Rough Draft

Reading Journal: "Summer Will Show"

2009-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show. NYRB Classics 2009. Originally published in 1936.

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s story “The Music at Long Verney” (1971), an old landed couple find themselves listening to music outside the window of their own large country house, Long Verney, which they have rented out to a sophisticated young couple from town. While the story seems to ally our sympathies on the side of the old couple and their attachment to the English countryside, Townsend Warner dismisses them at the end of the story as “impermeably self-righteous.” Fresh experiences, fresh opportunities for empathy and understanding of other lives, fail to penetrate them. They come away from listening to the music at Long Verney grasping at an excuse not to repeat the visit. They shun the opportunity to make a deeper connection.

Townsend Warner’s fiction is peopled with insiders who find themselves on the outside. Lolly Willowes, the daughter of a respectable family, becomes a witch. Mr. Fortune, an English bank clerk, becomes a missionary on a South Sea Island and an outsider among the natives. Ralph Kello, a vagrant fleeing from the plague, finds himself impersonating a priest in a medieval convent in The Corner That Held Them (1948). Ralph, who becomes known as Sir Ralph, is an outsider who finds himself on the inside, but who secretly remains outside the sanction of the church. The conflict in the Townsend Warner’s novels is often between who people are on the inside, and the different spheres in which they find themselves.

Sophia Willoughby, in Summer Will Show (1936), is another such character. Like the couple in “The Music at Long Verney,” Sophia is a member of the English landed gentry, at the same time bound by the expectations of her class and in mental rebellion against them. She’s bored and unhappy, with nothing to give meaning to her life but her children and the rituals of her class. Then her children die of smallpox, and Sophia travels to Paris, where she unexpectedly falls in love with her husband’s Jewish mistress, Minna Lemuel, and becomes caught up in the revolutionary struggles of 1848. The social insider becomes an outsider, living from hand-to-mouth, but always at the same time remaining, by virtue of her class and upbringing, outside the experience of the workers and revolutionaries who now surround her.

Sophia is caught between passionate engagement and critical detachment. She runs hot and cold. For Minna, life is art. She has an ability to pose with perfect sincerity. She is a talented storyteller, and it’s her stories that initially draw Sophia toward her. Warner is interested in the revolutionary power of stories, and in the revolutionary power of love, to change our lives and change the world. At the end of the novel, Sophia is gradually absorbed into words. “Absorbed” is, fittingly, the last word of the novel.

Summer Will Show is itself absorbing—a vivid, lyrical, bold and stimulating novel. It takes unexpected turns, and never gives its characters an easy way out. Warner has a particular genius for the historical novel, which allows her to recreate a world that is like our own, but with telling differences. The reader, like Warner's characters, is thoroughly absorbed, but at the same time stands at a critical distance—looking back, drawing connections, listening to a distant music.

When she wrote Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner had begun a relationship with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland. The two women became devoted Communists, helped to organize workers in rural Dorset, and made a trip to Spain during the Civil War to support the struggle against fascism. Sophia’s journey in Summer Will Show from the world of the landed gentry to the world of the revolutionary worker was in many respects like Warner’s own. Warner was the daughter of a schoolmaster at Harrow, an expert on Tudor church music, a poet and novelist. During World War I, she worked in a munitions factory, where she gained first-knowledge of industrial working conditions. She began to see the dissonance between middle-class romanticizing of the working class and the actual harsh conditions of labor.

In Summer Will Show, there are intellectuals who romanticize revolution, who see it as something essentially picturesque, and there are real working men and women for whom revolution is a final tragic act of desperation. Sophia, like Warner herself, can no longer romanticize, but she can never be an authentic member of the proletariat. She remains essentially an outsider. Summer Will Show stands on my bookshelf beside another NYRB Classic, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels, which has at its center a debutante turned Communist. Sophia, like Mitford, cannot step entirely out of the life into which she was born, but neither can she go back to it.

In a significant scene in the novel, Sophia finds herself listening to a conversation between Minna and the proto-Marxist Ingelbrecht:

What I feel, thought Sophia, is what I have seen painted sometimes on the faces of people listening to Beethoven; the look of those listening to a discourse, to an argument carried on in entire sincerity, an argument in which nothing is impassioned, or persuasive, or reasonable, except by force of sincerity; and there they sit in a heavenly thraldom, as blind people sit in the sun making a purer acknowledgment with their skin than sight, running after this or that flashing tinsel, can ever make. I cannot for the life of me see what Minna and Ingelbrecht are after; to me a revolution means that there is turmoil and after it people are worse off than they were before; and yet as I see them there...it is as though I were listening to music, able to feel and follow the workings of a different world. For it is there, that irrefutable force and logic of a different existence.

Unlike the old couple in “The Music at Long Verney,” who likewise stand outside the lives of others, Sophia listens.

Photo Gallery: Audubon Center of the North Woods

2009-11-21T13:53:00.001-08:00

Audubon Center of the North Woods, Sandstone, Minnesota

Grindstone Lake

Word Journal: Rhodomontade

2009-11-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

Loneliness was the famine which had tamed him; and in the release of having some one to talk to he forgot the where and the when, forgot the unintimacy between them, forgot even the lack of credence which she could not conceal as she listened to his rhodomontades.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936)

Sylvia Townsend Warner is a careful stylist, with an ear for the shape and the rhythm of her sentences. Here is an elegant tricolon, built upon the triple repetition of the word forgot. At the same time, excessive repetition is avoided. Townsend Warner might easily have written "forgot the lack of intimacy between them, forgot even the lack of credence...," but she creates variety by coining "unintimacy," a word that even the Oxford English Dictionary fails to recognize. The combination of repetition and variation in the sentence, the juxtaposition of the familiar and strange, is, like the rest of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing, particularly artful and elegant.

The sentence ends with a word that sent me scurrying to the OED. Rhodomontade (or, rodomontade) means "a vainglorious brag or boast," and is first attested in English in 1612. It is ultimately derived from Rodomonte, the name of a boastful Saracen leader in the sixteenth- century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto's epic Orlando furioso (1532).

