In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. [...]
Samuel Johnson’s ultimately victorious sanity derived from a set of axioms that he had derived from his reading in literature, philosophy, history, and theology—having to do with human limitation, self-discipline, the inevitability of the vanity of human wishes, and the psychological power of prayer. Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget [...]
Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]
John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]
Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]
The West is dynamic, exciting. But there is a lesion of Being in the West because there is a draining away of memory. Suppose there began to be subtracted from your consciousness all memory, all the experiences of childhood, all the stories you have read or have been told. You would not know who you [...]