The Tedious Enlightenment

For each of the last fifteen years, I’ve spent about a month with, at first, Will Durant and then later with Will and his wife Ariel and their work-of-a-lifetime history of “western” civilization (mostly European, with some notable passages on ways Asian cultures and religions, especially Islam, affected Europe, and with surprisingly little on the Americas). And, as I’ve often reported in these posts, I’ve loved every page of the experience.

Last year, things changed just a little. I got into the volume called The Age of Voltaire and found out who the Durants’ hero was. Of all the countries in Europe, the book concentrated on France (with sidetrips to other countries, to be sure), and of all the people in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, the volume focused on Voltaire. Very few personages in history receive more than one dedicated chapter in this bookshelf full of chapters: only Jesus and Mohammed come to mind. But in this volume, all of the history of the era is treated as an extension of a biography of this one man.

This year, I finished up that volume and opened up the next, covering the second half of the eighteenth century. Called Rousseau and Revolution, it fittingly begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau: two biographical chapters, in fact, and the story hadn’t even reached his most famous written works. “Another extended biography?” I thought. And then who should show up again with one more dedicated chapter but Voltaire! In fact, here in the volume whose title refers to Voltaire’s philosophical rival, the Durants make their best case yet for the importance of Voltaire. I know he and Rousseau were influential, but more influential than Jesus and Mohammed? Do two billion people roam this earth claiming to live their lives according to the pattern set by either Voltaire or Rousseau? Do two hundred?

I get it. The Durants were humanists who wanted to celebrate in their history the “freeing of the mind” in the last, say, four hundred years. They were very, very respectful of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (maybe only a little more than either Voltaire or Rousseau were), but they rejoice to look back and see the control of these religions on science, philosophy, law, government, and education broken. And to an extent, I’m with them. I’ve read in their books and others about the abuses of the medieval Church. I sympathize to a great extent with the Protestant renunciation of those abuses and cringe when I see Protestantism’s own abuses. I love freedom of the press and freedom of speech; I believe people should be able to express their views without fear that a state run by a church will imprison or kill them. I am in awe at the discoveries of science and don’t think any researcher should have to alter any words to please any institution with its own interpretation of its own religious scripture. (I’m trying to be brief here. Of course these freedoms have limits: crowded theaters, human experimentation, etc.)

But, really, do I need to be happy that Rousseau, in his Confessions, could write with legal impunity about wanting to go to an alley, pull down his pants, and hope that some woman would come along and spank him? Is this really why we should be happy with freedom of expression?

I like Voltaire and Rousseau, and the Durants have made me like them even more. What I admire about them most was their stand against wrongs. They wanted to rid the Church and the government of corruption and immorality. (Their definitions of morality aren’t exactly mine, but close enough for my sympathy.) But they didn’t have much to replace it with. Rousseau sent all his infants to a foundling hospital and then wrote a book on how to raise children!

The French philosophers of the period called their movement éclaircissement: enlightenment. That label suggests to me that they were promising to show civilization the way out of a dark place, but in fact what they did best was only to put a light on some dark corners in that place. They shone the light on a door or two that they claimed opened onto paths toward a better life. But let’s face it: all their hopes led to the Reign of Terror and then to Napoleon’s tyranny. So the Durants' raising golden monuments to Voltaire and Rousseau and then asking me to make long, polite bows towards them got uncomfortable. This year for the first time, I found my yearly conversation with the historians tedious.

Swan Song

Every year for the last three or four, my experience with Galsworthy has followed the same dynamic. Disappointment follows hard on the tail of the onset of reading. (“Oh, no. Soames again? When will we ever get to the next generation of Forsytes?”) Then the seed of a plot piques the interest, even if the first impetus launches nothing much more than a lot of talking and worrying. Then the characters’ critiques of modernism start in again, and it seems once more as if I’m in for just another ride on the same track.

Well, I won’t say that Galsworthy has surprised me this year with a new exit off of that well worn track. The narrative twist always has the same effect, and he never seems to fail to provide a new set of secondary characters that offer a twist on the twist, a critique of the critique. And yet the view on each new circuit around the track becomes clearer, more full of detail. And in the end, I see Galsworthy as even more ingenious than I had thought before. There. That’s how predictable Galsworthy is: he always convinces me that he’s smarter than he seemed before. Can’t he ever come up with a new trick?

In Swan Song, the sixth novel in The Forsyte Saga, the formula proceeds in this way. Jon Forsyte moves back to England with his pretty American wife, and the married Fleur Mont thinks she has to indulge her continued feelings for him. This young generation, groping along after the Great War, rejects the past because it is “boring,” so, really, how can marriage vows mean anything to them? Fleur’s father, Soames Forsyte, criticizes his daughter’s immorality (mostly to himself) but has nothing better to replace it with. He blames dishonesty and thievery and adultery on modernism, disliking its art, its literature (it has “no continuity”), and its dancing (the Charleston is “vacuous”), as if the previous generation or the Old Days were better. Yet he knows personally all too well the pains of infidelity. And he even discusses with an art dealer the talent Fragonard had for making adultery seem attractive. So clearly immorality isn’t just a new fad after all. Each generation of Forsytes blames the other for the ills of the world, and yet both clearly have deep moral problems.

Meanwhile, politician Michael Mont tries a new scheme: upgrading the slums without displacing the tenants (permanently anyway). Here’s where the plot offers a first-level critique: instead of looking to others in order to find blame, just try to make the world better. But the humanitarian projects in the Forsytes’ world always fall apart because they depend on committees who can only be altruistic in the most mercenary ways.