Comment Moderation

2009-11-14T06:01:00.000-08:00

Recently, spam comments have significantly outnumbered genuine comments on this blog, so I've reactivated word recognition for comments. Comments will also continue to be moderated.

Reading Journal: "Robert Elsmere"

2009-11-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere. Oxford World's Classics 1987. Originally published 1888. 576 pp.

Mrs. Humphry Ward

Robert Elsmere was an instant and sensational bestseller when it was published in 1888. William Gladstone, in between terms as Prime Minister, wrote a forty-page review of the novel, finding fault with its rejection of Anglican orthodoxy. Oscar Wilde summed it up with a witticism, dismissing it as "Arnold's Literature and Dogma with the literature left out." Mrs. Ward was, in fact, Matthew Arnold's niece, and like Arnold, she objected to the literalism of orthodox Christianity, which was based on an unscientific acceptance of miracles. The underlying purpose of her novel was to suggest a new Christianity, based on historical knowledge, the humanity of Christ, and the ideal of social justice.

The novel begins in the Lake District, where the saintly and evangelical Catherine Leyburn brings comfort to her poor neighbors and holds her family together after the death of her like-minded father. The first part of the novel tells quite compellingly the story of Catherine's wooing by the young clergyman Robert Elsmere, fresh from Oxford and about to become the rector of a small parish in Sussex. Catherine struggles between her sense of duty to her family and neighbors, and her growing love and admiration for Robert. Finally, she accepts him, and Robert takes up his post in Murewell, Sussex, where he immediately becomes a force for good. At the same time, he comes under the spell of the scholarly and misanthropic Squire Wendover, with his fabulous library and his atheism. Under the Squire's influence, Robert comes to reject the miraculous basis of Christianity, which means that he can no longer accept the 39 Articles and therefore must leave the Anglican Church.

Elsmere, through his historical researches, comes to the conclusion that the miraculous elements of Christianity, like the story of the Resurrection, arose out of prescientific modes of thought and conventions of storytelling. Miracles made Christ's story compelling to a first century audience. But the scientific nineteenth-century had no need of miracles or the divinity of Christ: the self-sacrificing moral goodness of a purely human Christ was enough. There was no need to believe in the literal Resurrection when the example of Christ remained, though the work of his followers, a powerful force for social and moral regeneration.

Robert Elsmere represents a middle way between the evangelical orthodoxy of his wife Catherine—who becomes a less sympathetic character as she struggles intractably with her husband's heresy—and the thoroughgoing skepticism and atheism of Squire Wendover. Gladstone objected that the deck is stacked against orthodoxy because Ward gives the Church no intellectually formidable proponent in the novel to counter the influence of Wendover. For Catherine, Christianity is a matter of feeling, not thought, and she can only pray that her husband will return to the fold. At the same time, Robert doesn't follow the Squire's teaching to its logical conclusion, and become an atheist. The Squire is misanthropic, too absorbed in his scholarship, and dies bitter and alone. Atheism is a moral abyss.

The novel is full of attempts at salvation. Rose, Catherine's artistic younger sister, yearns to save the handsome morose Oxford tutor, Langham, from his lonely and disappointed life. A minor character, Charles Richards, wants to "reclaim" his alcoholic wife. Catherine wants to save Robert from heresy and damnation. Robert wants to save everyone. Salvation, Ward seems to say, is not worked out through the miraculous intervention of the risen Christ, but through human relationships, and human love. Christ was not the incarnation of God; rather, we are the incarnation of Christ when we work together in love for the betterment of the world. This is the essence of Robert Elsmere's new religion.

Storytelling is also central to the novel, and to Mrs. Ward's ideas about religion. Both in his Sussex parish and in his ministry to London workers, Elsmere institutes storytelling evenings, when he reads aloud to his parishioners. Like her uncle, Matthew Arnold, Mr. Ward saw that familiarity with the workings of literature was essential for understanding the metaphorical truths of Christianity. Storytelling also brings us into the lives of others. It draws people together, and becomes an agent of reconciliation. It's hearing from someone else the story of her husband's ministry to the London working poor that finally reconciles Catherine to her husband's loss of orthodox faith.

In the course of the novel, as Catherine becomes more rigid and less sympathetic, Elsmere himself becomes more idealized. One character talks, late in the novel, about "the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea." He says, "There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life; there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea." Mrs. Ward, writing in the late nineteenth century, optimistically believed in the power of the charismatic ideologue to be a force for profound good. The twentieth century would show the other side of the coin.

Robert Elsmere is an absorbing, thought-provoking, beautifully written novel. Mrs. Ward has a sympathetic understanding of human character. Walter Pater called the novel "a chef d'oeuvre of that kind of quiet evolution of character through circumstance, introduced into English literature by Miss Austen..." The influence of George Eliot can also be felt throughout (at one point, Elsmere's influence is said to be "incalculably diffusive"—a quotation from the end of Middlemarch). Above all, Mrs. Ward has a deep Victorian moral earnestness. The novel is, as Gladstone, said, "eminently an offspring of the time," and as such offers a panoramic picture of late Victorian religious and intellectual life. It's a shame that Oxford has not included the novel in the latest reissue of the World's Classics series.

The Grand Obsolete Party

2009-11-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, New York's 23rd Congressional District—my Republican father's old stomping grounds in his days as an administrative law judge for the New York Department of Labor—elected a Democratic congressman for the first time since the 1850s. According to a political history of the district—the northernmost congressional district in New York—part of the district (Franklin County) was, until Tuesday's election, more recently represented by a Whig (George Simmons, elected in 1852) than by a Democrat (the last Democrat was elected in 1850).

