Acts of Recovery: Essays on Politics and Culture.

Lost and Found

ALTHOUGH MOST OF the essays in Acts of Recovery are recent, some go back as far as 25 years; yet the title accurately identifies a series of views linked by a single vision and mission: the recovery of tradition. An essay on The Closing of the American Mind announces that Allan Bloom "wishes to recover Western civilization amid the rubble"; another essay is titled "Empiricism, Metaphysics, and Recovery"; a fine essay on Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot celebrates the latter because he "engaged us in an enormous act of recovery, reaching back beyond the present to 'the mind of Europe'--not only 'from Homer to the present' but also to the spiritual perceptions recoverable from the great myths." It is fitting that this essay ends by quoting the Four Quartets: "There is only the right to recover what has been lost/And found and lost again and again."

Indeed, among the moderns, Eliot is never far from Hart's mind. As his preface notes, this collection of essays begins in literature and ends in theology, but even in a "theological" essay such as "Christ and Apollo" he glances again at Eliot, whose "'theology' proceeds from his relationship to language, from his involvement with English poetry." This firm conviction of a bond between poetry and theology leads naturally to a close reading of a poem by the seventeenth-century mystic George Herbert, and to further acts of recovery celebrating the Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. From literature to theology, with culture and politics as intermediaries as well as separate concerns--this is a wide span but a single arc, certainly not beyond the scope of the great critics Hart admires: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, Chesterton, Eliot, and Lionel Trilling (a teacher of Hart's during the author's undergraduate days at Columbia).

Especially refreshing is the insistence that "conversation about literature is a vital human activity" that must not be restricted to academic obscurities but carried on in the public forum. The "most central and vital" tradition of literary criticism "begins in English with Samuel Johnson, and it has its roots, often, in journalism, a fact that in itself attests to its public and social character, and to its political character in the broadest sense of the word." Scarcely surprising then that Hart's admiration for Johnson leads to an essay that may start showing up in anthologies, "Johnson, Boswell, and Modernity. "Boswell left tradition and position in Scotland for the London of infinite possibilities, evolving a long list of serial selves but eventually discovering the "darker truth ... that if one can be anything one wishes, one might never achieve any true identity at all." Hart's meditation spirals outward to recognize Boswell as the first modern, whose "spiritual descendants" include Dickens's Pip, Stendhal's Julien Sorel, and Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby--all young men from the provinces who encounter the new city beyond tradition, the cosmopolitan bustle of anonymity and masks. Sam Johnson, in direct contrast, defended the old cultural values, an engagement the more positive because of his wide sympathies: "passionately devoted to the traditional idea of order, to the values of subordination, reverence, and family loyalty, he also responded to the possibilities that worked counter to them.... It is for this reason that his acts of judgment, when they finally are made, are so impressive." While Boswell was hypochondriacal and Johnson melancholy, their dread was on different grounds: suspicions of a personal void for Boswell, humility and guilt before the Christian idea of atonement for Johnson. Yet one wonders whether Hart's theological argument fully answers the scope of Johnson's despair--does not the ferocity of Johnson's affirmations reveal his knowledge of the cracks in his world through which a Boswell can slide? Johnson may be the first great critic in Hart's tradition precisely because of his realization that the confrontation with the protean modern world is a desperate one; his acts of recovery were necessary, just as, in another of Hart's fine essays, the French Revolution forced Burke to break with friends and define his social vision.

When based in literature, Hart's considerations of politics and theology are simply brilliant. In essays of a less literary character, there may be a difficulty in reconciling the arguments that "the plausibility of a view of reality depends on the social support it receives" and that the central mysteries of Christianity are literal truths. Perhaps my own reservations about these views lead me to find considerable tension between them, yet the fact that Hart holds both of them makes for the special urgency of his acts of recovery and his insistence on the public nature of the debate. He can welcome Bloom's Closing of the American Mind because it "quite possibly marks a historic turning point in the rediscovery of Western thought" and then end by noting that "Bloom's brilliant dissection of the ills of relativism is weakened by his inattention to religious truth." He can convincingly reconstruct Frost's lifelong argument with Eliot and then note that "the signs of transcedence in Frost are intermittent" because Frost is "resolutely individualistic" and "receives very little collective reinforcement," whereas Eliot "does inhabit a supportive 'community.'" Yet Frost also belongs to a transcedent tradition, although his is the oracular homespun of Emerson. Whitman, and Emily Dickinson rather than the rich European draperies donned by Eliot. But as Hart quite properly notes in his preface, all disputes are ultimately theological.

Rounding out my own selection of memorable essays are two nice discussions of the Spanish Civil War, seen through the light of personal visits and the prism of literature (Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Jose Maria Gironell's The Cypresses Believe in God), an analysis of the rise and fall of Partisan Review, and a colorful reminiscence of Hart's fellow NATIONAL REVIEW editor Willmoore Kendall.

Mr. Nicol is a professor of English at Indiana State University.