Here’s my attempt to get in touch with my literary feelings. I like all of these books and am grateful to their authors for having gone to the trouble of writing them. At the moment, I can’t imagine moving any of these books to a different category, but I may as I keep re-reading them.

Great but Too Long

Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Majestic organ tones numb the ear after a while.)

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

A La Recherche du Temps Perdus, by Marcel Proust

Great, Except for the Ending

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling (In the end, the little Irish kid goes to work for British intelligence in Afghanistan, thereby forsaking not only his Holy Man, but also siding with the historic oppressors of his own people.)

Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Huck sees through conventional society, it hypocrisies, its cruelty, but instead of staying to do something about it, turns his back to it and lights out for the territories.)

Paradise Lost, by John Milton (Our grandparents the orchard thieves had to go and get kicked out of a good thing.)

Great, but Marred by an Eccentricity of Manner

Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles Doughty

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

The American Scene, by Henry James

(Let me rethink this. The eccentricities of these wonderful books are what makes them wonderful.)

Kept Rooting for It to Be Good

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott

Almost Too Painful to Read

Othello, by William Shakespeare

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Perfect!

\Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (Proust wanted to learn Englisb well enough to translate Walden in French, but then learned that someone was already doing it.)

The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett

The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan

The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry

My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham

Plays by Moliere, translated by Richard Wilbur

Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain (Not a great book like Huckleberry Finn but not marred by an ending that you want to tear out of the book, either.)

History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, by Henry Adams

Nero Wolfe Mysteries, by Rex Stout

Bertie Wooster Stories, by P. G. Woodhouse

The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James

Too Much Like Life Itself to Characterize

Don Quixote, by Cervantes

Plays, by Shakespeare

The Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer (William Cullen Bryant trans.)

Essays by Montaigne

In this post, I will examine the life of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and speculate about how he came to formulate the justification of freedom of speech that he wrote in his great dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision in Abrams v. the United States (1919). I believe that if Holmes’ justification of freedom of speech were more widely known and better appreciated, there would be fewer self appointed censors of speech on the right and left. And if it were commonly understood what free speech is, it would be more difficult to hand a manila envelope stuffed with cash to a Congressman with power to make or break a particular piece of legislation, and claim that one was only exercising one’s First Amendment rights.

What Sort of Hero Is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr?

When I was a kid, I had a hunch that turned out to be — pretty good for a kid’s. This was, that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 – 1935) was someone whom I could make my hero. When I saw The Mind and Faith of Justice’ Holmes, a hefty Modern Library Giant edited by Max Lerner, on sale at Gelsanliter’s Office Equipment Store, in Mount Vernon, Ohio, I bought it. I laid it aside not long after, though. I was fifteen years old and Oliver Wendell Holmes was a grade or two above my reading level. My belief that Holmes was a hero of some sort nevertheless persisted in my mind, maybe because of his flamboyant mustache, which seemed to say “Here I am and to hell with you.”

My interest in Justice Holmes was later revived by Edmund Wilson. In his book Patriotic Gore (1962), Wilson made the case for Holmes as an important figure in American intellectual and cultural history. But Wilson also pointed out that although Holmes as a judge had sometimes ruled in favor of liberal causes — and I considered myself a liberal by now — he wasn’t a liberal himself. He had little sympathy with most progressive efforts to improve the lot of working men and women — liberalism, abolitionism, Fourierism, anarchism, conservatism — because of how they can lead to violent conflict and death, as in the Civil War.

Then, as I learned more, I began to see that Holmes could not be easily categorized.

Bad Holmes, Good Holmes

Holmes’s legacy, I found, consists both of decisions that history has judged to be valuable and correct and of bad decisions that reflect a curious lack of empathy that was common among the members of the educated classes of his time.

What is bad in his legacy comes from this bleaker, less kind and less empathetic side — a side, some biographers say, that was brought forth by his brutal suffering in the Civil War. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote in a 1927 opinion denying a mentally retarded woman’s plea not to be sterilized by the state of Virginia. Coming so late in Holmes’ life, this heartless dictum could not be dismissed as an aberration. In letters to friends he confided an interest in eugenics, which, if this may be counted in his defense, was of widespread interest among the educated classes in his time.