The Republican Party has strong historical roots in far upstate New York, going back to the founding of the party in the 1850s, when the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. The most famous abolitionist of all, John Brown, lived on a farm in Essex County, which is part of the 23rd district, and Underground Railroad lines ran throughout the district, which borders on Canada.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party was the party of progressive social change, the party of civil rights and environmentalism, the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. In the antebellum era, it was the old Democratic Party that was invested in preserving the institution of slavery. Republicans abolished slavery, broke up monopolies, and pioneered the cause of environmental conservation. The new GOP website lays claim to African-American heroes like Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, who were members of the party of Lincoln and abolitionism. Sadly, in this new century, the GOP has become the party of racism and opposition to climate change legislation and comprehensive health care reform.

The change in the party is probably most dramatically illustrated by the defection to the GOP of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond in 1964, at the height of the civil rights era. Originally a Southern Democrat, Thurmond left the party that had associated itself with civil rights and equal opportunity. But the shift in progressivism from the GOP to the Democratic Party began much earlier, even before the Democrat FDR introduced the New Deal. In 1912, the GOP was split between progressives, who supported former President Teddy Roosevelt, and conservatives, who supported the incumbent President, William Howard Taft.

In language that will seem familiar from the most recent Presidential election, Taft said of both his fellow Republican (Roosevelt) and his Democratic opponent (Woodrow Wilson): "The equal opportunity which those seek who proclaim the coming of so-called social justice involves a forced division of property, and that means socialism." (One of Taft's opponents in the crowded race was an actual Socialist, Eugene V. Debs.) Taft and the Republican Party declared themselves in 1912 the party of the status quo, of small government and big business.

For a fascinating account of the pivotal race of 1912, I recommend James Chace's 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed the Country (Simon & Schuster 2004).

Friends Signing Books

2009-11-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

Rob and Rebekah and BANR

Yesterday, after Latin class, I walked over to the Carleton Bookstore with Rebekah Frumkin, author of the short story "Monster," which is featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers. A large group of friends and fans showed up at the bookstore to have Rebekah sign copies of the book. In a unique arrangement, the contents of BANR are selected by a committee of high school students in the Bay Area and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who work with Dave Eggers to compile the anthology.

"They thought my story was creepy," Rebekah said.

Rebekah signed books for an hour before rushing off to write a computer program and study for her Latin quiz. There may be a few copies of BANR left at the Carleton Bookstore; otherwise it can be special ordered or ordered online. A large percentage of the proceeds from the book go to 826 National, a coalition of non-profits "dedicated to helping students, 6-18, with expository and creative writing."

Rebekah's story originally appeared in Post Road Magazine, an online literary magazine published by the English Department of Boston College. It shows once again the incredible quality and variety of creative work now appearing in online publications.

On Sunday, back in Oberlin, Ohio, Kerry Langan was signing copies of Only Beautiful & Other Stories, with my Amazon.com review projected onto a screen behind her to help boost sales. Next she'll be traveling down to Palmetto, Georgia, for a reading and book signing at StudioSwan Gallery on Saturday, November 7, at 5:00 p.m. I wish I could be there for the book event, and to celebrate the birthday that Kerry and I share on Sunday.

"Only Beautiful and Other Stories"

2009-10-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

Kerry Langan, Only Beautiful & Other Stories. Decatur, GA: Wising Up Press, 2009. 214 pp. $20. Available from the publisher or from Amazon.com, or by special order from your favorite independent bookselller.

In the first two stories in Kerry Langan's beautiful new collection of short stories, there are moments of silence. The silence in the first story, "Makeover," comes in the wake of a trauma: "The furnace shuts off and the house is gradually quiet, so silent I hear the spray of rain hitting the window." In the second story, "Lead Us Not," the silence marks an absence: "The room was so quiet I could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights overhead and the hiss from the radiators." One of Langan's gifts as a writer is her ability to listen intently, and to hear what is unspoken in every situation. She also has a great writer's eye for the significant detail, bringing entire life histories alive in a single moment of illumination. She achieves what the best writers of short fiction can achieve, combining an economy of narration with a depth of insight and sympathy that allows us to feel, in a few short pages, that we know her characters and live intimately among them.

"Makeover" is narrated by a fifteen-year old girl, Barb, who babysits for the children of a woman, Janet, whose marriage has recently broken up. Barb innocently fantasizes about being in Janet's place—a grown-up woman with a lovely house and a closet full of beautiful clothes—but ends up trespassing upon fantasies that are not nearly so innocent. Langan allows us to see the world through Barb's eyes—but unlike Barb, we can at the same time see through our adult eyes the more troubling aspects of Janet's life and relationships. It's a perfect opening story for the collection, because it explores the attractions and the dangers of entering into the lives of others—one of the major themes of Langan's fiction.

In the novella, "Only Beautiful," Langan tells the story of beautiful Mary Connolly in the voices of at least a dozen different characters. The novella is like a diamond of many facets, prismatic, as the characters illuminate not only Mary's life, but their own, with unexpected lights and colors. As in many of Langan's stories, the characters, bound up in their own anxieties and preoccupations, manage to misinterpret each other, to cause each other unintentional pain, and to muddle through—sometimes to a kind of unexpected grace. Langan's touch is so sure that we never fall out of sympathy with these flawed and fumbling, and ultimately very familiar characters. She knows how much we need each other, and how falteringly we fulfill that need.

In one of my favorite stories, "The Marshall Islands," Langan gives us a classic American short story with the Aristotelian unities of a suburban backyard barbecue, and an Aristotelian moment of recognition in which a father sees the epitome of his own life—his failures and his longings—in the life of his son. The story contains everything: the longing of parents for children, of men for women, of age for youth, of the present for the past. The Marshall Islands—where the United States conducted nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll after World War II—become a symbol of poisoned relationships and of a longing for a fresh start. It's smart and potent storytelling.

Flu Update

2009-10-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

This subject heading has appeared in my email inbox three times in the past week. Another professor reports that he received five flu automailer messages in a single day. We are now in Week 7 of Carleton's nine-and-a-half week term, usually a stressful part of the term in the best of times. This fall, the flu is taking full advantage of the stressed and sleep-deprived student body. Currently, 30% of my Latin 101 class is out with what appears to be H1N1.

