism and an ignorance of the very science that he sought to enthrone as the driving force of history. Wells had "not kept abreast of the modern scientific and historical work," and he had "not followed the general thought of Europe and America in matters of physical science." It was, however, Wells' defective and deficient grasp of history itself which was most at fault:
[I]n history proper, he was never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture, and never even introduced to the history of the early Church…. With all this Mr Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksuredness of the man who only knows the old conventional text-book of his schooldays and mistakes it for universal knowledge.2
The controversy, or what might whimsically be called the "War of the Wells," reached a conclusion and a climax in 1926, when Belloc's articles for The Universe were published as A Companion to Mr Wells's "Outline of History." Wells responded with a book of his own, entitled Mr Belloc Objects, to which Belloc replied with a further book, entitled Mr Belloc Still Objects. By the end of the sixyear struggle with his adversary, Belloc claimed to have written over 100,000 words in refutation of the central arguments of Wells' book.
The year before the Belloc-Wells confrontation reached its climactic conclusion, G. K. Chesterton entered the fray with the publication of his book, The Everlasting Man. Intended as Chesterton's own "outline of history," written as a riposte to Wells, it was very different in tone to Belloc's published broadsides. Whereas the argument between Belloc and Wells had become a quarrel, creating personal enmity between the two men, The Everlasting Man is a prime example of Chesterton's ability to argue without quarreling. This is seen in the prefatory note to the book in which he acknowledged his differences with Wells while lauding Wells' achievement:
As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
2. Michael Coren, The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells (Jonathan Cape, 1993), 162–3.
Compare these kind and conciliatory words, offered deferentially to an adversary, with Belloc's derision of Wells' ignorance of his own ignorance and his prejudiced provincialism. Such is the difference between Chestertonian charity and Bellocian bellicosity.
The Everlasting Man is divided into two parts. The first part, "On the Creature Called Man," covers history prior to the time of Christ; the second part, "On the Man Called Christ," covers the history of Christian civilization, indicating the real difference that the Incarnation makes to human history. The book parallels Wells' History by commencing with prehistoric man. Without referencing Wells' book directly, Chesterton questions the scientific or historical accuracy of seeing the "cave man" as some sort of "ape man." According to popular perception, the "cave man" was a primitive savage: "So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about…. I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded."3
After mocking the prejudiced presumptions of those who had psychoanalyzed a mythical prehistoric patient, Chesterton requested an unprejudiced and truly scientific and historical approach to the mystery of prehistoric man. He suggested that those wishing to know more about our neolithic ancestors should be truly radical and look in the caves in which such evidence might be found. In doing so, we might discover "the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club." Upon entering the cave, we do not find evidence for the "progressive" presumption that our ancient ancestors were primitive "ape men":
What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs.4
The evidence that we do find in the cave is art, which is the work of men, not the work of apes nor ape men. "Art is the signature of man," Chesterton writes, indicating that our most remote ancestors were distinct in kind from the brutes that they hunted and painted and that they shared a common kinship and kindred spirit with men of all ages in what makes all men most human.5
3. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder and Stoughton, 1947), 28–9.
4. Ibid., 30.
5. Ibid., 37.
The Everlasting Man fulfilled its purpose. It was an answer and a charitable riposte to Wells' Outline of History and an exposé of the shallowness of the atheist humanism and "progressive" scientism that had animated Wells' approach to history. Although it was not a huge international bestseller, as Wells' book was, it would prove very influential. Father Ronald Knox was "firmly of the opinion that posterity will regard The Everlasting Man as the best of [Chesterton's] books,"6 a view which was echoed by Evelyn Waugh:
Chesterton is primarily the author of The Everlasting Man. In that book all his random thoughts are concentrated and refined; all his aberrations made straight. It is a great, popular book, one of the few really great popular books of the century; the triumphant assertion that a book can be both great and popular. And it needs no elucidation. It is brilliantly clear. It met a temporary need and survives as a permanent monument.7
One can deduce from Waugh's effusive praise that Chesterton's "great, popular book" had been influential on Waugh's own conversion to Catholicism in 1930. What is not in doubt is the influence of The Everlasting Man on the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Anglican Christianity a year later.
Lewis had admired Chesterton—without accepting Chesterton's Christianity—ever since he'd stumbled across a volume of Chesterton's essays while recovering in a field hospital in France during World War I. "Chesterton had more common sense than all the other moderns put together," Lewis wrote, "bating, of course, his Christianity."8 Although, by the mid-1920s, Lewis had abandoned his earlier atheism for a form of theism, the "God" in whom he believed was very different from "the God of popular religion": "Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to make sense."9
Having read The Everlasting Man soon after it was first published in September 1925, it would take a further six years for Lewis to finally embrace Christianity. This was following the famous "long night talk" with his great friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, on September 19, 1931, but there is no doubt that reading Chesterton in general and The Everlasting Man in particular had paved the way for his conversion. "In reading Chesterton, as in reading George MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for,"
6. G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views, ed. D. J. Conlon (Oxford University Press, 1987), 49.
7. Evelyn Waugh, Review of Chesterton: Man and Mask by Garry Wills, National Review, April 22, 1961.
8. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Fount Paperbacks, 1998), 166.
9. Ibid., 173.
Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. "A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."10
Many years later, during World War II, Charles Gilmore, the Commandant of the Chaplains' School of the RAF, remembered that Lewis "would bid me study again Chesterton's Everlasting Man; would anxiously ask if the chaplains had really got it into their heads that the ancients had got every whit as good brains as we had."11
Considering the influence of The Everlasting Man on Lewis' and Evelyn Waugh's conversion, one can but wonder the extent to which the history of twentieth century literature would have altered had Chesterton not written his own "outline of history." It is possible that we have Chesterton to thank, albeit obliquely, for The Chronicles of Narnia and Brideshead Revisited. Similarly, it is possible that we might have The Everlasting Man to thank for the conversion of Joy Davidman, the young Jewish girl who had become an atheist after reading Wells' Outline of History. Years later, influenced by the Christian works of C. S. Lewis, she became a Christian, then a regular correspondent, and—finally and eventually—Lewis' wife. And so, following a strange and circuitous route, Joy Davidman, later Mrs. C. S. Lewis, had passed from Judaism to atheism after reading Wells' History, and then had come across the writings of C. S. Lewis after Lewis had passed from atheism to Christianity, having read Chesterton's Everlasting Man. It is difficult not to sense the hand of Providence in this one woman's experience of the "War of the Wells."