The good side of his legacy consists mostly of dissents that affirm the constitutionality of social legislation, and that affirm the principle of free speech. For example, his influential dissent in Lochner v. New York (1905) argued for the constitutionality of New York state laws regulating the hours and working conditions of workers in a bakery — which in themselves did not concern him. But it is with his great dissent in Abrams v. United States that this post is concerned.

Holmes’ Life and Views

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1841 and died in Washington, D. C. in 1935. His life touched points in the entire history of his country — something that is no longer possible. As a child, he witnessed veterans of the Revolutionary War being honored in a parade down Tremont Street in Boston, and he remembered his grandmother telling how her family fled Boston when the British army came to occupy it. At the age of 92, he received a courtesy call from the newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in a few years would authorize development of the atomic bomb. (Holmes had this advice for the new president: “Form your battalions and fight!”)

His father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., was a pioneering medical reformer. In this capacity, he is best remembered for discovering, in 1843, how puerperal fever — an often lethal infection affecting women who have just given birth — is passed from patient to patient by physicians and nurses who do not wash their hands or change their smocks between patients. Naturally, the article outraged doctors and nurses who were spreading the disease by not washing their hands or changing their smocks. Dr. Holmes was unmoved by their outrage. The importance of his discovery was quickly recognized, however, and honors followed; he was eventually made Dean of Harvard Medical School.

He was also a witty lecturer, the author of the popular book of essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and a much-in-demand writer of occasional verse. His poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the One Hoss Shay” is a satirical commentary on the collapse of the Calvinist Church in America. I find another of his poems, “The Last Leaf”, to be quite touchng. Dr. Holmes was a genuine poet, although a minor one. His essays and verse were published in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine which he co-founded and named.

The Holmeses were “Boston Brahmins”. In fact, it was Holmes Sr. who coined the term, to refer to members of families who had maintained a high level of intellectual distinction for at least several generations. Brahmins were scholars, poets, clergymen, college professors, doctors, judges, and philosophers; but never merchants, soldiers, artisans, laborers, or politicians.

Holmes Jr. was conscious of being a Brahmin through his descent from a long line of learned clergymen, originally Calvinist but turning to Unitarianism in recent generations. He would describe himself as a Unitarian whenever he needed to say what church he belonged to, but he had lost his belief in God early in life, never regained it, and did not attend the services of any church.

Holmes, Sr. was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became an occasional guest at the Holmes household. Holmes Jr. revered Emerson, both for the wise things that he said, and for his ability to remain silent when he had nothing to say — an uncommon ability in the loquacious Holmes household. Holmes Jr. once gave Emerson an essay that he had written to criticize Plato’s theory of ideas. Emerson returned the essay to him with only the one comment, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him”. Holmes showed this comment to friends proudly, as an intellectual battle scar. Toward the end of Emerson’s life, Holmes mailed him a copy of an essay that he had written on primitive notions in modern law; along with the essay he enclosed the following note: “Accept this little piece as a slight mark of the gratitude and respect I feel for you who more than anyone else first started the philosophical ferment in my mind.”

Emerson may also have provided Holmes Jr. with validation for the scorn that he was beginning to feel for the masses of men. In his book The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote:

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses.. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! The calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all.

Holmes would later refer to working men and women en masse as “thick-fingered clowns” But his reactions were never predictable. He had contempt for plebeians en masse, but when he went on his daily walks in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, he always stopped to talk with the railroad crossing guard. During the Civil War, he grew to detest abolitionism, but once when he saw a concert of whites singing in blackface, he became so indignant at this disrespect for the members of black race that he walked out on the performance.

When he was growing up, his friends included Henry Adams, the future historian and the grandson and great-grandson of presidents; Henry James, the future fiction writer; and his brother William James, who would achieve distinction both as a psychologist and a philosopher. Holmes and William would sometimes sit up all night talking philosophy — or “twisting the tail of the Kosmos” as Holmes called it. They gradually became less close as the differences between their aims and temperaments became more obvious. William wrote to his brother Henry that “Holmes was formed like a planing machine to gouge a deep self-beneficial groove through life.” Holmes was aware that he was being judged.

