The Dustbin of Relevance
Sometimes, after reading that hash of mendacity and advocacy called the news, spattered with the opinions of people who cannot write two sentences without vulgarity, obscenity, flippancy, and self-satisfied ignorance, I turn to my books. I am reading Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, a wonderful exercise in probing the shifting currents of human motives, and the grounds, often as firm as quicksand, on which we judge what those motives in any particular case may be. Trollope shows how rarely we get them right, even when we direct our thoughts toward ourselves, whom we presumably ought to know best.
Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s wife, does not know that she is a vulgar, ignorant virago, and that all her showy devotion to the Church is but the thinnest veil over self-will and the lust to have everyone truckle to her demands. The hero of the novel, the poverty-stricken curate Mr. Crawley, is courageous but moody and as far from ingratiating as he can be. Thus, he is often his own worst enemy, his very virtues preventing him from dealing with the usual worldly brew of a little virtue mingled with a great deal of self-regard; nor is he without some pride of his own.
Trollope could not match the madcap genius of Charles Dickens, whom he once satirized as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” nor did he have the knack of creating such a gallery of immortal characters as Dickens did, who in this regard in the history of literature was second only to Shakespeare. But he wrote of the ordinary people you might meet in an English provincial town, from the aristocrats to the laborers, and his attitude toward the wicked was characterized not by fascination with their evil, nor by that loathing which is sometimes an overreaction against the fascination. It was rather a severe pity. After all, what should we feel when we see a human being made in the image of God destroying himself by his own self-produced and self-administered poison?
What man can write sensibly about anything when he is all in a lather of self-justification and hatred?
That Trollope’s novels are set in Victorian England, and that they have so much to do with matters of Church and State, matters largely settled long before I was born — whether settled well or not is another question — is all to his advantage, and mine too, for that matter. It is not our world of political madness, nor is it some dystopian world, a bad dream caused by consuming too much of that madness. What man can write sensibly about anything when he is all in a lather of self-justification and hatred? Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a cliché-ridden fever dream, born of bigotry against evangelical Christians, fashionable bigotry in the urban enclaves of Ontario. She had done better to move to one of the islands off the coast of Newfoundland and listen to the stories the old fishermen had to tell. Something like that is what Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did, moving to the swamp country of northern Florida, getting to know the farmers, their language, their ways, and their earthy tales. It was the same with Jack London in the Klondike, or with Sir Walter Scott and the ruins of old Scotland that he saw wherever he turned. The best position to be in, if you are a reader and you are willing to have your heart and mind be moved, is to encounter the half-familiar, what is firmly rooted in a human world you can approach, but not the world you are in the midst of, with its confusions and your own passions to distract you.
To put it another way, to the extent that an author of fiction or poetry writes specifically for what he knows will be considered “relevant,” that is, a part of the current wrangling and noise, he will be consigning his work to irrelevance, because once that wrangling and noise have subsided, or turned toward another object, there will be little left to his work. Virgil wrote his Aeneid, apparently, because Augustus Caesar urged him to do so, thinking of it as a part of his aim to reform the morals of the Roman state, reestablishing the virtue of pietas as central to all that Rome strove to be at her best. Yet what Virgil wrote is hardly propaganda, and its situation as “in” Rome yet not in Rome, because it would be a long time before the actual founding of the city, gives us likewise a half-familiar world from whose vantage we can learn about our own world, not least because we can learn about our own selves. For what we say about our motives is one thing, and what our motives really are is usually something else. Does a god rouse in me this dreadful desire, says Nisus on the evening of his disastrous night-sortie with his youthful friend Euryalus, “or do men make gods of their own desires?” Virgil leaves that question unanswered.
One might hope that our schools and colleges would provide shelters against the ubiquitous tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” as Macbeth puts it, his false world of ambition in ruins all around him. Alas, they do precisely the opposite. They invite the madness in. You cannot simply study the works of Anthony Trollope, with the leisure of mind and heart that they both require and reward. It must be Trollope and feminism, Trollope and Victorian economics, Trollope and prison reform, Trollope and the Liberals, Trollope and the Tories, Trollope and ecclesiastical hypocrisy — Trollope and anything other than the creature himself, man. Eventually, though, as Trollope is not a kind of putty to be stretched and punched into the desired shapes, he will be set aside in favor of the second-rate and third-rate rabble of his time, whose intellectual caliber and artistic skills are not so formidable. And then the English teachers and professors find, to their astonishment, that though the madness is attractive in the moment, it can be gotten much cheaper from the phenomena of the masses, and not at all adulterated with some little admixture of judgment and taste. So we find — just to take English as an example, though much the same can be said about the humanities generally — that what was once a vibrant and popular major is now nearly dead, raddled with self-inflicted diseases, bleeding internally, foul of breath, and foggy in the brain.
Can the discipline be reformed and brought back to health and vigor? Not with the doctors in charge. They detest the notion that you might read Trollope and not have anything political to do with him. What good is a human voice speaking calmly and rationally? How do peace and quiet advance whatever grand new revolution in human affairs we must advance, or else? I wonder sometimes whether they have actually read anything at all, in the way Trollope must be read; in the way any truly excellent poet or novelist or playwright must be read, if reading him is to be more than gazing into a mirror, or scribbling down a sentence here or there, out of context, to be shouted through a megaphone.
What we need are, basically, true schools and colleges, places free of the current distractions, places where intellectual relaxation and concentration are two forms of the same thing. No one is relaxed at a political rally, and therefore, no one can concentrate his mind there, either. At such events, one may be concentrated from without, as the stuff of an orange into a can, or gunpowder into the mouth of a cannon, but you can no more reason about what is good and true than the powder can decide not to explode. But who among us has had any experience of a school or a college characterized by that inward human peace? Most people below a certain age have never known it. They above all need liberation from the falsely relevant, that is, liberation from the noise, so quickly raised and so soon passed by, so that they can be free to ponder truths about man and God, which never go out of fashion. Then they might just be able to read The Last Chronicle of Barset.
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen:
Studies in Pride, Envy, Pointlessness, and Death
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