As for the "War of the Wells" itself, it might be said to have ended with the surrender of Wells to the truths that he had been too gullible to see. Whereas Belloc, Chesterton, and Lewis lacked the credulity to believe in the future golden age ushered in by science, which had been Wells' inspiration for his History , it was history itself that led to Wells' final disillusionment with his own optimistic delusions. Faced with the horrors of World War II, Wells was forced to face and confront the multifarious evils that scientific "progress" had unleashed in the service of "progressive" ideologies. His last book, written before his death in 1946, was full of the desolation of disillusionment. Overshadowed by the aftermath of blitzkrieg, gas chamber, genocide, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his final book was entitled, tragically and appropriately, The Mind at the End of Its Tether . In the end, Wells' "progressive" optimism was not defeated by Belloc or Chesterton, but by reality.
10. Ibid., 148.
11. Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (HarperCollins, 2002), 252.
by D. T. Sheffler
Iwould like to see fewer biographies of great individuals and more biographies of great families or villages. We tend to overrate the singular man of original genius, while ignoring the slow accumulation of culture built up layer upon layer, century upon century, that makes the individual man of genius possible in the first place. Only so much culture can be gained in a single generation. If I may steal a metaphor from Joseph Epstein's essay, "The Ideal of Culture," which steals in turn from Willa Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, culture is like the onion and crouton soup served to Bishop Latour by his friend, Father Vaillant. Only a Frenchman could make such a soup, which leads Latour to say,
I am not deprecating your talent, Joseph, but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Some provincial subject of Rome learned from her mother a way of making a certain kind of bread. Perhaps she found a way to make it just a little better by changing the kneading process slightly. Twelve generations later, a baker from the next village finds that the dried-out leftovers from this type of bread make nice croutons. Someone else in the north of France, during the reign of Philip IV, seasons such croutons from a stock pot left simmering with marrow-rich bones. And on and on, just to get the crouton piece of the onion and crouton soup.
How many little things do we encounter every day—things that add so much loveliness and dignity to our lives—that could not possibly have been invented all at once in a single generation? Even the off-gridders and paleodieticians rely on countless resources, often in the form of know-how, that only come to them after thousands of years of painstaking cultivation away from bare survival in the woods. It is easy to think that this incremental move away from bare survival in the woods is a move away from nature. But culture is natural to man because human nature is to cultivate, in all the senses of that word's root, the Latin word colo: to till the soil, to reap the fruits, to inhabit the same estate generation after generation, to devote oneself to the perfecting of something beautiful, to worship. Man is the cultural animal. We are homo colens.
All the other attributes of man that have been suggested as our distinguishing feature are cultural. Language separates us from the lower beasts, but language itself is something cultivated and passed on from mother to daughter.
Language is not static, but rather grows organically in delightfully variegated ways over generations. Henri Bergson and Hannah Arendt suggest that we are homo faber, the tool-making and crafting animal. All our artisanship, however, is a form of cultus because each technique is learned primarily by imitation of our forebears and only secondarily supplemented by individual creativity and invention. Sometimes this is contrasted with Johan Huizinga's homo ludens, the playing and consciously delighting animal. Our playful arts, however, also are what they are only through continual refinement. How much distance had to be covered before something akin to Ring-around-the-Rosie in the dim mists of the preliterate bronze age turned into a play of Aeschylus?
More fundamentally, we have been called both homo religiosus and homo sapiens, man as the religious animal and man as the rational animal. Both our spiritual and our rational dimensions, however, are more rooted in the community of generations than Enlightenment thinkers tend to suppose. From conception, a human being is a spiritual, rational person, but this hidden interiority only comes into developed embodied fullness as we learn the practices of worship and dialectic in a community of other spiritual persons who themselves only learned from others. The highest meaning of cultus transcends the plowing of fields or the cultivation of even our loveliest arts. At its summit, human cultus is the sacramental life of the Church, and we are most human when we fully immerse ourselves in this life.
I heard a story once from a friend who visited a winery in Croatia. It was small and family owned. Nobody knew how long a vineyard had occupied this patch of land ideally sloping down to the Adriatic, but one suspects that grapes have grown there in one way or another since before the Romans came. Nobody knew, likewise, how long the vineyard had been in the family, since the genealogy has grown so long that the whole story can no longer be told. Such a family always has little projects going on to improve what they love. "Grandfather built that wall over there and now we are extending it to surround the new storage building." Such family wealth is not the wealth of coins but the substantial wealth that allows a father to pass on a whole way of life. Not every generation, however, gains ground. My friend told me that the family brought out a bottle for her to try. They could not sell it, they said, because it was ruined. Its flavor was all ashes and smoke. Years ago, the whole region had been devastated by wildfires and an entire year's harvest had turned bitter along with the loss of buildings and equipment. "We keep it," they said, "to remember what we have been through."
Another fire heavily damaged the cathedral in Chartres, France, on 7 September 1020, causing the bishop Fulbert to begin construction on what would become one of the finest things human beings have ever made. The earlier building damaged in that fire was not itself the first church to stand on that
spot. The first was built some time prior to the fifth century, but this church was burned down by the Duke of Aquitaine in 743. The second church was burned down by Danish pirates in 858, parts of which remain in the present Saint Lubin Chapel. They broke ground on the final church in 1126, faced setbacks from more fires, began again in 1194, completed the building in 1252, and finally reconsecrated it under St. Louis IX, King of France, in October of 1260. Stone upon stone, church upon church, generations of masons labored, whose names we cannot now discover. Imagine being one of those tradesmen to begin the work in 1126 at, say, the age of thirty-seven. Imagine dying at sixty-three in 1152 with the completion of the work another hundred years off, not knowing what further layers of work would be completed by your sons and your sons' sons.
That ending may sound depressing to some, but such a life and death is one of the noblest I can think of. Is it really more desirable to finish your career and retire to a few rounds of golf so that you can bequeath to your children nothing more than a moderately swollen account and some closets to go through?
Not all of us who are sympathetic to this line of thinking can inherit a vineyard in Croatia. We are born into a particular time and place and many of our parents bought into the post-war American culture of the 1960s and 70s—some more than others. Many of us did not grow up learning to read Latin or play Bach because we went through childhood as the unwitting subjects of a school system more concerned with denigrating and supplanting a tradition than passing one on. This means that we must be modest in what we can hope to cultivate and leave to our own children.
Right now, classical schools are springing up all over the country, but few of these schools can be wholly true to their own classical ideals for the simple reason that none of their faculty or even their principals have themselves received a classical education. We are all making up for lost time. Suppose that all these schools accomplish, however, is just a little progress: the education of our children in such a way that some of them can go on to teach our grandchildren in a more truly cultured manner. Learning Latin as an adult, I teach my son in a rather clumsy way so that he can teach his son in a better way. The same principle applies to Shakespeare, to classical philosophy and theology, to music and art, and to all the other things that we have lost (or that we actively despised and destroyed). I have every reason to think that we can, in fact, accomplish more than this even in the present generation, but just suppose that this is all we can manage. Would that not be a worthy enough bequest to our sons and daughters?