Holmes attended Harvard where he became an abolitionist. After he was graduated he enlisted in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. This so called “Harvard Regiment” would suffer the highest number of casualties of all Massachusetts regiments and would rank fifth in casualties of all Union regiments.

He was wounded three times in the course of his military service: at Balls Bluff, Fredericksburg, and Antietam. The wounds he received at Balls Bluff and Antietam almost killed him, as did a later bout of dysentery. He did not re-enlist when his original three year enlistment ended. Nearly all the Harvard men with whom he had enlisted were dead.

He sometimes talked about his experiences in the Civil War in a large philosophical manner, but although he observed the anniversaries of the major battles in which he had fought, he could not bear to revisit the war in detail. When someone gave him a copy of Lord Charnwood’s distinguished biography of Lincoln, he read it without pleasure. In old age, he decided to reread Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the books that had most impressed him when he was a young man. He couldn’t bear to read it now, even when decades separated him from war.

Holmes enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1864 and upon graduation began to practice law in Boston. He quickly became well regarded as a lawyer and a long career of respectability and affluence opened up before him.

Still, he craved work in which he could achieve intellectual distinction. He found it when he was chosen to edit the twelfth edition of Kent’s Commentaries on American Law, a standard and influential reference work. He was beginning to make his mark.

In 1872 he married his childhood girlfriend Fanny Bowditch Dixwell. Shortly after their wedding she developed rheumatic fever and was graavely ill for weeks. She was reclusive for the rest of her life, and is remembered for her devotion to her husband and her sardonic wit; she once said “Washington is filled with great men and the women they married when they were young.”

At the same time, he was reflecting on the philosophical basis of law; the chief fruit of his reflection was his conclusion that natural law could not be referenced as a sanction of positive law. The principles by which men were ruled could no longer be read in the face of nature or be found engraved on the human heart. There were no unvarying eternal rules, no self-evident truths. In an article on natural law that he later published in the Harvard Law Review, he wrote:

It is not enough for the knight of romance that you agree that his lady is a very nice girl—if you do not admit that she is the best that God ever made or will make, you must fight. There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. It seems to me that this demand is at the bottom of the philosopher’s effort to prove that truth is absolute and of the jurist’s search for criteria of universal validity which he collects under the head of natural law.

His rejection of natural law informed the most famous paragraph of his most famous book, The Common Law:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. 

By the age of 40, he had thus achieved greatness in legal scholarship, the first of the two fields to which he would devote his life. The second field became open to him in 1882, when he was appointed an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He would serve on this court for twenty years, the last two years as chief justice. He applied himself to his work as a judge with his usual assiduity, and in twenty years wrote over a thousand opinions for the court. But he found that his work on the Massachusetts court provided little opportunity for the original work that he longed to do.

It was, however, as a justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that he perfected a way to make judicial opinions and dissents something like works of art. His opinions and dissents were much shorter than those of other judges, and the language that he used in them was pithy, colloquial, and free of legal terms except where these were unavoidable. “I don’t believe in the long opinions which have been almost the rule here I think that to state the case shortly and the ground of decision as concisely and delicately as you can is the real way.” His style was said by some to be easy to read but hard to understand. It was the style that he would use for his great opinions and dissents on the United States Supreme Court.

It was also during his time on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that Holmes wrote an influential and controversial paper for the Harvard Law Review, The Path of the Law. (1897). In this paper, Holmes described the job of a lawyer as predicting, for the benefit of his client, the probable costs of breaking the law as well as of the benefits of obeying it. The client is free to weigh costs against benefits and make the choice that better furthers his aims. Holmes wrote:

You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force, and therefore you can see the practical importance of the distinction between morality and law. A man who cares nothing for an ethical rule which is believed and practised by his neighbors is likely nevertheless to care a good deal to avoid being made to pay money, and will want to keep out of jail if he can.

This point of view has been vigorously, if not in my opinion, convincingly, debunked by Albert Alschuler in Law Without Value: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes. 2000.

Similarly for contracts, which merely specify promises that one is free to keep or not to keep, with the contract specifying the penalties for not keeping them. Holmes thus originated the practice of viewing the law as a “bad man” would view it — as a matter of benefits versus costs, with no accounting for morals or ethics. The bad man doctrine of legal analysis became both controversial and influential almost immediately.

