The following are excerpts from a speech T.S. Eliot gave on April 19, 1955, at the London Conservative Union. I have typed verbatim what Time and Tide reprinted in its April 23, 1955 issue. One can find the full speech in T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965; Lincoln, NE: University of [...]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES Sir.— The traditional use of the word [aristocracy] implies, I believe, an emphasis upon inheritance: not merely the inheritance of property, however important that may seem to some, but the inheritance, partly through biological transmission and partly through environment, of, other less tangible values. In other words, the unit [...]
Christopher Dawson A Historian and His Word: a Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 by Christina Scott. The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes edited by Peter J. Cataldo. “Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I [...]
The greatest school that ever existed, it has been said, consisted of Socrates standing on a street corner with one or two interlocutors. If this remark strikes the average American as merely a bit of fancy, that is because education here today suffers from an unprecedented amount of aimlessness and confusion. This is not to [...]
What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” impends over the English-speaking nations. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms that dominated our century since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted by a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Fanatic ideology has been, in essence, rebellion against the old moral order of our civilization. [...]
Edmund Burke To resist the idyllic imagination and the diabolical imagination, we need to know the moral imagination of Edmund Burke. Cato the Elder told his friends, “I had rather that men should ask, ‘Why is there no monument to Cato?’ than that they should ask, ‘Why is there a monument to Cato?’” [...]
With stealth and no small amount of cowardice, the Greeks creep out of their strange gift, a large wooden horse, under the cover of night and safely within the locked city walls. Rather than face Aeneas and the Trojans as men in battle, the Greeks unlock the gates, letting their murderous comrades in, and proceed [...]
Russell Kirk’s home A friend of mine recently told me about a banner she saw hanging inside the entrance of an American public elementary school. “You’re all number one,” the banner read. I must admit that my reaction to this was rather strong, if not downright irate. Two immediate problems sprang to mind. [...]
Some observations, rude and otherwise, from two weeks of traveling across the United States. I’m at the end of seven weeks of intense traveling. Frankly, I’m tired and more than a bit cranky. But, of course, I brought the travel on myself entirely. For what it’s worth, here are a few observations from my adventures—focused [...]
Yesterday was Christopher Dawson’s birthday. Well, it would’ve been. Arriving in this world in 1889, he died a happy and joyous death in 1970. Born into a blessedly happy and interesting Victorian family and raised in the idyllic and heady atmosphere of the short-lived Edwardian period, Dawson witnessed the horror of the world descending into [...]
Many supposedly intellectual conservatives seem to consider ideas and culture from afar, as it were, feeling no deep personal need for or intimate connection with them. Some are in a way attracted to the arts or even to philosophical speculation, but see no significant and immediate connection between these and the life of practice. Ideas and [...]
Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little [...]
Below are quotes from Russell Kirk’s first published academic article, “Tragedy and the Moderns.” The article appeared in January 1940, when Kirk was just beginning his second semester of his senior year in college. He wrote it, however, during either his freshman or sophomore year at Michigan State, under and with the encouragement of his [...]
Paul Elmer More “I have disliked various politicians, Roosevelt for instance; but I have never felt towards any other man, not even Bryan, as I do towards Wilson. He has certain qualities which appeal to the intelligence of men otherwise clear-sighted and straightforward, and as a consequence he seems to have corrupted the [...]