Can
conservatives be more than just disillusioned liberals, or those who
were never so gullible as to require disillusioning? Must
conservatives concede ownership of the heart to liberals, reserving
only a claim to the organ of intellect for ourselves? Must we take as
our symbol the flaming sword which turned every which way, warning
Adam and Eve against any return to the Garden of Eden?
There
may be a touch of hyperbole in my questions; but only a touch. Having
surveyed the landscape of conservative thought for the last ten years
or so—ever since I realised that I was a conservative, in my late
twenties—I have been dismayed at the forbidding exterior of that
countryside.
I
say ‘exterior’, because I realize that conservatives— though
they present a dour face to the outside world— are the most
romantic of folk by their own firesides. Sadly, they are embarrassed
at their own romanticism, like yokels who fear the laughter of the
city slicker. When asked to defend their social philosophy, they tend
to cite the corruptibility of power, the dangers of utopianism, the
frailty of a
priori
reasoning, the ‘crooked timber’ of humanity, and other counsels
of prudence.
The
poetry of conservatism has been confined, almost entirely, to
literature. Names like Eliot, Larkin, Yeats, Lewis, Betjeman, and
Tolkien spring to mind. Even here, however, the poetry is nearly
always that of of loss and regret, rather than the enthusiastic
expression of an ideal. I am indeed profoundly moved by poems such as
Betjeman’s ‘The Plantster’s Vision’:
Cut
down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
Pouring
their music through the branches bare,
From
moon-white church towers down the windy air
Have
pealed the centuries out with Evensong.
Remove
those cottages, a huddled throng!
Too
many babies have been born in there,
Too
many coffins, bumping down the stair,
Carried
the old their garden paths along.
But
why should the poetry of conservatism always be expressed indirectly,
in satire or jeremiad? I hungered for prose, for ideas clearly
stated. I wanted something to cheer, rather than many things to weep
over.
I
found glimmerings of what I was looking for in some of my favourite
conservative authors, especially those two great Englishmen, Peter
Hitchens and Roger Scruton. Both evoke (in lyrical prose) the ideal
of home and tradition, of tangible things. Both, however, are
self-conscious mourners of things past, or passing. Hitchens
describes his masterpiece, The
Abolition of Britain,
as an epitaph, while the title of Roger Scruton’s England:
An Elegy
speaks for itself.
In
the American writer Russell Kirk, I also found lyricism—but once
again, it was mostly a lyricism of lament. Kirk’s deep love of
tradition leaped from the pages of The
Conservative Mind,
but the book mostly seemed a negative critique of modernity. Indeed,
all of the conservative authors who most valued tradition seemed to
view it as a kind of fossil fuel—doomed to gradual depletion, the
rate of depletion being the only question at issue.
This
didn’t satisfy me. I yearned for something less lachrymose, more
affirmative.
Being
Irish might have something to do with this. In the late nineteenth to
the mid-twentieth century, Ireland was gripped by a wave of cultural
nationalism which sought, not only to arrest the decline of
tradition, but (crucially) to reverse
it.
This was seldom considered to be a conservative cause. Yet it is hard
to think of anything more conservative than the great mass of a
nation united in a popular effort to revive a national language,
national sports, national literature, and national traditions in
general.
To
some extent, this effort was triumphant—the Gaelic Athletic
Association, which came into being in 1884, continues to be a massive
popular success. To some extent, the effort failed—the dream that
the Irish language might once again become a language of everyday
life never materialized.
But,
in the words of Yeats, “it was the dream itself enchanted me”. It
is an inspiring fact that, for more than half a century,
traditionalism was the dominant ideal in Ireland. Not was this the
traditionalism of prudence, but rather a romantic traditionalism, a
traditionalism that took the form of a quest rather than a siege.
Eamon
De Valera’s St. Patrick’s Day speech of 1943, though much
mocked, is probably the best expression of the national ideal during
these decades:
The
ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of,
would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a
basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal
comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land
whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields
and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the
romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the
laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the
wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the
life that God desires that men should live.
If
nationalism could inspire the masses with such an ideal—such an
essentially ‘backwards-looking’ ideal— why couldn’t
conservatism? Why was its poetry confined to the ironies and
obliqueness of elite literature? Why did populist conservatism, on
the other hand, have to focus so relentlessly on the evils of
government and the wickedness of reforming elites?
Outside
the tradition of Irish cultural nationalism, indeed, I found an
accessible ‘conservative sublime’ expressed in only one writer;
the great English journalist, novelist, poet, and Catholic apologist,
G.K. Chesterton, who died in 1936.
Chesterton
was remarkable for many things, but one of them was the manner in
which he defended tradition; not with the melancholy of so many other
writers, but with gusto. Though he was not a self-described
conservative, he seems to me a nonpareil at evoking—in prose
written for his beloved ‘common man’—the romance of
conservatism.
Take
his famous defence of the very idea of tradition from his masterpiece
Orthodoxy:
I
have never been able to understand where people got the idea that
democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that
tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to
a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or
arbitrary record… Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure
of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of
those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to
men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to
their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us
not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom;
tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is
our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of
democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the
same idea.
Or
take his defence of the family as a romantic institution in Heretics:
This
is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is
romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is
everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is
arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there…When we step into the
family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is
incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a
world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made.
In other words, when we step into the family we step into a
fairy-tale.
Chesterton
can even be wildly romantic about domestic economy, as in this
passage from his volume of sociology What’s
Wrong with the World:
God
is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be
said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other
words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of
man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits….For
the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed
by an idea unpopular in present discussions—the idea of property.
The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can
cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with
red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is
still an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint
the sunset whose colors he admires; but he can paint his own house
with what color he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with
pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice.
Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man
should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is
shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a
graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits;
properly with limits that are strict and even small.
In
his essay ‘A Defence of Rash Vows’, he appeals to monogamy not as
a sacrifice due to society, but the expression of man’s natural
exuberance:
The
revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of
a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to
listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to
imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed
on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke
consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented
a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two
words—'free-love'—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be,
free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of
marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at
his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured
grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but
they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not
write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment.
They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty,
which is the only one that he wants.
This
is the sort of stuff, one imagines, that might convert even the most
resolute philanderer.
The
irony that Chesterton—who sometimes described himself as a
liberal—wrote more passionate paens to tradition than many a
self-professed conservative, is strangely paralleled in these lines
of his own, from his book Charles
Dickens—perhaps
my favourite Chestertonian passage of all:
But
Dickens in his cheapest cockney utilitarianism was not only English,
but unconsciously historic. Upon him descended the real tradition of
"Merry England," and not upon the pallid mediævalists who
thought they were reviving it. The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists,
the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness
the spirit of the present day. Dickens had in his buffoonery and
bravery the spirit of the Middle Ages. He was much more mediæval in
his attacks on mediævalism than they were in their defences of it.
It was he who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and
long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England.
Surely
conservatives don’t have to confine themselves to the bullish
cynicism of the talk radio host, or the rueful nostalgia of the
cultured old fogey. We can be wild romantics, galloping idealists,
twenty-first century Cavaliers.
Where
to start? Well, steeping ourselves in the works of G.K. Chesterton is
my suggestion.
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