The process of layered culture is not limited to the high culture of Latin and Shakespeare. As human beings, we rely on this constant refinement of a tradition in every area of life from things that are small and ordinary, such as learning the best way to shave, to things that are foundational to the whole shape
of the life that we will lead, such as learning how best to carry out a romance. We can easily miss how difficult it is to figure out the small and ordinary in the absence of a cultural model to imitate. How often does one shave? What kinds of blades are best? How does one avoid cutting oneself? What does one do when one does cut oneself and must put on a dress shirt for work? Ideally, a boy learns all these things from his father, or uncle, or some other man whom he admires. These days, such questions can readily be answered with a little research, but the difficulty of the young man's predicament lies in the thousands of such questions that must be answered and the impossibility of even knowing where to start or that there are so many questions to be answered in the first place. How does one dress for work anyway? How does one talk to coworkers appropriately? How does one open a conversation? Culture works by looking to models that we admire and answering such questions by imitation with little improvements of our own along the way.
Conservatives tend to focus on absolute universal moral standards: thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. When faced with the question of how best to shave, they usually write such questions off as "matters of individual prudence," rightly recognizing that a single answer cannot be given absolutely for all young men in all circumstances at all times. But such an answer hardly gives the young man any real guidance, and the solution to his troubles cannot be readily gleaned by studying the Bible. Liberals tend to focus on the cultural contingency of such things and wrongly infer that culturally contingent things are, at best, simply arbitrary—and at worst, a threat to individual freedom and self-expression. What the young man needs, however, is an uncle to come along and show him how to mix his soap, where to buy proper blades, and how to hold his razor so that he does not cut himself. Is this a law of absolutely inviolable morality? Of course not—but neither is it arbitrary. It is a matter of culture, and a cultured person is someone who has internalized many such things and integrated them into a harmonious, flourishing way of carrying oneself through life.
Such ordinary matters are trivial in isolation, but we should not despise them on that account, for thousands of trivial things pile up to form the vast majority of our daily lived experience. With a continuously refined tradition at our backs, we stand a good chance of carrying out this day-to-day existence rather well. Without such a basis to begin from, however, we are forced to muddle through on our own best guess. Sometimes we divine a pretty good way to operate, but mostly we just make a mess.
If such logic stands for the trivial, it must stand all the more for those affairs that, while not belonging to the realm of moral absolutes, are nevertheless weighty and require much wisdom. How does one choose whom to court?
What might be said on a third date to win her heart? When does one make a proposal and how? What kinds of intimacy are appropriate before and after a proposal? And those questions only cover the period before marriage.
Knowing the refined habits and graces of daily married life is a form of practical wisdom, and while possessing its secret may not make a person completely invulnerable to life's tragedies, it certainly does mitigate many of the worst. Those most successful in this sphere usually have at least one model couple to look up to, although it is better to have several. The model couple will never exactly match one's own situation and they will never be perfect. But such is all culture. We start with what we admire, learn what we can, apply to our own circumstances, and make adjustments. With all of our own faults, we hope to be in turn a model for our own children and other younger couples of our acquaintance. It turns out much better than just guessing at what to do or following the immediate impulses of our most reptilian psychology.
I suspect there are two main reasons why many today do not aspire to the life of long culture. First, we have come to worship the ideal of authenticity, which means doing one's own thing. One must move to New York City and start from scratch. One must find oneself. One must be original—just like everyone else. A certain amount of independence and self-knowledge is, of course, a requisite part of a complete human life. But I begin to worry when I see friends feel the need to move and start from scratch every five years. We already have within ourselves what we are looking for, but we think we need to go just beyond the horizon again and again to discover who we really are. We think we need to emancipate ourselves, breaking free into a life unconstrained by parents, hometown, responsibilities, or spouse, but this just leaves us with a fifth career and a third spouse, no closer to the mirage oasis. Mostly, that dream of the real self is just the product of marketing anyway.
The second reason is deeper and has more moral force. We are increasingly aware today of the many sins of our forefathers. How many of all those innumerable prior onion and crouton soups were made by oppressed peasants for their haughty overlords? Might this not dirty my hands? More directly, we worry that our whole inheritance, both intellectual and material, was only gained through systems of injustice. Might it not be better to burn the whole house down in hopes of beginning again with a clean conscience? Our very sensitivity to such moral qualms, however, is part of the inheritance laboriously gained through centuries of moral reflection. Burning the house down might offer a momentary sense of catharsis, but it might also bring us right back to the level of, say, the Assyrians, who were not so nice. What is more, keeping our hands clean from anything tainted by a past of injustice might make us feel pious, but it really does nothing to help anyone in the present still suffering from injustice.
We may be tempted to feel a kind of survivor's guilt when we have the good fortune to experience the happiness of long cultural capital while so many live in the bleakness and misery of anti-culture. The solution to this, however, is not to join them in bleakness and misery until we contrive some utopian scheme for getting everyone out at once. This would only serve to increase the domain of anti-culture and add to the already too great mass of human suffering. The best way to help those left out in the cold when we are enjoying a family dinner is not to cancel the dinner, but to invite them in.
As Anthony Esolen so beautifully describes in his book, Out of the Ashes, we have so many unused rooms in our inherited manor house that we could easily accommodate more guests if we would uncover the furniture and dust a little. Never has it been easier to read the great texts of the canon completely for free. The whole treasury of classical music is there to be taken up and played and listened to. Instead of scrolling through Twitter, one might just as easily scroll through the freely available collections of the Freer, the Frick, the Met, the National Gallery, or the Louvre. So much of the best that has been thought and said and sung and sculpted is right there just waiting for those in this generation who are willing to take up the work of long culture and pass it on to those who will be immeasurably ennobled and humanized by it. It has not all been burned down by the Duke of Aquitaine or Danish pirates, but it might, if we fail, be simply forgotten.
In the end, the hope of keeping our hands clean by keeping away from the sins of our fathers is a fool's hope anyway. We have much too many sins of our own to be so fastidious. There is nothing we can burn down that will serve as an adequate atoning sacrifice. We can only look to the end and source of all true culture, the center around which all those churches of Chartres revolved and still revolve, the highest possible aspiration of all our human making of bread and wine. We can only look to that sacrifice lifted up with the declaration: ECCE AGNUS DEI, ECCE QUI TOLLIT PECCATA MUNDI.
by James Matthew Wilson
The hour has come, the table stills, And, as the conversations cease, Someone's last hurried whisper fills The air with thoughts about a niece And her pursuit of dangerous thrills. A cheek turns rose, and then, in peace, The host, stood at the table's end, Shares those few words his wit has penned.
But, as his thoughts rise on the air, Sonorous, decent, sound but dull, Eyes lower and fix their sullen care On crystal glasses halfway full Whose cut intricacies now flare Like beacons in the evening's lull, To lure the mind of every guest Toward brilliancy's ecstatic rest.