So then comes the critique of the critique: Jon asks help of his uncle Hilary. This humble cleric and his wife truly breathe the life of heaven; they are in this world but not of it. Jon’s only way of understanding their godliness is to say that they are good without being boring. Through them Galsworthy offers his critique of modern society, Edwardian society, Victorian society, the selfishly charitable, and any other group living according to merely human values.

Yeah. Same old thing. Galsworthy is so boring. And I can’t wait for more!

Anger

I’m going to confess a guilty pleasure: Master Chef. I could prolong my confession with comments about the show’s excessive love of purées, its quirky editing, its endless repetition of dramatic moments, and the mystery boxes that are never mysteries since the viewers have already seen the hidden ingredients at least twice before the contestants do. But for the purpose of today’s post, I just want to make an observation about Gordon Ramsay’s anger. Clearly, yelling is as much a part of Gordon’s television brand as the sixteen Michelin stars he has received. And his blunt critiques bring many a contestant to tears. But when “one of America’s best home cooks” is eliminated (a few episodes into a season anyway, after which the judges supposedly have really come to know and care about the contestants), the Chef with the Coif asks for a hug, and (here’s the real point) the contestant always wants that hug. There’s a junior edition of the show, as well, and the kids adore Gordon Ramsay, even after he yells and (oh, so predictably) throws the raw meat they’re trying to serve to ranchers or truck drivers or firefighters. It seems that the contestants know that Gordon Ramsay’s anger is, well, perhaps mostly schtick, but is, in any case, always directed at the food and the performance, not at the person.

I don’t know if that analogy helps you. But I was thinking about it just two days ago and felt like tossing it in today like a Homerian simile.

    And as the Scot does cast his darkened brow
    And smold’ring eyes down on an errant chef,
    Trembling with diffidence about a faulty dish,
    And yet retains the love and honor due
    To him contestants dearly wish to please;

    So, too, the sixteenth President did find
    Himself in frequent states of passioned pique
    As office seekers begged and gen’rals balked,
    Although the people still deemed him their father.

OK, that was six-and-a-half times as good as I thought it would be when I started it and makes my main point so well I don’t have much else to say. But I should mention the book I really intended to talk about and make one other point.

Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln touches on many aspects of Lincoln’s psychology other than anger: his hatred of slavery, his diffidence with women, his ambition, and more. But the chapter on anger suddenly affected me more than the others before it. I had read several of the anecdotes before about Lincoln getting frustrated and scolding, to give just one of many kinds of examples, southern women asking for pardons for their sons, imprisoned for rebelling against the United States. But reading fifty pages of such stories, one after the other, presented a picture of Lincoln almost wholly new to me. Here was a man who didn’t just have occasional lapses from patience but who showed his frustration through displays of anger over and over again.

And yet. 

And yet, I remembered, the people who knew him best still revered him and thought of him as a father figure.

The same mitigating consideration didn't come to mind in the next chapter, though. It was surprising to have a sixty-page chapter on Mary Todd Lincoln’s personality in a book on the psychology of the more famous of this wedded pair, but it was far and away the most enlightening in the book. I knew she tried her husband’s patience, but, wow! On one occasion, Mary, angry that Abraham had not stoked the fire, hit him in the face with a piece of firewood and drew blood. On the way to Washington for the first inauguration, when agents learned of an assassination plot against the President-elect, Mary publicly announced their change of route; she eventually had to be locked in a room in order to keep her quiet and to preserve her husband’s safety. As first lady, she often accepted large gifts from men and then threw tantrums until the President gave them offices. After her husband’s death, Mary then extorted many of these same men, telling them she would announce the partial truth that they got their offices only because of her if they didn’t send her money. Yikes! She was so much worse than I knew.

After reading sixty pages of such stories, I began to see how the chapter on Mary did indeed speak to the “inner world of Abraham Lincoln.” The man who lost his temper so many times in speaking to others very rarely did so with his wife.

The End of D’Artagnan

I had known about The Man in the Iron Mask since my childhood encounters with Classics Illustrated and knew that I would read the actual book some day. I didn’t get that particular title from CI when I was a kid, so I didn’t know the story. I didn’t even know it was a Three Musketeers book until about four years ago. So the long, long wait, the return of beloved characters, the positive comparison with the dreadfully tedious Louise de la Valliére (the “Musketeers” book I read last year), and the poignant end of three of the four musketeers made this a very satisfying and moving read.

The Man in the Iron Mask is actually only the final third of a novel three times the length of either The Three Musketeers or its first sequel, Twenty Years After. But having read the whole series now, I can see why it is often published (and filmed) separately: only a little background is needed to understand the situation, and only in this last third do we get an interesting, exciting plot involving the characters we (and, from what I can tell, Dumas) actually care about.

The man in the iron mask was a real personage, a prisoner in the Bastille held by Louis XIV for historically undisclosed reasons. But Dumas had made the musketeers famous by putting them at the heart of historical events, and here he makes the masked prisoner the twin brother of King Louis and has our heroes involved in a plot to substitute one for the other. Whether for or against, I won’t say!

And I won’t reveal any other secrets of the story except to say again that, as becomes a final volume in a series about favorite characters, the reader grieves some deaths at the end. Each death is utterly befitting its respective character, as is the non-death: that character needs to live with some regrets for a while.

Yes, I am truly grieving. I was sad when I finished the book, and I’m sad now writing about it. This is the end, in several ways, of characters that I have deeply loved since I was sixteen. And, as with many real deaths I’ve experienced, I didn’t see these coming.