Centrepiece
Lost friends
Colin Welch
Still no news of my old mentors, off in my lost commonplace books to some unknown region. I try to commune with them, beseech them to get in touch: a smug- gled note in Church Latin, say, from Car- dinal Newman; a copy of Carlyle's essays, with the words 'white', 'city' and 'estate' ringed, and a page number; a bottle with a near illegible message from woozy old Col- eridge in it. In vain. Pity Sir Oliver Lodge was not of the company, or others expert in paranormal perception.
I mentioned last week certain attitudes which most of them have in common and which may comfort them in their exile: con- servatism, a love of order as of liberty, a sense of how the latter must be constrained to preserve both itself and the former.
They have for some reason in common too a shared epoch, roughly 1760 to 1914, an age in which they were at home, and I feel so. From before that time I recall La Rochefoucauld; from after it, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hayek, von Ivlises, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Michael Polanyi, Irving Kristol and Michael Oakeshott on ra- tionalism in politics. But all these last seven are surely rooted in the past, and view our own epoch with eyes trained in the last. It was an epoch of liberalism and conser- vatism, of liberty and order, transformed by three revolutions, French, American and Industrial; an age of reason and roman- ticism, of music and the bourgeoisie, of burgeoning socialism and nationalism. Plenty of tension here, plenty to quarrel about. I still hear in memory furious rows rising from those commonplace pages: old deaf Treitschke, for instance, roaring that nationalism was both a conservative and a liberating force, others, more truly conser- vative than he, demurring: Grillparzer predicting 'Humanity via nationality to bestiality', and Burckhardt (or was it Ac- ton?) that any attempt to make the nation the mould and measure of the state would end in material and moral ruin.
Rows provoked by Hegel, Nietszche (Treischke thought the former a fake, the second mad) and Marx, whose errors of analysis and prophecy are usually held to have been revealed only by the passage of the social-democratic decades, but were all apparent in Marx's lifetime to that neglected liberal-conservative genuis W.H. Mallock, whose loss I specially regret. Notebooks containing both Carlyle, say, and Cobden can hardly be a peaceable kingdom. But at least most of them were fascinated by the same problems that fascinate me still, even more pressing now as then or more so, and they mostly bring to their debates a shared mode of thought and
speech, a common style.
It may seem absurd to claim a common style for people writing in different languages, some of them read by me only in translation. But that style inspires also their translators, especially Henry Reeve, a Times leader-writer when those leaders really did lead, whose translations of de Tocqueville are in effect a rebirth.
To describe that style, first take away whatever has ruined the style of political and economic discourse in our own day: vague slang and neologisms, the intrusion of false science, especially social, of mathematics misapplied, of bogus or misleading quantification, of the hideous jargon which follows in their train, the habit of regarding life as so many 'problems', each in isolation. Then add some old-fashioned ingredients: a liberal education, still founded on the classics (no true classicist myself, I can see well enough and with anguish what has happened to language since it lost its classical founda- tions); a general respect for debating man- ners; a desire to enlighten and persuade rather than to blind with science, to include rather than exclude; a conviction that much wisdom lies in systematised experience and enriched commonsense, and that much true wit is what oft was thought but never so well expressed.
If we have done our addition and sub- traction right, we should have an idea of that marvellous style, spacious, rich, elaborate, limpid, polite, which our Euro- pean and American forefathers brought to the discussion of politics as of everything else. A style miraculously friendly to thought and feeling, which move within it as in a well-cut suit — an inadequate image, since style, thought and feeling are not separate, like body and clothes, but a unity. Are not thought and its expression one and the same thing? A style difficult for us now to reproduce and work in, because we have largely ceased to think and feel in the way it expressed. A style, alas, repulsive and im- penetrable to many of the young, who, rootless and alienated from the great dead, seeing them as discredited or rendered less 'relevant' by recent 'advances' in their fields, survey their works with the uncom- prehending bafflement of a savage at a learned society.
Unless memory errs, many of my quota- tions are about memory itself. The lines which Conrad and Ford Madox Ford plac- ed at the head of Romance, '0 toi qui dors clans rombre, 0 sacre souvenir'. Newman recalling how verses learnt by rote when we were children return to us in later life with a mournful poignancy. Pushkin — 'And reading with abhorrence my life's tale,./I quake and curse,/Complaining bitterly and shedding bitter tears,/But the sad lines not wash away'. Mrs Mandelstam 'What can we except to happen in a country with a disordered memory? What is a man worth who has lost his memory?' De Tocqueville emphasising the extreme importance, in understanding a society, of studying its in- heritance laws, in which its memory resides. Young Otto Weininger, who regarded all forgetfulness as immoral and self-murder as world-murder, yet forgot all when he com- mitted suicide on Beethoven's grave. Genius is for him, if not memory itself car:- tied to extreme, then utterly dependent on memory, the staff of its life. There is the storing memory which in fact supplies all the materials for a masterwork, however forward-looking and original it may ap- pear. There is too the shaping memory, which at the beginning of a great act of creation remembers its end, at the end its beginning. Strokes of genuis: what are these but the bold conjunction of what memory has given ,and was perhaps never joined before? Or do I traduce Weininger? I would look him up, but he too has been abducting along with the others, taking so much of rnY memory with them. How shall I fare without it? 'Think for yourself', you may crisply retort; 'learn to walk without crutches. I have a quotation for you, from Young: "Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote,/And think they grow immortal as they quote." A happy chance has delivered you from this folly. Make the most of it.'
Alas, how much 'thinking for oneself'. is in fact a process of linking memories together to form new entities, of putting what someone thought on top of what scfr meone else thought, adding whatever one can of one's own and seeing what happens., Yet what indelible memories our wickeo century has in fact conferred on us, memories inspiring as well as dreadful. We have seen crimes and destruction without precedent. Yet we have also seen peoples who have lost everything but courage, and have started all over again — the Jews (or such as survived), the uprooted eastern Ger- mans, the Asians of East Africa. Beside such prodigious adversities confronted an.c1 overcome, to bewail the loss of keys, credit cards and commonplace books is tru.lY shameful. It reminds me of the headlines 1.fi a Scottish newspaper: 'Train Smash In South: Many Feared Dead: Scot Loses Pud- ding'. And of course my lost friends and teachers may yet be restored to me: months sometimes elapse. What mountains of sauerkraut and sausagages await them, what fatted calves, what beef roasted or en &tube, what haggis and pumpkin pie, what wines, women and song, what masses or puritan thanksgivings as may be appropri; ate, what pate de fois gras and trumpets. And d w ha of af apt et e qc speech of [shall ln deliver, with wha
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