Holmes stayed on the Massachusetts court until President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the United States Supreme Court in 1902. He was 62 years old when he was sworn as an associate justice. He would serve on the court with distinction for 30 years.

Shortly after his appointment to the Supreme Court, he wrote: “Since I have been here, the novelty solemnity and augustness of the work has made my past labors seem a closed volume locked up in a distant safe.”. The Holmes’s social life was transformed, too. He and his wife Fanny became frequent dinner guests of President Teddy Roosevelt at the White House.

It was clear to all that Roosevelt expected Holmes to support his trust-busting and other progressive legislation should it ever be challenged before the court. Holmes enjoyed his White House dinners but felt quite comfortable ruling against Roosevelt when the law as he saw it wasn’t on Roosevelt’s side. Roosevelt, however, was surprised and outraged by what he regarded as Holmes’s betrayals, not having realized that a Boston Brahmin cannot be bought, not even with White House dinners.

[It should be noted that it was Theodore Roosevelt, not Franklin Delano, whom Holmes, some think, described as “a first rate temperament and a second rate intellect”, although there is no evidence either that Holmes used anything like these words to express that thought.]

As a justice of the Supreme Court, Holmes could not, of course, seek out cases that raised interesting or profound questions of law. He did not, as it turned out, have any need. As a young man, Holmes had chosen the materials that enabled him to become a great legal scholar; now, in the final years of his life, he was being chosen by the issues that enabled him to become a great judge.

In the new century the demand for progressive reform was growing as the nation’s major corporations, chiefly based in coal, oil, and railroads, grew in wealth, political power, and influence over the lives of the country’s workers. These changes raised novel legal issues that necessarily landed before the Supreme Court. And in the years after 1917, when the United States entered World War One, the Supreme Court was called upon to define the government’s power to regulate the exercise of free speech.

As if these challenges were not enough to occupy Holmes’s mind, one of his fundamental legal tenets, his rejection of natural law, was attacked in the Illinois Law Journal as “heresy”. The legal scholar making this charge took issue with a judgement that Holmes had made some years before, that an individual cannot sue a state government for recovery of land. “ There can be no legal right as against the authority that makes the law on which the right depends,” Holmes had written.

Another strong conviction that Holmes formed while he was a judge was the wisdom of allowing the people considerable freedom to legislate solutions for their own needs and problems. This meant that judges should be restrained in their exercise of the power of judicial review — the power to invalidate laws or provisions of laws when the courts found them to be in conflict with the Constitution.

In Lochner v. New York (1905), Holmes dissented from the court’s majority opinion, which held that a New York statute regulating the hours and working conditions of bakery workers was an unconstitutional infringement of the bakery owner’s freedom to contract with his employees as he saw fit. It may surprise some to find Holmes dissenting in favor of the sweaty masses for whom he had expressed, on occasion, such Emersonian contempt. But Holmes’s regard for the law was stronger than his disdain for the masses of men or his doubts about the practical wisdom of legislation meant to make long hours among bakery ovens a little more tolerable for the bakers. “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It’s my job”, he said. His disinterested respect for the law is one important aspect of his greatness as a judge.

His detachment was further shown in his dissent from the Court’s majority opinion in U. S. Schwimmer, 1928. Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jew, had applied for U. S. citizenship and been turned down because, as an avowed pacifist, she had said that she would not bear arms in defense of the United States. The fact that as a 50 year old woman she could not bear arms in any case was considered immaterial by the lower courts.

Holmes scorned pacifism but believed that the issue involved in this case was not the soundness of pacifism as a philosophy, but the principle of free speech:

 Some of her answers [to questions that she had had to answer about her beliefs in her application for citizenship] might excite popular prejudice, but, if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate. I think that we should adhere to that principle with regard to admission into, as well as to life within, this country. And recurring to the opinion that bars this applicant’s way, I would suggest that the Quakers have done their share to make the country what it is, that many citizens agree with the applicant’s belief, and that I had not supposed hitherto that we regretted our inability to expel them because they believed more than some of us do in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount

This was the last dissent that Holmes would write in a free speech case.