How typical of us to find Riches in boredom. How a thing To which our selves had just been blind Will fascinate and suddenly bring Joy that the world is so designed. The gleaming of the roadside spring, The beetle in a brick wall's shade, Such signs seem as if for us made.
And so the schoolboy's fingers trace The whorls within the weathered pew; A girl's hand fiddles with a case To clasp then open it anew; And diners settled in their place Find in the crystal's hue on hue
A resonance much like a rhyme To draw the hour out of time.
by Martin Cothran
In academic circles, the study of "pedagogy" has taken a fair beating. This is not a recent phenomenon. In 1929, the literary critic Irving Babbitt proclaimed that professors of pedagogy "are held in almost universal suspicion in academic circles, and are not infrequently looked upon by their colleagues as downright charlatans."
The subsequent years have not improved their reputation—among their academic colleagues in other disciplines or anyone else.
The study of pedagogy, not to mention the practice, has suffered from a number of problems, the first of which seems to be that, as a discipline (made up of a web of educational think tanks, academic journals, teachers colleges, and professional standards boards who all purport to prepare teachers to teach), it has wasted its credibility on every progressivist fad and fashion and spent its energies on experimental ideas that have repeatedly failed—failure that has not stopped the educational establishment from implementing the same ideas again and again to no academic benefit. There is a national education reform movement almost exactly every twenty-five years in the United States, starting with the progressivist reforms of the 1920s. Each has flown under the progressivist banner, and each has not only failed to solve the problems of learning in our schools, but has, in many cases, made them worse.
Another issue is the low scholarly reputation of teachers' colleges. On the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), for example, education majors are among the lowest performers on both the quantitative and qualitative sections of the test, saved from the absolute bottom of the verbal section of the test by the lower-scoring business majors. Students entering graduate schools of education tend to come from the bottom quartile of undergraduate achievement, and perform poorly on various measures of academic competency. Education research, too, has little to say for itself: A metastudy by two researchers from Duke and UConn in 2016 found that only 0.19% of education studies met even the most basic requirement of reliable research: that the study be replicated.
Another problem is that the study of pedagogy has been forced to bear the full weight of learning. A teacher is expected to master "methods" of teaching rather than to concentrate on the content he or she is expected to teach. Knowing how to teach math seems to be more important than knowing math. An oft-repeated progressivist bromide is that we shouldn't concentrate on teaching students
knowledge, but teach them instead how to use knowledge—the question of how a student is supposed to use something he does not have is left unaddressed.
The old idea that a teacher should have a mastery of what he or she is to teach has given way to the idea that how to teach is the important thing. The specialist in pedagogy is considered more necessary than the specialist in math when it comes to teaching math, despite the fact that the student is expected to learn math, not pedagogy.
There are other problems: lack of accountability, imperviousness to change, low expectations. But the chief problem, and the one that gives birth to the others, seems to be that many of the assumptions about students, schools, teaching, and the very nature of learning in teacher preparation are simply mistaken.
This fundamental issue has to do with the very object of teaching. Here we find a marked disagreement between progressivist and traditional educators, with extremes on both sides. Let's start with a simple example in the form of a question.
When we say "Mark teaches Julia Latin," is the object of Mark's activity Julia? Or is it Latin? Which one is being taught? The progressives have a quick answer: It is Julia who is being taught. In fact, there is a common education-school slogan that asserts "We are teaching students, not subjects" to underscore the lack of concern for the subject matter being taught to the student, and their all-encompassing concern for the student.
To them, Julia is the object of teaching, not Latin.
This concern with the student over the subject is very much in line with the chief principle of progressivist pedagogy, stemming directly from John Dewey, that teaching should be "child-centered." This is an intrinsic or psychological emphasis. The practical result is the tendency to think that teaching is the process of bringing the subject into conformity with the student rather than the student into conformity with the subject. William Heard Kilpatrick's attempt to allow the student's interests to play a greater role in what he or she studied (which easily transitioned to the attempt to sideline teachers) also exemplifies this impulse.
This child-centered philosophy is on full display when the new progressivist teacher takes over the classroom in Chapter 2 of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Suspicious of Scout's evident literacy, she begins eliminating traditional subjects, only to replace them with whole-word reading instruction, projects, cooperative learning, and thematic units in a methodology her brother Jem refers to as the "Dewey decimal system."
The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless
efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn't know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: No tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me. 1
These new learning devices—projects, unit studies, "group dynamics" (cooperative learning), all the unwieldy pedagogical apparatus of the progressive program launched in the 1920s (made more toxic when paired with a thinly veiled disdain for actual literacy)—were designed to take the place of the former and longstanding goal of inculcating cultural knowledge in the student. And if the rhetoric of the education establishment is any indication, the downgrading of the importance of subject matter in favor of the non-academic development of the child is still the dominant attitude.
The anti-academic and anti-knowledge bias in progressivism has been its most controversial characteristic. Its greatest critic has been E. D. Hirsch, Jr., whose book Cultural Literacy landed like a bomb in 1987. In a later work, he states,
Historically … the progressive tradition has continued to attack the disciplined teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic in favor of "holistic" methods, which supposedly engage and educate the whole child. Progressives have also continued merely academic learning. Not surprisingly, disparagement of the "subject" has resulted in a diminishment of student competency in subject matters.2
1. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial, 2002), 36–7.
2. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (Anchor, 1996), 268.
There is, of course, an opposite extreme. The extreme traditionalist may say that the object of education is not the student at all, but the subject: that in the sentence "Mark teaches Julia Latin," what is being taught is not Julia at all, but Latin alone. The subject, not the student, is the object of teaching.
We see this view on full display in Charles Dickens' novel, Hard Times, a book that could be considered one of the great commentaries on education. In various novels Dickens lampoons the education of his time, characterized by the "grinders" to whom poor unsuspecting students were sent to learn their grammar forms mechanistically and completely out of context of any actual Latin.
Hard Times opens with a scene in a classroom in which Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher, is attempting to force "facts" into the brains of his students:
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"3
Here, students are not human beings with souls that need to be formed in accordance with some ideal paradigm, but instead are "reasoning animals," mere "vessels" to be filled with "facts." So little do the students themselves matter to Gradgrind in the project of learning that he has assigned each of them a number by which he refers to them in class. And when he goes to ask Sissy Jupe, "Girl Number Twenty," who has been raised with circus horses, about the nature of horses, she cannot find the words to explain what she knows. To show her what a horse is, Gradgrind turns to Bitzer, who, despite having little real knowledge of horses, gives the requisite facts about the horse, which are accepted by Gradgrind as the correct answer. Implicit in such a method is the treatment of a horse, not as a being with a nature or an essence, but merely as a mechanistic collection of facts.
