The Ten Points of Tolkien’s Politics

 

As a person who has read and written about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades, I am often asked about his political views. In a sense, this is a funny question, as Tolkien really despised most politics. In fact, he really thought of himself as very anti-political. His few statements on the matter reveal just how unpolitical and apolitical and anti-political he could be.

It is also, however, a natural question for someone to ask about the great man, as we live in a highly politicized age.

So, what do we know? ...

So begins Bradley Birzer's article, reprinted in Intellectual Takeout (it was originally printed in The Imaginative Conservative).

To find out what Birzer says we know, go here!

T. S. Eliot and G. K. Chesterton

T. S. Eliot

was not appreciated by the proletariat.
"Those new-fangled poems kinda bore us.
He writes like he's sittin' with an open thesaurus."

I openly admit that I've had a love/hate relationship with the poetry of T.S. Eliot over the years. As an English major, I was indoctrinated with the idea of his importance as a modern poet. Intellectually, I understood, but I still never liked the poems that I was required to read - and later even teach. I found them too clever, and too dark. Heck, there's something wrong if, except in the case of verses composed centuries ago, a poem required footnotes to begin to understand it. 

My clerihew above summarized how I felt.

It wasn't until many years later that I encountered his "Four Quartets," Murder in the Cathedral, or his "cats." 

Recently, I wondered how G. K. Chesterton and Eliot viewed each other, given that their careers overlapped. I suspected there would some differences over poetics  given Chesterton's love of traditional forms and Eliot's rejection of them. But they both did share religious concerns, albeit one Catholic and the other Anglican.

So I did a quick search. 

As I suspected, they did have some differences. 

In 1917, referencing "The Ballad of the White Horse," Eliot observed, “I have seen the forces of death with Mr Chesterton at their head upon a white horse. Mr Pound, Mr Joyce, and Mr Lewis write living English; one does not realize the awfulness of death until one meets with the living language.”

In 1918, Eliot wrote: “Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas [with] no evidence that it thinks.”

And in 1927, Eliot opined in The Criterion: "Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc sing the same tune together. I cannot admit that either of these writers ‘writes well’. The former's Outline of Sanity is the work of the brilliant but sporadic essay writer, scoring point at the cost of lucidity and cumulative effect. Mr. Chesterton is an inheritor of the older generation of Victorian prophets, with a touch, in fact too many touches, of Arnold's irony. In essays such as Orthodoxy, Heretics, or The Defendant, his style is admirable for his purpose; he often has unique perceptions; but his mind is not equipped for sustained argument."

Yikes.

So far, I have not seem much Chesterton wrote much about Eliot. But he did offer a parody of the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 

To a Modern Poet 

Now you mention it,

            Of course, the sky

                        is like a large mouth

                                    shown to a dentist,

and I never noticed

            a little thing

                        like that.

But I can’t help wishing

            You got more fun out of it;

            you seem to have taken

                        quite a dislike

                                    to things

They seem to make you jump

And double up unexpectedly—

And when you write

            like other poets,

                        on subjects

not entirely

novel,

      such as, for instance,

            the Sea,

it is mostly about

            Sea-sickness.

As you say—

It is the New Movement,

            The Emetic Ecstasy.

I note a few other comments over the years. But then they seem to find some common ground, and even appreciation, spurred in part by faith. In 1929 Eliot wrote to Chesterton: “I should like extremely to come to see you one day…May I mention that I have much sympathy with your political and social views, as well as (with obvious reservations) your religious views?” (I find no record that they actually did visit, however.) And Eliot later praised the Father Brown stories and The Man Who Was Thursday. 

In 1935, Eliot even wrote  in The New English Weekly, “With Mr. Chesterton I naturally have sympathies which I did not have twenty-five years ago.”

Meanwhile, Chesterton actually contributed a piece (“Is Humanism a Religion?”) to The Criterion, which Eliot edited, and expressed a desire to see a production of Murder in the Cathedral.

In an obituary of Chesterton in The Criterion in October 1936, Eliot wrote, "It is not for his attainments in pure letters that he should be celebrated here: though it may be said that if he did nothing to develop the sensibility of the language, he did nothing to obstruct it. Nor are his religious convictions precisely our affair. What matters here is his lonely moral battle against his age, his courage, and his bold combination of genuine conservatism, genuine liberalism, and genuine radicalism."

I'm there was more interaction between them, at least in writing. I don't find any record of them actually meeting in any formal way. But there are Chesterton scholars who have more knowledge than I.

As for me, I, following Eliot's 1935 lead above, appreciate Eliot more than I did earlier in life. But when it comes to their differences over literature and faith, I, a proletariat sort, clearly fall into the Chesterton camp. 

In my beginning is my end. 

T. S. Eliot

was not appreciated by the proletariat.
"Those new-fangled poems kinda bore us.
He writes like he's sittin' with an open thesaurus."

Walking With C.S. Lewis

 

Joseph Pearce has surfaced again! The indefatigable promoter of literature, Chesterton, Lewis, and their friends has turned up in The Imaginative Conservative with an article titled "Walking With C.S. Lewis".

The article - which is actually a reprint of an 2015 one - begins...

I have always been a keen walker, or “hiker” in the American idiom. I have ambled, rambled, scrambled or otherwise perambulated across large swathes of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; I have roamed around Europe; and I have even ventured, since my arrival on this side of the Pond fourteen years ago, to traipse through parts of the New World. I am happy to walk alone or with friends, and I am always happy to walk with ghosts. ...