2009-10-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

The Historical Jesus and the Late Victorian Novel

2009-10-23T05:51:00.000-07:00

Ernest Renan

"The great problem of the present age," writes the translator of Ernest Renan's La Vie de Jésus, "is to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it, and which are alike opposed to science and common sense." Renan's book appeared in English in 1863, a few years after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), and invited similar criticism and outrage with its challenge to the traditional Christian world view. Renan (1823-1892) attempted to see Jesus in his historical context, not as the Son of God, but as an historical figure whose thought and actions were influenced by the intellectual, social, and political currents of his time, and by a long tradition of Jewish thought.

The influence of Renan's Life of Jesus pervades Mrs. Humphry Ward's great novel Robert Elsmere (1888). The title character is an Anglican rector whose historical and scientific investigations prompt a crisis of faith that ultimately leads him to reject the supernatural basis of Christianity. He is left with "the image of a purely human Christ—a purely human, explicable, yet always wonderful Christianity." Elsmere's crisis mirrors the intellectual and spiritual crisis of the Victorians in general as they faced the implications of the new scientific and historical views of the world.

It's important, in Robert Elsmere, that the rector is an amateur naturalist—like Rev. Farebrother in Middlemarch and like so many nineteenth-century Anglican clergymen. The study of natural history revealed to the religious mind the wonders of God's creation, but to a more critical mind like Elsmere's it revealed truths fundamentally at odds with his simple Christianity. Certain central Christian doctrines—the Virgin Birth, for example, and the Resurrection—were seen to be absurd in light of a scientific understanding of the world. But more importantly, science gave Elsmere a method by which he could scrutinize Scriptural evidence and see it as part of an historical process, rather than as a divine revelation.

Mrs Ward writes: "Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was, that was really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his. Evolution—once a mere germ in the mind—was beginning to press, to encroach, to intermeddle with the mind's other furniture. And the comparative instinct—the tool, par excellence, of modern science—was at last fully awake, was growing fast, taking hold, now here, now there."

Elsmere's crisis is precipitated when he reads about and ponders the latest historical criticism of the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. Renan, among others, realized that Daniel was written centuries after the events it purports to narrate—that it is, essentially, a work of fiction—and that when Jesus quotes from it, he is not bringing a divine prophecy to fulfillment, but merely reflecting the purely human influence of Jewish tradition.

Mr. Grey, Elsmere's Oxford mentor, dissects Elsmere's loss of literal faith: "Well, the process in you has been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to do with it. It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence. I am old-fashioned enough...to stick to the a priori impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher! You have come to see how miracles are manufactured, to recognise in it merely a natural, inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, inductive."

George Eliot—young Mary Ann Evans—went through a similar crisis of faith as the translator of D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus (Leben Jesu, 1835), a pioneering German attempt to uncover the historical Jesus. As Eliot biographer Jenny Uglow writes: "She was reluctant to reduce the person of Christ, whom she regarded as an unparalleled charismatic teacher, to a mere pawn of cultural consciousness. Strauss seemed to drain Christianity of any application to life, and she realised, in rejecting his negative position, that she did value the symbolic importance of Christian teaching, indeed of all religions based on notions of self-sacrifice, of spiritual community, of supporting love."

That qualification—"the symbolic importance of Christian teaching"—is significant. Christianity could be seen as full of mythical elements—stories that nevertheless touched an essential chord in the human heart. Not surprisingly, the woman who would become a great novelist, known for the moral depth of her fiction, concluded that fictions could contain great truths. A scientific examination of the Bible reduced it to a collection of absurdities. As Matthew Arnold explained, the Bible only made sense, and only remained relevant, when read as a literary text.

Late Victorians like Arnold and Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward needed Christian teaching as the basis of their morality, and as the basis of liberal social action to alleviate poverty and suffering and injustice in the world, but they could no longer accept the Bible as the literal word of God. Renan wrote: "To have made himself beloved, 'to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him,' was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries." He continues, "If Jesus were to return among us, he would recognise as disciples, not those who pretent to enclose him entirely in a few catechismal phrases, but those who labour to carry on his work."

To live one's life so as to be loved: not a bad standard of conduct.

The work of Ernest Renan is also read by the title character in American novelist Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware. Theron Ware is, like Robert Elsmere, a clergyman (in Ware's case, a Methodist) whose study of Renan, among others, leads to a loss of his Christian faith. Theron Ware is also, like Elsmere, a gifted preacher. But when Ware loses his faith, and can no longer in good conscience preach Christian sermons, he reapplies his talent in a typical American way: he becomes a salesman.

"Beyond Forgetting" Readings

2009-10-15T12:23:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow (Friday, October 16), I'll be taking part in two poetry readings from the anthology Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease (Kent State University Press). Joining me for both readings will be the book's editor, poet Holly Hughes; at the second reading, we'll be joined by Minneapolis poet Ethna McKiernan. The first reading is at 4:00 pm at Viking Theater, at St. Olaf College. The second reading is at the Northfield Retirement Community Chapel, starting at 7:00. I wrote about Holly, and the book, on Northfield.org in the spring. You can purchase the book for 15% off ($25.46) this week at the St. Olaf Bookstore.

Pumpkin Flower

2009-10-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

October has brought a harvest of new books from people I know or used to know. I'm beginning to feel like the one vine in the pumpkin patch that flowered like the rest, but never produced a pumpkin. Here are a couple of the prize pumpkins produced this October.

Kerry Langan, Only Beautiful & Other Stories (Wising Up Press). Kerry has been a friend since our desks faced each other in the Oberlin College Library in the mid-1980s. She was a young reference librarian and I was a student worker at the circulation desk. Kerry and I share a birthday, and a similar history. In the 1990s, she gave up the reference desk for a life as a writer and a stay-at-home mom. She has written and published numerous short stories, and several of them, along with a novella, are brought together in her new book.