"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind. "You know what a horse is."
To Gradgrind, the teacher is teaching the subject, not the student. The student is the passive recipient of the knowledge, and it is the knowledge alone, not the student, that is the important constituent in the learning process. Facts are the important thing; the student is the mere receptacle.
3. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin, 2007), 9.
Is there a third alternative?
We might resolve this question by taking note of an observation about Latin grammar. In Latin, students learn that verbs like "teaching" require a double accusative construction:
Marcus Juliam linguam Latinam docet.
The accusative case, indicated by the -am ending on both Juliam and linguam Latinam, tells us that both are direct objects of the verb. In English we can say both "Mark teaches Latin to Julia," and "Mark teaches Julia about Latin," sidelining either the subject or the student into a prepositional phrase. Early on, however, students of Latin learn that neither would be the right construction in Latin—at least they would learn this if the teacher bothered to teach them the subject!
If we take our cue from the Latin grammar, there would be no progressivist nonsense about saying "We are teaching Julia, not Latin" (another reason Julia should take Latin). And there would be no Gradgrindian grammar either.
This is, we might say, the classical answer to the question, something that would be taken for granted in an educational thinker like the Roman Quintilian. What is being taught in the process of teaching? It is both the student and the subject. Both are the direct objects of the educational process. We are indeed teaching the student, and trying to do it as clearly as possible by adjusting our manner of presenting the material in the classroom. And yet we are also teaching subjects, each of which has its own peculiarities in regard to its teachability, which must be taken into account.
Teaching is a transitive verb: It must have an object. And what the grammar here tells us is that teaching has not one object, but two. For this reason, teaching is a constant balancing act between what we are teaching and who we are teaching. The abilities of the student must be taken into account in the teaching process, something every good teacher knows how to do, but he does this without compromising the subject.
Contrary to progressivism, the purpose of teaching is to change the student, not to change the subject. And contrary to extreme traditionalism, the purpose is not to leave the student unchanged in teaching him an unchanging subject.
by Carol B. Reynolds
Akey precept of classical education involves understanding the development of Western literary genres through study of the acknowledged masterworks. Classical educators enthusiastically trace the lines from ancient literature through Dante and Shakespeare. Optimally, they continue to draw that line, examining Baroque style, moving through the era of timeless novels by Austen, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters, continuing across a web of works by Dumas, Hugo, and Melville, and savoring the labyrinth of monumental undertakings by writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Far rarer do educators take the same measured journey through the masterpieces of Western symphonic repertoire. Granted, certain composers and their works may be studied, but how often do teachers examine the path from the first blush of instrumental genres (Renaissance, Baroque) into the symphonies by Viennese masters Mozart and Haydn, and then across the rocky world of Beethoven and into the glorious orchestral works by nineteenth-century Romantics like Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky? Only through following this line can a person appreciate the value of this tradition.
Yet, even if such a journey is taken, it does not always culminate in its pinnacle: the symphonic works by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), a composer whose name alone mesmerizes musicians. Introducing Mahler into the classical curriculum may not seem to be an imperative, but it will unlock a depth of understanding that cannot be accessed through any other repertoire.
Could a world of musical sound exist that is so nuanced as to be simultaneously hidden while startlingly forthright? What if this music lavished beauty upon the ear one moment only to jar and bewilder the next? Could such music proceed according to a tight formal design that nonetheless feels amorphous? Finally, would contemporaries embrace this music, or would decades have to pass before it found a revered place in the Western canon?
These features describe the works that flowed singularly from Mahler's pen. His compositions express the human experience on its deepest levels with unusual authenticity. His musical phrases take listeners somewhere— whether they pulsate boldly or are transparently gentle. Mahler utilized an exceptionally large orchestra, yet many passages rely on small groupings of
instruments in the style of chamber music. His symphonies are long when compared to those of his era, but not longwinded. Instead, they breathe, sigh, and dissolve into seemingly inconsequential episodes built from basic elements like folk tunes, the gestures of a dance, or the kind of repetitive patterns that might be created by a child.
Mahler was passionate about nature and immersed himself in natural surroundings whenever possible. Not surprisingly, he cultivated the sound of the natural world in his pieces (cowbells, jingle bells, hammer blows, bird calls), expressing effects commonly heard in the meadows and mountain paths of alpine Austria. The dramatic landscape of his music emulated the clashes found in nature. Even when passages are translucent with beauty, contrasting elements intrude, often grotesque and tempestuous, as they engage in a battle with the serene. These clashes are reconciled, but retain an edge, ending in a curious dissonance, an incomplete melody, or a sonorous oddity that protrudes from the harmonious fabric.
All this intensity flowed from a quiet, thin man wracked by internal doubt, bothered by physical infirmities large and small, and jostled by the dynamics that triggered the First World War and foretold the terrible path to the Second. Although biography is a poor tool for understanding musical style, certain facts about Mahler's life do illuminate his accomplishments as a composer.
Mahler was of modest birth and simple background.1 He grew up in Bohemia as an outsider: a German-speaking Austrian who moved awkwardly amid the dynamics of nineteenth-century Czech society. The circumstances within his family were not harmonious. Fortunately, his prodigious talents shone early and he received an exemplary musical education at the Vienna Conservatory. Still, the path to becoming a successful composer was not certain. He thus turned to conducting, spending his adult life torn between the worlds of conducting and composing.
For the ten critical years of 1897 to 1907 (including the period of writing the fourth symphony), he suffered beneath a Herculean yoke as head of Vienna's Imperial Opera. A Moravian Jew, Mahler had ascended to the post amid controversy. To be considered for such a position required the essential, although to him not inordinate, sacrifice of converting to Christianity. This requirement seems unfathomable today; yet, antisemitism was woven into the bureaucra-
1. He was born in a small village of Kaliště but grew up in Jihlava, today the capital of the Vysočina Region of the Czech Republic. This city lies along a river by the same name that marked the historical border between Moravia and Bohemia.
cies of institutions across nineteenth-century Europe, including those within the Habsburg Empire.
Mahler made himself Christian enough to be palatable to Emperor Franz Josef, but his Judaism handed his critics yet another reason to reject his efforts to bring needed reforms to the Imperial Opera. Mahler's attempts to change anything beyond superficial issues were met with brutal resistance. The resulting turmoil would have debilitated any artist whose chief joys were simplicity, stillness, and focused thought.
approaching Mahler through s ymphony no. 4
Unquestionably, the study of Mahler's nine completed symphonies (and a tenth left in draft) takes a lifetime. Still, no symphony gives a better place to start than his fourth (1899–1901)—a work that marked the closure of his first period as a composer and opened the door to a spectacular series of five symphonies that transformed the parameters of the form.