Holmes As a Person

He was as remarkable as a man as he was as a legal scholar. According to Dean Acheson, at that time Judge Brandeis’s legal secretary, Holmes was “possessed of a grandeur and beauty rarely met among men. His presence entered a room with him as of a pervading force.” He stood six feet two inches tall, with a soldier’s posture and a theatrically oversized moustache. One acquaintance, however, said that the dominant feature of his face was not the moustache but his “gently menacing” blue grey eyes. He was affable, witty, and and a conversationalist without a peer in his time. He had many brilliant friends, among them Judge Learned Hand, Harold Laski, Walter Lippmann, Frederick Pollock, and Felix Frankfurter. The friends who worked in Washington found Holmes’s townhouse to be a welcome retreat from the atmosphere of “cigar smoke suspended in steam heat” (Lippmann’s words) in which the work of the great city was done; Holmes’s book-lined study was the scene of many exhilarating discussions of matters mundane and metaphysical. To be a party to these discussions was a cherished privilege in Washington in Holmes’s day.

Holmes was vastly well read in law, philosophy, and literature. He knew a great deal about art, collected prints, and enjoyed going to art museums. His judgement of books was independent, as befitted an admirer of Emerson; he didn’t hesitate to say, for example, that he thought Othello “a rotten and repulsive” play. He never read newspapers.

He retired from the court at the age of 90, after acknowledging, reluctantly, that he had become physically incapable of doing his job. Age brought him little mental impairment, however, and he now systematically read through what he called his “Judgement Day books” — the books that he would be ashamed never to have read when the final bugle blows. These books included, among others, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Martin Chuzzlewit, Vanity Fair, the stories of P. G. Wodehouse (“He makes me roar.”), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (“really great”), and Proust in French. He read selections from Emerson. (“The only firebrand of my youth that burns to me as brightly as ever.”).

He outlived his wife by several years. When he died, it was found that he had left most of the value of his estate to the Treasury of the United States, the nation whose existence he had fought to preserve as a soldier, and whose laws he had helped reduce to system and clarity first as a scholar and then for fifty years as a judge. He was mourned by a nation that sensed that he had embodied faithfulness to one’s task and one’s country.

The Path to Abrams

In this section I will try to describe the historical background of Abrams v. United States and to account for Holmes’s famous “change of mind” about the protections owed to speech — a change that took place over a period of almost two years, culminating in his great dissent in Abrams vs the United States.

I rely heavily on Thomas Healy’s excellent book, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Chznged his Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America.

Holmes once wrote in a letter to William James that he preferred to keep developments in his thinking to himself. His dissent in Abrams certainly surprised and dismayed the colleagues on the court who were most in sympathy with his views, while it delighted his progressive friends who had long been frustrated by Holmes’s refusal to give speech greater protection.

Before Holmes’ time, the federal courts had seldom been called upon to declare what protections were owed to speech under the First Amendment. The infamous Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), by which the Federalist party hoped to silence its critics, was allowed to expire by Jefferson when he became President in 1801; and Jefferson pardoned those who had been convicted under the acts. This attempt to squelch free speech inspired no efforts to establish protections for speech, however.

Until Holmes wrote his dissent in the Abrams case, the principal protection enjoyed by freedom of speech was derived from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765 – 1769):

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity. (4 Bl. Com. 151, 152.)

In other words, the government cannot prevent a citizen from speaking, but it can hold him liable for what he says. The drafters of our Constitution appear to have accepted Blackstone’s doctrine without discussion. There is no evidence that Holmes felt that speech needed greater protection than protection from what came to be called prior restraint. The First Amendment had seldom been appealed to in cases involving freedom of speech.

Adding to the element of surprise surrounding the Abrams dissent, perhaps, is the fact that the Supreme Court had reviewed only a handful of cases dealing with the protections owed to speech. The data on which to base speculation about the movements of Holmes’s mind are not plentiful. By reviewing some of the cases that do deal with the protections owed to speech, I hope at any rate to glimpse the movement of his thought.

However, events soon pressured the Court to consider the question of free speech. The country’s entrance into the Great War created a powerful public demand that Congress take action against spies and saboteurs, even though there was little evidence that the country was seriously threateed by either. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 were Congress’s response to the demand. Together, the acts put a chill on freedom of speech by specifying jail terms of up to 20 years for actions tending to hamper or impede the war effort — all such actions being forms of speech. The language of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act was vague; deliberately so, some thought, so as to give the government wider scope for prosecution.