Rebekah Frumkin is a student in my Latin 101 class this term. She won her first national writing contest at the age of seven, was a published fiction writer as a teenager, has contributed to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and as a sophomore at Carleton has had a story chosen by Dave Eggers for Best Nonrequired Reading 2009. You can read her story, "Monster," here. Rebekah really makes me feel like a wilted pumpkin flower. She'll be signing books at the Carleton Bookstore on November 3.

Another Greuze

2009-10-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Here, again, is Mrs. Humphry Ward's recollection of George Eliot's arrival at Lincoln College, Oxford, and her first sight of Mrs. Pattison, the Rector's young wife:

As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln—suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far right corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned smiling to Mr. Lewes. It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly stepped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, blond-cendrée, the delicate smiling features and the white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches:—Mrs. Lewes [George Eliot] perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant...

Mrs. Humphry Ward

In an earlier post on Middlemarch, I mentioned how Eliot translated this scene to the Vatican, where the artist Naumann spies Dorothea and fetches Will Ladislaw to share his aesthetic experience. The striking scene in the Lincoln quadrangle lodged in Mrs. Ward's imagination, too, and found its way into her 1888 novel, Robert Elsmere. In the novel, the title character, a young clergyman, is showing his old Oxford tutor, Langham, around a remarkable private library belonging to the misanthropic scholar, Squire Wendover. Langham, the disappointed and detached middle-aged scholar, has begun to feel an attraction to Elsmere's spirited sister-in-law, nineteen-year old Rose. In the library, the two men at last come to a dreary room used "as a receptacle for the superfluous or useless volumes thrown off by the great collection all around." The room is filled with frayed and broken volumes, gradually crumbling to dust, and "a musty smell hung over it all." As he is leaving this room, a sudden vision arrests Langham's attention:

He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways facing hiim, an engraving of a Greuze picture—a girl's face turned over her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the teeth gleaming, mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line. Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.

The woman becomes a work of art, the work of art becomes a woman. There are traces of Pygmalion in these scenes, in the relationships between these old scholars and beautiful but intellectually unformed girls. Rose, it should he noted, is herself an artist, a violinist with a rare and exceptional talent. She is both artist and object of art.

Lady Dilke

In Robert Elsmere, Rose has an older sister, the puritanical Catherine, whose strong religious convictions make her call into question the value of art and the artistic temperament. Rose and Catherine seem to represent the aesthetic and ascetic impulses in Victorian women, the tension between the sensual and the spiritual that Dorothea wrestles with in Middlemarch. This tension is vividly illustrated in a memoir of Lady Dilke—the former Emilia Frances Strong Pattison—written by her second husband. In a striking passage, he writes about her days as a young art student in South Kensington: "In 1859, Miss Strong used to horrify her ordinary church friends by her studies in dissection and advocacy of the necessity of drawing from the nude; but, at the same time, still more greatly to shock them by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the stones, with her arms in the attitude of the cross." An aesthetic appreciation of the bodies of others contrasts with an ascetic mortification of her own flesh.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, "Souvenir"

The paintings of Greuze were enormously popular in the nineteenth century. Sir Richard Wallace collected nearly two dozen Greuzes at Hertford House (The Wallace Collection), where Lady Dilke viewed them. Their appeal may have lain in what she called their "immature beauty" and "vein of wanton suggestion." At left is one of the typical Greuzes from The Wallace Collection. Is her expression primarily sensual, or is there something spiritual in it as well, something of the ecstasy of St. Teresa?

In Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry Ward explores the often conflicting facets of woman's nature, as the Victorians understood it. She's interested in the tension between spiritual and sensual, between being the artist and being the object of art, between self-fulfillment and being the fulfillment of someone else's desire.

Footnote: In 1908, Humphry Ward, the novelist's husband, traveled to Berkeley, California, to give a lecture on the development of the Louvre's collection. Ward was a prominent art critic. Although he declined to be interviewed after the lecture, "he did venture the opinion...that American women were good to look upon." He was amazed at the number of women who were able to show up for a morning lecture. The New York Times article on his lecture was headed: "HUMPHRY WARD LECTURES ON ART. Wonders Afterward That So Many Women as Hear Him Have Nothing to Do. BUT FINDS THEM PRETTY."

Related: Greuze works in the Wallace Collection, London

Student Journalism on Northfield.org

2009-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

During the fall term, I'm supervising a work study student, Maia Rodriguez, who's writing regular feature stories for Northfield.org. Maia is a senior history major and a student in Doug McGill's journalism class at Carleton. Her stories will be appearing once or twice a week on Northfield.org, and will be archived here. She's already posted stories on National Coming Out Day and the gay community in Northfield, and on the Pressville blog that features student work from her journalism class.

Maia is working for Northfield.org through a partnership with the ACT Center at Carleton, which places student workers in positions with community organizations.

This is my second experience supervising a student journalist at Northfield.org. In January, I worked with a student intern, Amy Sack, a senior from St. Olaf College.

Here's a link to a YouTube video of the multi-talented Maia as soloist with the Carleton a cappella group Exit 69.

Related: About NCO|Northfield.org

Reading is Fundamental

2009-10-08T05:22:00.000-07:00

During the the course of the nineteenth century, an interesting transformation took place in higher education in both England and America. Universities, which for much of their history had primarily trained clergymen, were now training scientists. One of the results of this was the decline and, in many cases, abandonment of the classical curriculum based on the study of Latin and Greek. At Harvard, which dropped Greek as an entrance requirement in 1887, President Eliot wrote:

Universities are called on to train young men for public service in new democracies, for a new medical profession, and for finances, journalism, transportation, manufacturing, the new architecture, the building of vessels and railroads, and the direction of great public works which improve agriculture, conserve the national resources, provide pure water supplies, and distribute light, heat, and mechanical power. The practitioners of these new professions can profit in so many directions by other studies in their youth, that they ought not all indiscriminately to be obliged to study Latin.