Belloc puts in an appearance. But then we get to Lewis ... 

One of my favourite walks of this sort is to follow C.S. Lewis in The Pilgrim’s Regress, in which the pseudo-autobiographical protagonist traverses the Mappa Mundi of Lewis’s philosophical imagination, arguing with heretics and battling with dragons. I was, therefore, delighted to learn that a new annotated edition of this under-read and underrated classic has just been published (The Pilgrim’s Regress: Wade Annotated Edition, 2014), edited and introduced by David C. Downing, a Lewis scholar of deservedly solid repute, whose work I have known for years. Few works of Lewis are in more need of annotation than this allegorical journey through intellectual error and I was excited to see how Downing’s notes would illustrate Lewis’s path to conversion. ...

You can read the rest of the article here.

An Inkling Novel - And a Book Tally

I just finished Looking for the King by David C. Downing. 

The book is labeled "An Inkling Novel." It does indeed merit that label with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams all playing prominent roles in the plot and with their own words appearing (slightly reshaped for literary purposes), and with an appearance by Hugo Dyson. Their appearances in this book reminded me of an novel I read a couple of years ago that had some of the same gang appearing, Toward the Gleam by T. M. Doran. Lewis and Tolkien figure in that book, along with Chesterton, Owen Barfield, and others.

Is there a whole genre of fiction featuring Chesterton and the Inklings? 

Downing's book was amusing. It wasn't great, but it was certainly better than a lot of other contemporary books I've read. And it was fun picking up on all the allusions to works of the Inklings circa 1940. So, well worth reading.

I have had Downing's book stuck on a shelf for several years now. I rediscovered it as I was in the process of reorganizing my books.

Part of my goal in reorganizing is to identify books I can give away. Now that I'm retired, I've decided to donate to the library, the parish rummage sale, or my old school books that I will no longer need or use, as well as books that I will not likely ever read or reread. Through this on going process I've culled hundreds of books from my collection in the last couple of years.

A secondary and more recent goal is to collect related books scattered across multiple book cases in the house or in boxes stored in closets or the crawl space. I now have one bookcase dedicated to Chesterton, Lewis, and their friends. That bookcase features works by them, biographies and autobiographies, and studies of them and their works.

Right now, the tally by author:

Chesterton - 72 

Lewis - 40 

Tolkien - 10 

Williams - 11

Hilarie Belloc - 5

The case also contains some 17 books by Joseph Pearce and multiple titles by Dale Ahlquist.

I know these are other books by or related to Chesterton and the Inklings, but I have not not located them yet. There are more boxes in the crawl space ....

I will continue to collect and cull.

And, of course, to read.

{UPDATE: I did indeed find more books, particularly of Lewis, so I've updated the totals above.}

The Prophets of Technology (Including Lewis and Tolkien)

"...These writers foresaw, with a startling clarity, the emergence of the technocratic order in which we live; attending to their warnings, we can get a better understanding of our current predicament — and, just possibly, a sense of how we might respond to it. Such will be the purpose of this essay...."  

Hearth & Field contains a fascinating essay by Dr. Ben Reinhard on  "The Prophets of Technology",He features Lewis, Tolkien, and more. It begins:  

I dreamt that all the planning of peremptory humanity

Had crushed Nature finally beneath the foot of Man;

Birth-control and merriment, Earth completely sterilized,

Bungalow and fun-fair, had fulfilled our Plan;

But the lion and the unicorn were sighing at the funeral,

Crying at the funeral

Sobbing at the funeral of the god Pan.

—C. S. Lewis, “Pan’s Purge”

Technology, it is clear, has left mankind behind. For the moment, the forces we have created are profitably restrained — to the ease and comfort of the multitude, and to the staggering enrichment and empowerment of the elite who control them. Yet even our rulers are only riding the tiger, and it is only a matter of time before their grip slackens, and the machines man made to be his servant become, finally, his master. But whoever happens to rule at the moment, it is clear that the tyranny of the machine is unlike anything else hitherto encountered by the human family. Where the old tyrannies claimed merely the bodies of their subjects, the Machine claims all: body and soul, mind and strength, and all the inner recesses of the human heart. The old world has faded; the new one, being born, promises to be an inhuman, harrowing age.

And, most terrifying of all, it is all happening so fast.

Reflections of this sort are likely not new to readers of Hearth & Field. They can be found on the pages of any of a dozen respectable publications; they echo the concerns of contemporary writers as diverse as Paul Kingsnorth, Bill Watterson, Rod Dreher, and Pope Francis. But though readers will recognize that such warnings are not exactly new, I wonder how many recognize precisely how old they are. For all that it reads like a pastiche of contemporary criticisms of the technocratic paradigm, the opening paragraph is in fact comprised entirely of lightly paraphrased quotations from Christian humanists from the early-to-mid twentieth century: Romano Guardini, Christopher Dawson, C. S. Lewis, Conrad Pepler, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

These writers foresaw, with a startling clarity, the emergence of the technocratic order in which we live; attending to their warnings, we can get a better understanding of our current predicament — and, just possibly, a sense of how we might respond to it. Such will be the purpose of this essay. ...

Read the Essay here.