Questions for the Durants

 Will and Ariel Durant spent over forty years of their lives together traveling the world, visiting art museums, reading old books, and writing an eleven-volume history of western civilization (with one volume covering the East) that won a Pulitzer Prize. Sounds perfect to me. Some years my reading in this epic saga has been thrilling and inspiring (the high middle ages, for example). In other years, they’ve left me saddened by humanity’s evil, shown even in the pursuit of the ultimate good (religious wars during the Reformation, for example). This year, when I read the end of The Age of Louis XIV and the beginning of The Age of Voltaire, I just felt instructed. I wonder how much the cool emotional reaction simply has to do with the pandemic situation. For many years, I read Durant at lunch on welcome breaks from work; now reading is just one of several activities I engage in while sitting at home. Whatever the reason, my experience this year is more purely intellectual than usual, and I’m left with some questions for the Durants.

(1) You say that the theme of your multi-volume work is the emancipation of (European) thought, government, and social structures from superstition into a freedom of reason and conscience. Thank you, first of all, for spending so many wonderful pages on the development of religion in the west, and especially of Christianity. For people who celebrate its future humiliation, you certainly lavish elegant and fair praise on the Church of middle ages and show where reason did take its place in theological discourse. Would you be willing to concede that the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution, more than just freeing Europe from the Church, also freed the Church itself from a superstition or two and brought it to more reasonable stances?

(2) Thank you for including Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Enlightenment rather than calling them, in typical fashion, British forerunners of a properly French movement. You say that the early eighteenth century, after the influence of these great opponents of superstition and the weakening of the Church, was the most corrupt era in English history but that it also saw the rise of public charities like the foundling hospital and the public workhouses. (And, by the way, thank you for acknowledging the charitable aspect of the workhouses in spite of the unredeemed Scrooge’s famous attitude toward them.) Might you concede that the Church, with all its flaws, must prior to this time have had a positive effect on English society by limiting drunkenness, providing honest, healthy work for unwed women, caring for the poor, and other virtuous programs, and that the charitable societies and institutions begun in this period were primarily the work of Christians? In other words, is it possible that the road from blind faith to reason does not necessarily follow a steady ascent?

(3) When I was about 20, I read Francis Schaeffer say that if I were to study David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature in college, the professor would skip the part called “The Conclusion to this Book.” Several years later, I did indeed study that philosophical work, and the instructor did indeed skip the “Conclusion.” Thank you, Durants, for not only including the Conclusion in your discussion of the book but taking Hume at his word that the name of the section refers not just to its position at the end of the book but to its presentation of the main point of the argument. During the bulk of the Treatise, Hume shows the reader by logical argument that I have no reason to trust my senses and thus no reason to believe in the objective existence of the world around me, of laws or of cause and effect, or even of my own mind. But in the Conclusion, he says that he dines with a friend and plays backgammon and then cannot believe his own reasoning. Therefore, he says, reason cannot lead us to truth. I don’t think the sudden shift was just a weaselly dodge, an insincere blanket of comfort thrown over the cold bed of extreme skepticism so readers wouldn’t hate him, and I’m glad you agree. But, I ask, since Kant (not to mention all those professors Schaeffer and I knew) ignored the Conclusion, wouldn’t you say that Hume’s primary influence on philosophy lay in the bleak skeptical tail and not the sentimental dog?

I think the Durants would concede all my points. I believe that moral humanism described their own conscientious view of the Way the World Is. But I don’t think the emergence of the rational, modern world they so valued really was the theme of their lives’ work. No, as historians they were too honest to shoehorn their subject into their one story. I think their true purpose was simply to tell a sweeping tale of troubled humanity’s attempts to negotiate existence, to weep at and learn from our too frequent, execrable failures, and to celebrate our best achievements.

Trollope’s Understanding of Human Variety

OK, what am I supposed to write about when I open Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in 2020 and read about a very rich man who decides to enter politics. At least, everyone believes Mr Augustus Melmotte is richer than Croesus, although he never actually pays for houses and the contractors who improve them. But no one believes in Mr Melmotte more than Mr Melmotte himself. When the newspapers disagree on their suspicions, the contradiction is taken by Mr Melmotte’s followers as a sign not only that the papers are lying but that their champion is as pure as snow. He makes some gestures toward blocks of Christians in order to court their vote. He’s fascinated with the leader of China. Really! What am I supposed to write about?

Well, I won’t write about it. Instead, I’ll focus on Trollope’s amazing ability to write well about all sorts and conditions of characters. Poor and rich. Female and male. Rural and Urban. Virtuous and vicious. Pious and profane. Indigent and opulent. Common and aristocratic. Somber and hilarious. Trollope portrays them all so well!

My first experiences with the great postal clerk turned novelist were all set in small towns and rural estates. The old porter in Orley Farm, the dissenting minister in The Vicar of Bullhampton, and Mr Harding, the title character in The Warden – all are such wholesome, charming characters, and their stories evoke fully dimensional, five-senses pictures of a simpler time when being a good Christian was, if not easier, at least a more straightforward proposition. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world when these characters are in the scene.

But then in the fifth number of the Barsetshire Series, Trollope introduces us to the marvelous Johnny Eames, who finds himself engaged to two girls at once. Yes, Johnny is deeply flawed, though he remains sympathetic. But my point is that this kind of scrape doesn’t happen in a rural English village; no, Johnny takes the story to London. The subsequent series, centering on the Palliser family and Parliamentary politics, takes place mostly in London, and here, life is not so straightforward. Political activity leads to financial scandal, lies in the newspapers, gun violence, bitter resentment by lonely wives, and much, much more. The salt of the earth is so hard to find on the streets of the city, the creator of the angelic Mr Harding finds himself in later books giving outright deplorable characters the starring roles at times.

It seems Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now upon returning to England after an absence of two years and noticing a decline in public morality. Instead of beginning with a good girl in the village who takes an entire novel to reconcile herself (or not!) to the idea of moving “above her station” by marrying the local baronet, Trollope starts off this tale with Lady Carbury. Lady Carbury is a widow with a definite preference for one of her two children and is also an author who flirts with newspaper editors in order to persuade them to write positive reviews of her terrible books. But Trollope is just as familiar with and faithful to this narcissist as he is with (and to) the altruistic Doctor Thorne from Barsetshire. TWWLN is Trollope’s longest novel, and in its many hundreds of pages, he finds the time to unfold two love pentagons. Pentagons. And yet our author treats the whole cornucopia of motives, intrigues, doubts, insincerities, jealousies, and deceptions involved in these complicated webs with as much understanding as he brings to the wholesome courting of a good country girl by the village vicar.

Some people wonder how Shakespeare became so proficient at portraying both royals and ruffians. (I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with being a member of a dramatic troupe that both ate at dives and performed for a certain queen?) Their doubts sometimes reach the level of claiming that the Bard’s plays actually came from the pen of Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere. Trollope’s achievement in displaying the broad spectrum of human character seems just as monumental as Shakespeare’s, and yet no one that I’m aware of has ever proposed a theory that his novels were actually written by Benjamin Disraeli.