Holmes’ supporters were aghast at these acts, and it did not reassure them that the acts would expire when the war ended. A precedent had been established. The government could, when it deemed it necessary, do exactly the thing that the First Amendment said that it could not do: set limits to freedom of speech. In desperation, Holmes’s supporters looked to him to take a stand for First Amendment rights.

Instead, he shocked his supporters by siding with the court in upholding the Constitutionality of the Espionage and Sedition Acts in three separate challenges; Schenck v. the United States, Frohwerke v. the United States, and Debs v. the United States. In each case, the Court upheld the convictions of the defendants, each of whom had spoken out against the government’s war efforts. Worse, in each case Holmes was chosen to write the majority opinion for the Court! “The question in every case is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent,” he wrote. Holmes’s powers of reasoning, his profound legal learning, his marvelous gift of expression all would be enlisted in the government’s bid to weaken First Amendment protections.

A Chance Encounter

At the start of the summer recess for the federal bench in 1917, Judge Learned Hand by chance encountered Holmes on the train that both were taking from Washington D. C. to New England. Hand was grateful for this opportunity to speak to Holmes.

Sitting as a federal district judge in the case Masses Publishing Company v. Patten, Hand had just ruled that criticism of the U. S government’s war effort that appeared in a magazine published by the Masses Publishing Company did not violate the terms of the Espionage Act of 1917. Hand had ruled that speech did not violate the act as long as it “stops short of urging upon others that it is their duty or in their interest to resist the law,” and that the criticisms in the magazine had so stopped short. Hand’s ruling was overturned on appeal and the Masses Publishing Company was blocked from distributing its magazine through the U. S. Post Office as stipulated by the act. Since the company relied on subscriptions by mail for almost all its revenue, it had gone out of business shortly after Hand’s ruling had been overturned. Hand said to Holmes that something of value had been lost; the magazine was of real distinction. Hand made clear to Holmes his belief that freedom of speech was becoming dangerously restricted and that something needed to be done to correct this state of affairs.

Holmes listened to Hand courteously, but committed himself to nothing. It is hard not to believe that Holmes was influenced by Hand’s passionate advocacy. He admired Hand for the brilliant jurist that he was, and the two judges were in agreement on most points of law. But Hand had come up against something austere and immovable in Holmes’ nature, and was obliged to wait and hope.

Abrams v. the United States

Holmes soon had an opportunity to revise his stand on freedom of speech — its nature, its importance, and the protections owed to it on account of its nature and importance. His revision would make one of the great documents in the history of the doctrine of freedom of speech.

In 1918, a group of Russian immigrants in New York City, led by a man named Jacob Abrams, printed hundreds of copies of two pamphlets denouncing the invasion of Russia by the United States and other allied powers. The allies had invaded Russia after the Russian revolution had overthrown the Tsar. The original purpose of the invasion was to prevent a large cache of munitions from falling into the hands of the German Empire. After the armistice, the invaders remained in Russia to support the Whites in the Russian civil war.

Abrams and his fellow immigrants had distributed the pamphlets by throwing them out the window of a loft in the garment district. The immigrants were found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to twenty years in prison. In Abrams v. the United States they asked the Supreme Court to overturn their convictions.

The Supreme Court upheld their convictions, with the majority opinion being written by Justice John C. Clarke, who wrote in part:

… while the immediate occasion for this particular outbreak of lawlessness on the part of the defendant alien anarchists may have been resentment caused by our Government’s sending troops into Russia as a strategic operation against the Germans on the eastern battle front, yet the plain purpose of their propaganda was to excite, at the supreme crisis of the war, disaffection, sedition, riots, and, as they hoped, revolution, in this country for the purpose of embarrassing, and, if possible, defeating the military plans of the Government in Europe.

Justices Holmes and Brandeis voted to overturn the convictions. Holmes’ dissent was concise and rigorously reasoned — a good example of the style which one critic had criticized as easy to read and hard to understand.