When Mahler began writing his fourth symphony, he was emerging from what people today call a "writer's block." His first three symphonies, by no means commercially successful even if admired in certain quarters, were receding from audiences' memories. A composer paralyzed by an absent muse resembled a film director today whose accolades lie a decade in the past. A false step here, a disappointment there, could be accommodated by an adoring public. But when the wellspring of creativity appeared to run dry, the audience would turn. Clearly, in such circumstances, a composer's anxieties multiplied stratospherically.
In addition, the six-week summer holidays during which Mahler could compose unencumbered were regularly plagued by issues familiar to anyone hoping to accomplish a year's worth of work in a limited timeframe. During the summer of 1899, while he tried to bring the first drafts of Symphony No. 4 into order, factors domestic and beyond distracted him, including the ambient "serenades, funeral marches and wedding marches every day from eleven o'clock and on Sunday from eight in the morning" that drifted up from the village below the place where he worked. 2 Still, he was able to configure initial versions of three of the four movements that would become his fourth symphony.
Hoping to create a better work environment for the following summer of 1900, Mahler purchased land and had a "composer's hut" built (Komponierenhaüschen, or composing-little-house). Mahler would utilize several such retreats across his compositional career. To this day, these huts evoke not just
2. Taken from a letter of July 10, 1899 from his wife Natalie to Nina Spiegler. Cited in Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahleriana, a partly unpublished manuscript.
Mahler's circumstances, but the universal problem of an artist seeking the focus necessary to create. Even with a better working space, though, more problems arose (including ill health), yet Mahler was able to push through his difficulties. Ultimately, the fourth symphony would have its premiere on November 25, 1901, albeit to mixed reviews.
Initially, Mahler cast this symphony in six movements beneath an umbrella title of Symphonic Humoreske. Part of this original intention survived the compositional process, although other parts became key movements of different works. Initially Mahler gave the movements descriptive titles—a popular practice at the time that he had used in previous symphonies. But in 1900, he reversed course, eschewing the use of descriptive titles for purely instrumental movements (those without a vocal text) in part to distance himself from the appearance of writing program music. Nonetheless, extra-musical influences can be discerned. For example, while composing this symphony, Mahler was entranced by a playscript, Hippolytus, written by a former schoolmate and friend Siegfried Lipiner (1856-1911). Two of the play's characters symbolized the classical opposition between Apollo and Dionysius, one being Phaedra who embodied the Lebensdrang, or Life Force, and the second, Hippolytos, who represented the Seelenstille, or Rest of the Soul. Mahler himself related these characters to the contrasting moods he would cast in the fourth symphony.
Insofar as scoring, Mahler made a surprising choice to back away from the monumental scope of his second and third symphonies. He crafted the fourth symphony as if it were a string quartet, employing a full orchestral palate with the care and clarity appropriate for chamber music. Every detail of its instrumental color (and there is much of it) sounds clearly and defines the structure, much as strands of twinkle-lights define the shape of a Christmas tree. Except for select passages that overwhelm with orchestral power, Mahler achieved his goal to maintain lightness as the overall tenor of the piece.
The first movement expresses the atmosphere Mahler had originally designated: "heavenly gaiety" (überirdische Frölichkeit). He set the stage for this gaiety with the shake of sleigh bells over a solo flute line evoking a bird call, followed quickly by a lyrical string melody and the skipping motion of ascending bass lines in dotted rhythms. Throughout the movement, a juxtaposition of contrasting styles and moods recalls the spirit of childish play: repeated rhythms, nursery melodies, rustic dances, frenetic passages that stop suddenly, extreme shifts in dynamics. The movement is driven by a relentless energy that dissolves at times into stunning repose.
Despite the seeming mishmash of elements, the first movement is tightly constructed in an overall classical sonata form. Most notable is the turbulent development section, where Mahler probes the depth of his disparate materials. Woven into the energy and turmoil, however, are some of the most passionately beautiful melodies he would ever compose.
As with most composers, Mahler cultivated signature melodic shapes. His most beloved melodic line, usually labeled the Ewigkeit (Eternity) motive, plays a glorious role in this movement.
Here, a two-note descending gesture (sigh) moves upward yearningly, drops again, only to reascend, yet to drop again and then soar until clashing with the downward pull of bitter forces. As simple as the pattern is, it expresses one of the most satisfying of musical incarnations: unquenchable longing. Its effect is simultaneously edifying and devastating.
Classical-era symphonies often featured a dance rhythm as a second or middle movement. A sleek Mozartean minuet or bucolic Haydnesque Ländler were especially popular, each containing a contrasting "trio" arranged in A-B-A form. This practice gave way in Beethoven's time (turn of the nineteenth century) to a more free-wheeling form called a scherzo ("play" or "joke"), also with a contrasting trio. For the second movement of this symphony, Mahler chose an extravagant version of this last path, writing an unusual succession of three scherzos with trios.
The movement opens with a characteristic Mahlerian shift: a jarring horn call followed by the outburst of a country dance played by solo violin given a scordatura tuning. Scordatura indicates a specified "mistuning" requested by the composer. Such tunings would give the solo violin different effects. In this case, Mahler wanted a melody full of roughness or ghostliness when compared to the smoothness of the full string section. Ever explicit in his scores, the composer instructs the solo violin to play without a mute (while the string section in this movement often is muted) and to remain prominent throughout. Although not shown in the final score, Mahler initially entitled the movement with the phrase Freund Hein spielt auf ("Friend Hein [Death] plays away"
or "takes up the fiddle"). Accordingly, duality and ambivalence pervade the movement as scherzo and trio—grotesque and sublime—present the two faces of death, one frightening and one alluring.3
In playful fashion, the scordatura melody marks the beginning of each scherzo , while each trio expresses the spirit of a traditional Ländler through the melody of a solo clarinet. Both the scordatura violin and the solo clarinet, along with prominent solos by the trumpet and horn, illustrate Mahler's ongoing focus on individual instruments spotlighted from within the larger orchestra. In fact, orchestral players are drawn to Mahler's music partly because of the composer's fondness for giving every instrument the prominence of a soloist.
In the third movement Mahler turns to another standard classical form, that of theme and variation. But again, Mahler brings his own peculiar approach. Instead of the classical variation form used by Mozart, Mahler adheres to the freer form favored by composers like Brahms. The movement, accordingly, is better viewed as a series of metamorphoses, each striving for a higher plane. Apt comparisons can be made to the progressive structure of Dante's Purgatorio.
The third movement opens in sublime tranquility marked Ruhevoll (restful), with a melody Mahler himself described as "divinely serene, yet profoundly sad." The simplest of bass lines, spacious with rests, undergirds the melody.