Latin was, he believed, increasingly irrelevant to the pragmatic, industrial, professionalized culture of America as it headed into the twentieth century.

In Oxford, the tide began to turn in the 1850s, when the new Museum of Natural History was opened as a corrective to what scientist Sir Henry Acland called the “intellectual one-sideness” of the University, which emphasized the study of the classics at the expense of scientific research. In his Memoirs, Mark Pattison wrote that the influence of the museum challenged “our naïve assumption that classical learning was a complete equipment for a great university.”

Matthew Arnold

Science became the controlling discipline. Thrown down from its privileged place in the curriculum, even classics attempted to become more scientific, emulating the scientific philology of the Germans, for whom classics was Altertumswissenschaft, the "science of antiquity." And although, with the advent of Darwinism, science was increasingly at odds with theology, theology itself attempted to be scientific. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold saw science and theology, as it was widely practiced, as two systems of dogma. The scientist observed and read nature literally, and theologians applied the same method to the Bible. Science and religious fundamentalism were strangely alike in their rigid standards of proof. The Bible was the theologian's laboratory, where absolute truth was established.

To Arnold, this was fundamentally wrong-headed. In Literature and Dogma (1873), he wrote: "The idea of a triangle is a definite and ascertained thing, and to deduce the properties of a triangle from it is an affair of reasoning. There are heads unapt for this sort of work, and some of the blundering to be found in this world is from this cause. But how far more of the blundering to be found in the world comes from people fancying that some idea is a definite and ascertained thing, like the idea of a triangle, when it is not; and proceeding to deduce properties from it, and to do battle about them, when their first start was a mistake!" For Arnold, who was also one of the three great English Victorian poets, the problem is that people try to read the Bible "scientifically"—as a source of "definite and ascertained" truths—instead of metaphorically, as a literary text.

The root of the problem is that people don't read enough, and aren't accustomed, through extensive reading, to the ways in which literary texts work. They lack critical thinking skills. They lack culture. Arnold wrote: "To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the first step toward a right understanding of the Bible. But to take this very first step, some experience of how men have thought and expressed themselves, and some flexibility of spirit, are necessary; and this is culture." Later, he continues: "For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary."

In 2007, an AP-Ipsos poll indicated that 1 in 4 respondents had not read a single book in the previous year. Liberals were more likely to be readers than conservatives. Conservatives who read tended to read the Bible. If there is a culture war in this country, it may come down to something as fundamental as reading.

I'm heading out now to teach my Latin class, then I'm coming home to read a novel.

Autumnal

2009-10-07T13:57:00.001-07:00

Landscaping

2009-10-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

We finally got around to having a professional landscaper come in and remove the weeds that had taken over the flowerbeds around our house. A small stone wall and a few other touches were added at the same time. Here's the before and after.

Notice the weeds all around the foundation, and the out-of-control forsythia.

Notice the neat wall, trimmed forsythia, and lack of weeds. Grass will be planted along the right side to complete the project. Flowers and herbs will be planted inside the wall in the spring.

"A Grammarian's Funeral"

2009-10-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

"To the great, the fashionable, the gay, and the busy," Mark Pattison writes in his 1875 biography of the sixteenth-century classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, "the grammarian is a poor pedant, and no famous man."

In Rhoda Broughton's Belinda, Belinda is first drawn to Professor Forth, the character modeled after Pattison, after she hears him read Robert Browning's famous poem "A Grammarian's Funeral." The poem, written in 1855, is a mock heroic dirge sung by the students of a scholar as they bear his corpse to its final resting place on a mountain top. It shifts between the dignified style of the opening exhortation—"Let us begin.."—and humorously contrived Byronic rhymes. For example:

Image the whole, then execute the parts—
Fancy the fabric
Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz,
Ere mortar dab brick.

The scholar in the poem has devoted his life to learning, but has never gotten around to living. His patient studies are a preparation for life—the fully examined life of the wise man—but life slips away from him while he's involved in minute grammatical investigations. There's something heroic about the scholar's goal of comprehensive knowledge, but something pathetic about the execution.

In the last year of his life, Professor Pattison, who understood well the disappointments of a scholarly life, read Browning's poem and wondered "that such doggerel should in these days pass for poetry."

"The Wisdom of Dorothea"

2009-10-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Wisdom of Dorothea," in The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Ivan Dee 2006).

If the term "neoconservative intellectual" is not to be considered altogether an oxymoron, the appellation may be applied to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. The wife of the late Irving Kristol and a student of Leo Strauss, Himmelfarb is a scholar of Victorian culture, the author of numerous books, and the recipient of a National Humanities Medal (2004). In 2002, she was one of three conservative scholars who decided to boycott an academic conference because Cornel West had been invited to speak. Her scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating the moral superiority of the Victorians, to demonstrating the superiority of the British to the French Enlightenment, and to demonstrating that Edmund Burke and George Eliot were Zionists.

In her essay "The Wisdom of Dorothea," Himmelfarb addresses the question: "Why did Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw?" This is a question that has troubled readers with feminist sensibilities since the novel was first published. It was a question that Florence Nightingale asked, and that Eliot herself anticipated when she wrote, at the end of Middlemarch: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother."

As Himmelfarb phrases the question: "Why could Eliot not have given us a Dorothea more congenial to modern feminists?" Phrased that way, we immediately see Himmelfarb's strategy: to expose such thinking as anachronistic. George Eliot was not a modern feminist. She was a Victorian woman, and very much rooted in the conventions of Victorian morality. Yes, she lived with another woman's husband, but in doing so she adopted all of the conventions of a Victorian marriage, referring to George Henry Lewes as her husband, and to herself as Mrs. Lewes. Himmelfarb writes: "Their twenty-four years together were spent in perfect domesticity and fidelity."

This ideal of traditional marriage, the forms of which she attempted to observe in her own unconventional relationship, is what Eliot adhered to in marrying Dorothea to Ladislaw. "The idea that only in marriage can Dorothea find her personal happiness as well as her moral mission seems perfectly Victorian," Himmelfarb writes. "And so it is."