The case turned on the question of “intent”: had the defendants distributed the pamphlets with the intention of hampering the U. S. war effort? The Court had held that men can be assumed to intend the usual consequences of their actions, and that the usual consequences of actions such as the defendants’ would present a clear and present danger that the government has a duty to prevent.

Holmes argued that whatever the intentions of the defendants, their actions did not in fact present immediate dangers that the government had a duty to prevent:

Now nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so.

If, as Holmes believed, the court was not really punishing the defendants for their actions — which were innocuous — but for their creed, the issue before the court was nothing less than the rights of speech itself, and thus, of the right to think one’s thoughts:

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country. I wholly disagree with the argument of the Government that the First Amendment left the common law as to seditious libel in force. History seems to me against the notion.

Here at last was a justification of freedom of speech that did not rely on authority –not even on so venerable an authority as the First Amendment –but referred to the real needs of men – that there be an agreed upon working version of the truth which can alone serve as the basis of policy or other common undertakings.

Holmes concluded his dissent with the words “I regret that I cannot put into more impressive words my belief that, in their conviction upon this indictment, the defendants were deprived of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.” My own belief is that the paper on which Holmes wrote this dissent should be prominently displayed in the U. S. Capitol in a glass case filled with inert gases.

The Marketplace of Ideas — Can It Rescue Freedom of Speech?

Holmes’ justification of freedom of speech supposes a degree of civic virtue that is not likely to be found in many communities. It requires people to be well informed, rational, and motivated by a disinterested concern for the common good. We do not see many such communities today — certainly our nation as a whole is not such a community.

The public today is not well informed, but variously informed. In his book Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann wrote that each person carries in this head a unique picture of the world, even though all people are children of the same objective world. Because they carry different pictures of the world in their heads, they are bound to judge ideas differently. For example, one man says that the dam on the slope above the town is weak and needs to be drained and repaired immediately. Another man says, let’s wait and see. A third says that the whole idea is silly. Each man’s idea is reasonable, given the picture of the world that he carries in his head. And people are loathe to alter or give up the picture of the world that they carry in their heads. They find it hard to conceive that there might be any difference between their pictures and the objective world.

And there are people who, to enrich themselves, hope to confirm other people in their attachment to their pictures of the world. The owner of a dredging company wants to confirm people in their belief that the dam is in need of immediate repair. The owner of a seismic survey company wants people to believe that the dam could be damaged by an Earth tremor. The developer who wants to build a dozen houses in the meadow below the dam want people to regard the dam as sound.

People are not hopelessly irredeemably bound to their pictures of the world. People change their minds. But to judge among pictures of the world in order to decide which best corresponds to observable facts requires a power of rational judgement. It is an instinct of rationality that prompts a person who thinks the dam sound to go to the dam himself to verify his idea.

And then, the competition of ideas in the marketplace will sometimes require people to endorse ideas that benefit others more than themselves. It will require, in other words, that people have a disinterested concern for the welfare of their community.

And then there are the qualities of the ideas that are brought to marketplace, and the criteria for judging among them. In a corrupt community, only corrupt ideas will be brought to the marketplace, and the criteria for choosing the best (or rather, the worst) among them will be corrupt.

It would appear then that Holmes’ justification of freedom of speech is operative only in a community of saints of which there are none.

Even so, unattainable ideals have their value, even in this fallen Earth. They can instill in us a bias toward truthfulness, justice, and mercy. And even if we have not attained civic sainthood, we still may find it within our power “to be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”

Like most other septuagenarians I suppose, I wonder why it is that time has to speed up as it brings us closer to the terminus that we would just as soon never reach. That is the way it seems to work, at any rate. If life is a banquet, we must needs be force fed desert, swallowing it without tasting it. But why?

Like Minniver Cheevy, I thought and thought — and thought about this. Fruitlessly.

Then one day I happened to look at the plump single volume edition of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, which I read, no jazz, and in French. The cover is stained from prolonged contact with my hands. I can remember the day I bought it, at Schoenhof’s now-no-more foreign bookstore, like it was yesterday. I remember the are-you-shitting-me? look on the face of the young man working the cash register as he put down his Asterix comic book to ring up my ponderous purchase. And I remember asking myself Am-I-shitting-me? as I left the bookstore with five pounds of culture under one arm.