The sense of breadth in this movement results first from the steadiness of Mahler's confidence in this bass line. Each variation has its own character. The dynamic level rises and the tempo increases until the music arrives at one of Mahler's signature climaxes with cymbal crashes, wild glissandi, and the bells (ends) of the horns and clarinets pointed to the sky per Mahler's explicit instructions. This climax is not an ending, as listeners might expect, but rather a door to a new realm of sound: a place that is otherworldly, that floats inconclusively in an evocation of eternity—the music of the spheres.
3. Mahler commented that the movement "will make your hair stand on end. But in the Adagio that follows, everything will be unraveled, and you will understand that no harm was meant after all." Cited on page 162 ff. in Gustav Mahler, Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner, ed. Herbert Killian Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg, 1984). The original memoir was published in 1923.
Contrasting Franz Liszt's decision not to compose a finale around "Paradiso "in his Dante Symphony, Peter Brown notes that Mahler "not only composes a gateway to paradise, but goes on to realise it in the Finale."4 Mahler's initial plan to end the fourth symphony with a naïve, transcendentally beautiful song for voice and orchestra survived the compositional process. It opened the floodgates to original approaches Mahler would pour into each of his symphonic essays thereafter.
This final movement begins as the orchestra issues a morning call, setting the possibility of something unusual about to appear.
Indeed, this call foretells the similarly shaped soprano melody that responds to the call, proclaiming the first charming verse of the movement ("We enjoy the heavenly Joy").
Like composers before him, Mahler chose a familiar folk song for his principal melody. The text he reconfigured from a landmark collection of folk poetry, Des knaben Wunderhorn (Of the Little Boy's Magic Horn), published in 1805, and widely considered a landmark of German national identity.5 Mahler praised the "roguishness and deep mysticism" of the text and elevated it with a charming melody that almost skips off the page. Mahler specifies in the score: "To be sung with childlike and serene expression, absolutely without parody."
The text makes frequent reference to Gospel figures, saints, and the heavenly feast. Vegetables, fruits, and meats are in abundance. On fast days, fish come swimming and Saint Peter casts his net into the pond. Angels bake the bread; Saint Martha must become the cook. The text also evokes the Innocent Lamb led patiently to his death. Mahler spaces each of his four strophic verses with a bridge of purely instrumental music, conveying memories of earth. But these
4. Peter A. Brown, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony (Indiana University Press, 2003), 627.
5. The qualities of song characterize much of Mahler's symphonic style. Indeed, his entire compositional output consists almost solely of songs and symphonies. For many of these, Mahler made use of themes and texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
6
passages serve primarily as reminders that strife on earth continues, although that strife does not affect the heavenly life.
Few passages in the Western tradition can equal the final section (coda) of the fourth movement of this symphony. Discord is erased. Pulsating energy is suspended. Only tranquility of sound remains to express the text: "There is no music on earth that can be compared to ours." Saint Cecilia smiles as she leads the court musicians; even Saint Ursula has to laugh. The orchestra fades into what biographer Jonathan Carr equates to a music offering: "the peace that passeth all understanding."7
Today Mahler's fourth symphony is regarded as one of the highest expressions of classical symphonic form. At its premiere, though, the reception was far from affirming. To the ears of his ever-poised-to-strike critics, the symphony turned away from the mass force and breathtaking scope of his innovative second and third symphonies. This new work disappointed. It was too transparent and simple, even as it demanded too much of the ear. After all, Vienna at the fin-desiècle operated as Europe's center of luxury and sensual indulgence. The rigors of all-night waltzing were understood by all. The aural demands of Mahler's crystalline melodies pierced by a tumble of boisterous tunes collapsing into quiet ecstasy fit nowhere in that paradigm. In fact, these very passages annoyed and fueled those who wanted to diminish the talents of Mahler. This Jewish conductor whose day-to-day standards pricked the tenured players' complacency continued to throw their assumptions off balance.
And so Mahler would continue to struggle through his symphonic compositions. Each one presented new challenges, vastly expanding the concept of symphonic form and triggering puzzled reactions from listeners. At Mahler's death in 1911, the verdict was out regarding the importance of his legacy. The destruction of the First World War overtook the world. Postwar modernism unabashedly turned the world of music on its head and then drove away concert audiences. New technologies like the radio and phonograph recordings forever changed the public's primary method of encountering music. Before any of those developments could settle, the Second World War upended the world again.
6. Critics at the time panned the movement as false and affected. But Mahler's intent was to establish a middle ground between parody and nostalgia, thereby finding a way to allow a sense of purity to magnify the images within a text (e.g., a host of saints frolicking).
7. Jonathan Carr, Gustav Mahler, a Life (Overlook Books: 1997), 124.
Only after that war did Mahler's star finally rise, lifted by the brave endorsement of key figures like Leonard Bernstein, and facilitated by a generation that had assimilated the radical experimentalism of the early twentieth century. The ears of performers and listeners were open; the depth of Mahler's voice spoke to them. From the ashes of a destroyed European musical culture arose the realization that Mahler's voice had been unique. That word, used literally and forcefully, continues to be the best and most valid assessment of Mahler's ability to encounter, assimilate, recast, and present anew every known possibility of musical sound.
Mahler's music deserves attention from anyone pursuing a classical understanding of Western culture. The idiosyncratic beauty of his works takes time to assimilate. Beauty that is immediately understood, like love at first sight, carries the risk of being immature and fleeting. Over time, if genuine, beauty deepens through repeated encounters of struggle and resolution. It is this reconciliation and the promise of redemption in Mahler's music that allows us to experience an otherwise unfathomable level of beauty through orchestral sound. And it is this struggle that sets Mahler's works as a crowning jewel of the Western symphonic tradition.
by Eduard Habsburg
Review by Jerry Salyer
The Habsburg Way: Seven Rules for Turbulent Times by Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria
Sophia Institute Press, 2023, 176 pages, $19.95
I am of the opinion that if the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had not imagined that the sweeping away of long-established dynasties was a form of progress, and if they had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach, and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler.
–Winston Churchill
In American discourse today, the word "empire" inevitably carries negative connotations. For some it conjures up a vision of colonists struggling to free themselves from British rule, even as others may think of Nero's persecution of early Christians. Still others may remember Ronald Reagan's censure of the Soviets' "Evil Empire," while those less historically-literate will have at least seen Star Wars. Empire is what the bad guys do. Right?
Well, if we look at the Latin root word imperium (authority) we might at least pause before conceding such a sweeping judgment. The fact that there have been bad empires does not mean that the "bad" in "bad empire" is redundant, any more than the existence of bad governments means that we should all embrace anarchy. Nor need we espouse imperialism ourselves in order to find something positive in the legacy of the British Empire or Augustan Rome. After all, the former did stamp out the diabolical Thug cult of India, and the latter played a key role in the dissemination of Greek philosophy and of the Gospel. At the very least, we can concede that one empire may serve to counter another. As related in The Habsburg Way, the Ottoman Empire's attempt to bring Europe under the sway of the Koran was thwarted largely through the savvy diplomacy and strategy of Habsburg emperor Leopold I:
Leopold knew what he had to do to defend his realm. War was declared on the empire on August 6, 1682, but the Turks could not begin their campaign that late in the year without the risk that winter would be-
gin before their anticipated siege of Vienna had succeeded. The Holy Roman Empire had a year to prepare, and Leopold went to work. He formed an alliance with Venice and the Pope, which was only to be expected. But in a master stroke, he arranged the Treaty of Warsaw of 1683 in which Poland and Austria mutually promised to defend each other, if the Turks attacked either Warsaw or Vienna.