Himmelfarb is, I think, perfectly correct about George Eliot. Eliot was a conservative, distrustful of radical change, more comfortable if she could align herself with traditional roles. Although her relationship with Lewes was unconventional, she observed the forms of traditional marriage. But more important to her was the substance of that relationship: the mutual commitment and affection, the shared responsibilities, the belief that marriage was a proper setting for the working out of a moral life.

In a sense, Mrs. Lewes was “passing” as a married woman. She was doing her best to align her own behavior with the expectations of the dominant culture.

It was a strain. In his review of a recent edition of Eliot’s Journals, Terry Eagleton writes: “From 1854, when she eloped with the philosopher George Henry Lewes and started these journals, to 1880, when her death brought them to a close, Eliot seems to have had a permanent headache. When she wasn't prostrate with migraine, she was bilious, palsied, depressed and despairing. She also complains about her teeth and of chronic melancholia." Eagleton suggests that Eliot’s maladies are the result of repressed guilt, to which her relationship with Lewes may have been a contributing factor. George Eliot, the strict Victorian moralist, was living happily in sin with a married man.

“What stokes Eliot's guilt most of all,” Eagleton writes, “is the fact that she is happy.”

Middlemarch is on one level the author’s wish-fulfillment fantasy. Casaubon’s faulty heart releases her from a stifling and unequal marriage that would have meant the slow death of her soul, and allows her, despite numerous obstacles set in her path, to marry the man she loves. Eliot knows that she herself stands somewhere on the margins of the moral culture she has so completely internalized. No wonder she has a permanent headache. In Middlemarch, she places Dorothea in the central moral position in Victorian culture—that of wife and mother—that she can never occupy herself.

Contemporary social conservatives like Himmelfarb tend to see same-sex marriages as an affront to “traditional marriage” and the traditions, rooted in Victorian culture, of family life. But I suspect that most same-sex couples want the right to marry for precisely the reasons that George Eliot found it so compelling: because it gives sanction to a relationship of love and mutual responsibility in which both partners have scope for their moral development.

An Imaginary Correspondence

2009-09-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Scottish man of letters Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a friend of Rhoda Broughton, and in his book of "epistolary parodies," Old Friends (1890), he imagined a correspondence between Professor Forth in Broughton's Belinda and Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. The correspondence also includes letters between other characters in the two novels. Having just read both Middlemarch and Belinda, I was amused by Lang's interweaving of the two plots. The complete correspondence, courtesy of Google Books, can be read below.

Reading Journal: "Belinda"

2009-09-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

Rhoda Broughton, Belinda. Originally published in 1883 in Great Britain. Reprinted by Virago Modern Classics in 1984.

"All my energy was directed upon one end," Professor Mark Pattison writes in his memoirs, "—to improve myself, to form my own mind, to sound things thoroughly, to free myself from the bondage of unreason, and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of my intellectual fabric. I have nothing beyond trivial personalities to tell in the way of incident. If there is anything of interest in my story, it is as a story of mental development."

Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, devoted his life to scholarship. His major work was a biography of the late sixteenth-century classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, and it is as the putative model for another Casaubon—Mr. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch—that Pattison is remembered today. Although the identification of Pattison with Eliot's Casaubon is disputed, Pattison was indisputably the model for Professor Forth, the dull, irritable "Professor of Etruscan" in Rhoda Broughton's Belinda. The unflattering likeness was so widely acknowledged that Pattison himself, on a visit to Broughton's home in Oxford, had himself announced as "Professor Forth."

The novel begins in Dresden in the spring. Belinda Churchill and her spirited, dog-loving younger sister Sarah are on holiday with their grandmother. While Sarah avidly collects beaux as if they were Dresden figurines, Belinda falls for the young English student David Rivers. Unfortunately, Belinda's shyness and insecurity make her appear cold, and Rivers fails to press his suit. The couple is parted, and Belinda, believing she has lost her true love forever, resigns herself to a loveless marriage with Professor Forth, who proceeds to suck every ounce of joy from her life.

Then Rivers reappears, still ardent and unattached. These days, Belinda would feel little hesitation about writing off her mistake and leaving the Professor. But in late Victorian England, she finds herself in a bind. Although Broughton's novel is a shocking depiction of the soul-crushing tyranny of a bad Victorian marriage, it's difficult to warm to Belinda. Her beautiful cold exterior masks a rather foolish and rather shallow interior that easily fills up with bitterness and self-pity. Even her relationship with Rivers fails to generate enough of a spark to thaw Belinda. Her reserve freezes her out of her own life.

Belinda's husband is a monster—but so, in some way, is each of the characters: the flirtatious Sarah, the self-absorbed Mrs. Churchill, the tactless Miss Watson. Broughton creates a world in which the seeds of sympathy fall upon barren ground.

Professor Forth's major contribution to scholarship is an edition of the fragments of Menander. He is Professor of Etruscan, a language that exists only in a few scattered fragments and loan words. With the professor, Belinda is only able to find fragments of happiness, and Broughton seems to imply that such is life.

After she had posted a copy of her wedding announcement to Rivers, Belinda sits down to read to her husband. Curiously, the passage she reads to him is from Darwin: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades."

There is growth and change and survival. There is something that connects the apparent fragments of life, but poor Belinda cannot find it. She falteringly reads the passage to her husband, he asks her to repeat it ("pray repeat that last paragraph; I am unable to follow you; you are making nonsense of it!'), and she faints.

Dino Kale and Chicken Pizza

2009-09-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Dino kale is in season and available at Just Food Co-op. It travels about fifteen miles from Gardens of Eagan to the produce section of Just Food. I picked up a bunch of dino kale yesterday and fashioned it into a pizza topping, along with grilled chicken and fresh cherry tomatoes from a friend's garden. Most of the ingredients—except for the olive oil, salt and pepper, and mozzarella—could be found in season now from local sources. Barbara Kingsolver, whose Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I'm in the midst of reading, would approve.