The result of Leopold's maneuvering was the extraordinary confrontation known as the Siege of Vienna, where Poland's heroic king Jan Sobieski led a combined force of Polish and Holy Roman Imperial cavalry straight through Ottoman lines. Europe remained free and Christian.
And as author Eduard Habsburg points out, this was only one of many instances whereby the imperial house of Austria played a salutary role in European politics. At the 1809 Battle of Aspern, the Archduke Charles personally headed the assault that broke the French formation, thereby proving to the world that Napoleon Bonaparte was not an invincible superman; during the fratricidal First World War, Emperor Karl I quietly promoted peace efforts, seeking all the while to mitigate the conflict's totalitarian ferocity; during World War II, members of the imperial family established (and served in) the Free Austria Battalion, a resistance group fighting to undo Nazi Germany's annexation of their country.
This Habsburg legacy may still prove beneficial to Western life, argues Eduard, if enough people are open to its lessons. One such lesson involves the Habsburg reliance upon subsidiarity, the principle that decrees that issues be resolved at the most local level possible. Only through subsidiarity could such a large, multiethnic regime as the Holy Roman Empire ever have been managed, he explains, and this provides a lesson for Americans today. "Cities should never take over roles that families can manage; states should not do what counties, towns, or families can do; nations should not preempt the role of states."
We must resist the "strong desire to centralize lawmaking and policymaking at higher and higher organizational levels," whether the centralization comes from Washington, D.C., or European Union headquarters. "Human beings are made for local interaction, in families, towns, and countries with common cultures. That's just the way we are made." Here it so happens that the imperial Austrian is on the very same page as some of America's foremost icons, such as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry, both of whom explicitly yearned for America to become a highly decentralized federation rather than a consolidated regime.
Of course, the ship of centralization seems to have long since sailed, and the ordinary twenty-first century U.S. citizen probably cannot do much now to change that. As individuals, however, we can at least stop thinking and acting
as if our hope lies in distant celebrities or politicians. Instead of being news junkies, mere spectators of the world crisis du jour, we might save the better part of our time and energy for our immediate and extended families, neighborhoods, churches, and local communities.
On the world stage the Habsburgs themselves retain only a tiny fraction of their former clout, as the prospects of a Habsburg restoration have become dimmer and dimmer in the years since World War II. This explains why The Habsburg Way is written as it is. Although there are many details that might lead the American reader to moderate his natural distaste for monarchy, the book's author aims neither to convert anyone to monarchism nor to propagate some grand ideology of imperial government. If anything, The Habsburg Way is a historically informed self-help book, one whereby modern American parents can take cues from some of Europe's greatest patriarchs and matriarchs. An imperial family is still a family, after all, and by any empirical standard the Habsburg dynasty is one of the most successful in history. Having lasted as an institution for almost eight hundred years, its historical and cultural legacy is indisputable, and it counts among its members some very striking men and women of faith, from the Venerable Archduchess Magdalena to the Emperor Karl, beatified by Pope John Paul II. In one passage Eduard sets forth his case as to why American Christians of all confessions might take an interest in his kin, especially now:
The Habsburgs can indeed be seen as a model of a large, successful family, blessed with many marriages and lots of children. Historically, the family experienced few assassinations and made no great conquests through war, killing, or cruel intrigues. But more than this, in a time where every Christian value is being increasingly driven out of public life and politics, the Habsburgs stand for timeless things like family, faith, the peaceful cohabitation of nations and languages, and the peaceful coexistence of diverse races and cultures. For all their faults, the Habsburg rulers appear to have cared for their subjects quite well.
In other words, the Habsburgs are of interest to anyone who cares about the relationships between parents and children, about identity, about responsibility, or about God. The Habsburgs took pains to ensure that each new generation was enculturated via the Habsburg tradition—for no one can take for granted that those born into a family automatically know what membership in said family means. True membership is only learned through years of commitment, discipline, and prayer. It could be that the Habsburg way represents a possible preventative with respect to our era's personal crises, obsessions, and sexual experimentation—all of which partly stem from the existential void left by an absence of a sense of roots.
Thus the Habsburg way implies that he who is born privileged needs to learn gratitude toward his forefathers, as well as how to make the most of his material, cultural, and spiritual patrimony. For him to do so, he must be inculcated through the Socratic maxim γνῶθι σαυτόν (know thyself), which has very practical implications:
This maxim applies to individuals and families about themselves. Indeed, the entire Habsburg family has always been keenly aware of its deep roots, what shaped it, and where it came from. Although mostly the Habsburgs were a deeply traditional people, that didn't keep them from innovating, when necessary. We are all swept, whether we like it or not, into the future, every moment of our lives. When you "know yourself," you can carry yourself into the future without losing yourself along the way.
As if to punctuate the claim that the Habsburgs are capable of adapting to changing times, the foreword to The Habsburg Way comes from none other than the pugnacious Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary. As a Protestant who is also a nationalist, Orban is certainly not the first person we would expect to introduce a work revolving around the former rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet Orban's experience as an anti-communist dissident during the Cold War has taught him the importance of seeking common ground where it is to be found. And there are old ties between his people and the Habsburgs: As he says himself, "There were indeed times when, without the other, the Hungarians and the Habsburgs would have been swallowed up by history," such as when the king of Hungary helped save the throne of Rudolf von Habsburg during the Middle Ages.
True, in the modern era conflicts did on occasion pit Hungarian nationalism against Habsburg imperial politics, and tragedies ensued. Yet one bright side of twenty-first-century tribulations is that they can prompt surprising reconciliations. "We Hungarians have indeed become independent," concludes Orban, "while the Habsburgs of today no longer labor beneath the burden of governing an empire. So now there is nothing to stop us from learning from each other, acknowledging our respective traits, or recognizing the impression our own history made on the other…. We are on the same side again, and we are going into battle together again, as we did eight hundred years ago."
The unraveling of the Habsburg domain did not mean the end of their story. Their ideals and symbols live on, even into this age of Covid, globalization, and radical politics; they have even renewed their ancient friendship with the Hungarian people. As our own American society sometimes seems to teeter on the brink of dissolution, the enduring nobility of the Habsburgs is an encouraging lesson indeed.