Dino Kale and Chicken Pizza

1 grilled chicken breast, cubed
half a bunch of dino kale, chopped
olive oil
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
salt and pepper
cherry tomatoes, halved
grated mozzarella
pizza dough

Preheat oven to 425°. Heat 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil in a sauté pan. Add minced garlic and cook, stirring often, until lightly golden. Add chopped dino kale and sauté over moderate heat until limp, 5-10 minutes. Stir in chicken during the last minute or two of cooking. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Roll out pizza dough, brush lightly with olive oil, and top with cooked dino kale and chicken, tomatoes, and mozzarella. Cook in preheated oven. Makes one large pizza.

Reading Journal: Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America

2009-09-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

Edmund Burke

The British politician and writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is often claimed as the father of modern conservatism, and in the pages of Burke's great speech on Conciliation with America (1774), conservatism sounds eminently reasonable. In tone and intellect, there is a vast difference between Burke and the living, fire-breathing conservatives of Fox News, whose object is to inflame rather than to persuade. One wonders what Burke, for whom conservatism was a matter of civility and the preservation of polite civilization, would have made of Glenn Beck, for whom it's a matter of fear- and hate-mongering.

It's true that Burke had an Irishman's hot temper. "Burke's faults," says Hammond Lamont, the editor of a nineteenth-century school text of the speech, "were clearly those of an ardent temperament." Edward Gibbon called Burke "the most eloquent and rational madman I have ever known." Most television conservatives these days strike me more as simple madmen, without the eloquence or reason. In nineteenth century American high schools and universities, Burke's speech was studied as a model of good writing and argumentation. It still remains compelling and inspiring.

The two most frequently cited characteristics of Burke's conservatism are his appeal to experience over theory, and his preference for slow and incremental change over sudden innovation. The two are closely connected, since for Burke tradition is the accumulation of human experience and wisdom, and should not be lightly abandoned for an untested theory. "The question now...is," he tells Parliament, "whether you will choose to abide by a profitable experience or a mischievous theory; whether you choose to build on imagination or fact; whether you prefer enjoyment or hope..." His whole understanding of the function of government is summed up in a passage near the end of the speech:

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniencies; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.

In 1774, the question before Parliament was how to deal with the American colonies, who were refusing to submit to taxation without representation and were in open defiance of Parliament. Burke, who would later be a passionate opponent of the French Revolution, stands squarely on the side of the colonists. Why did he support one set of revolutionaries and execrate the other? As David Womersley (the editor of my Penguin edition of Gibbon) explains: "In France it is the revolutionaries themselves who are the peddlers of political, financial, legal, and moral innovation. In America, political and legal innovation had come from Great Britain and had been resisted by the colonists." In Burke's view, the system of taxation proposed by Parliament for the colonies was an untried theory, an "innovation," something that went against the traditions of the British Constitution. The American Revolution was, in Womersley's words, "that paradoxical thing, a conservative revolution." It was about restoring the traditional rights and liberties of British subjects, and resisting the innovative and arbitrary exercise of Parliamentary power.

Burke's analysis of the American character—the American love of liberty, reinforced by democratic assemblies and dissenting religion—is masterful. His peroration argues that the best method of securing a revenue from the colonies is not by a mass of legislation, but by cultivating their "interest in the British Constitution"—by stirring their patriotic sense of inclusion in the civil rights and privileges of British citizens.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep their idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance.

This idea resonates down through the great speeches of American statesmen like Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln. One hears the echo of it in Lincoln's invocation of the "bonds of affection" in the First Inaugural Address.*

In his Memoirs, Edward Gibbon wrote: "As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted, before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, however, determine the actions and opinions of our lives." Burke expresses a similar sentiment: "Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistry." Again, at the root of modern conservatism, in the eighteenth century, is a rejection of abstract reasoning in favor of practical experience and moral sensitivity.

One finds this oversimplified in remarks like those of conservative commentator David Gelernter, who writes about "a conventional liberal or a conventional academic who would rather think than act. (Pure thought is no good—is top-heavy and likely to capsize—without the ballast of everyday, practical experience.)" These same conservatives find something suspect about Sonia Sotomayor drawing upon her own experience to animate her jurisprudence. Central to Burke's conservatism is a respect for tradition tempered by what he called "a moral imagination," which the conservative Russell Kirk defines as "that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events." In other words, it includes "empathy."

At the center of Burkean conservatism is something that, these days, I associate much more with "liberals": the ability to enter the experience of someone different from oneself, and be morally and intellectually enlarged by that experience.

*As a classicist, my favorite passage in the speech is when Burke says: "It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member." Here he is quoting Dryden's translation of a passage in Vergil's Aeneid:

...One common soul
Inspires and feeds and animates the whole.
This active mind infus'd through all the space
Unites and mingles with the mighty mass (982-985).

In the original Latin:

Spiritus intus alit; totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem; et magno se corpore miscet (6.726-727).

The Latin is quoted by Daniel Webster in his Bunker Hill oration (1825) to characterize the spirit that animated the Americans in the Battle of of Bunker Hill. John Dickinson quotes it in 1776 when he argues, in Burkean fashion, that "the wellfare of the people...perpetually animates the [English] constitution, and regulates all its movements."

Frontenac State Park

2009-09-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

September woods

The steep walk down from the bluff

In Yan Teopa Rock

Lake Pepin, from above In Yan Teopa Rock

Frontenac State Park is located on the bluffs above the western shore of Lake Pepin, about 10 miles south of Red Wing and 5 miles north of Lake City, Minnesota. From the top of the bluff, there are impressive views over Lake Pepin. A rather steep path leads down the bluff and runs parallel to the lake shore, eventually arriving at In Yan Teopa ("rock with opening" in the Dakota language), a natural limestone arch. On this Sunday morning in September, we saw numerous warblers in the woods, beginning their fall migration.