It seems like yesterday that I bought the book. But I needed more than one day to read the book to the end. Or I somehow jammed a whole lot of time between today and the it-seems-like-yesterday when I bought the book. In that apparently no more than 24 hours, Swann had enough time to debase himself before that floozy Odette, and Baron Charlus had to time become inscrutably unpleasant, and Bergotte had time to get sick and then die while admiring a little patch of yellow in a painting by Vermeer, and Vinteuil the composer of that unforgettable air had time to have his heart break when he discovered that his daughter is lesbian and so what?

So maybe we stuff a lot of time into the interstices between the points of time that we remember like they were yesterday. So maybe I’ll see if there’s enough time in those interstices for me to re-read that book, this time in English. I kind of want to find out what happens.

My wife and I spent our honeymoon, in July 1982, exploring the peninsulas in the part of coastal Maine that Sarah Orne Jewett celebrated with delicate art in her book The Country of the Pointed Firs. One day, as we followed the peninsula that begins near Spruce Head down to its termination in the North Atlantic, a causeway over an inlet of that ocean came into view. On the right side of the road, just before the causeway, was a two-story shack clinging to the steep bank that led down to the water. A sign over the entrance to the shack said USED BOOKS. We stopped to see what so improbably located a second hand bookstore had to offer.

On the upper floor, dog-eared mouldiness. On the lower floor, reached by a desperate staircase that planted its feet in twilight gloom, was a table, and on the table was an elegantly bound book, its appearance making it seem as out of place as the bookstore seemed out of place in its own way. I paid $10 for it.

The book was an 1821 edition of the works of the Roman poet Vergil, one of the titles in the series known as the Delphine classics. One of my classics professors had told me about this series, but I had never seen any of the volumes in it. The books were prepared at the order of King Louis XIV of France for his son the Dauphin (Delphinus in Latin), who was, unfortunately, decidedly unbookish. The Delphine classics did not incorporate any advances in scholarship, but they were innovative pedagogically. In the margin on each page is a prose paraphrase, in simple Latin, of the original text printed on that page. The footnotes are also in Latin. The series became popular with serious students of the classics and it was republished numerous times. John Dryden produced his famous translation (1697) of Vergil working from a Delphine edition.

The series was published in America with minor changes by the firm of H. Carey and I. Lea of Philadelphia. H(enry) Carey was a son of the firm’s founder, Matthew Carey, one of whose agents, Mason “Parson” Weems, was the author of popular biographies of the revolutionary war hero Francis Marion and of George Washington; it was in Weems’ biography of Washington that Americans first read the story of the vandalized cherry tree. The Careys, father and son, catered to the taste of wealthy Virginians for elegantly made books with fine bindings. The Delphine Vergil that I now owned would have pleased any fastidious Virginian. Van Wyck Brooks wrote about the Careys in the first chapter of his charming study The World of Washington Irving.

The title page of the book was inscribed with the signature “David G. Haskins 1830”. From time to time, in the years before the Internet arrived with its answers to all riddles, I wondered who David G. Haskins had been and what sort of person he was. A Harvard graduate, probably. I wondered if he liked Vergil as much as I do; the pages of the book are unmarked and unworn. But maybe he was simply careful with books. And then I stopped wondering about him.

That is, until recently, when I read in Robert Richardson’s excellent study, Emerson: the Mind on Fire, that in 1839, Emerson had had a long discussion about religion with David Haskins, “a relative.” Of course; Emerson’s mother was Ruth Haskins. But how close a relative? Walter Harding, in his book “The Days of Henry David Thoreau”, mentions an acquaintance of Thoreau named David Haskins who was Emerson’s “cousin”.

Very good — a David Haskins was a close relative of Emerson. But was this David Haskins the same person as the long-ago owner of the Delphine Vergil that I bought in Maine?

My brother-in-law Kevin McLaughlin, an accomplished amateur historian, suggested that I look for information about David Haskins in the Find-a-Grave web site. I did, and found an entry about a David Haskins who was related to Emerson and even better, the entry contained a sample of his handwriting. The sample matched the inscription on the Delphine Vergil that I bought in Maine. Q. E. hot damn D.!

The Find-a-Grave entry includes an obituary of David Haskins which says, among other things, that he was a Havard classmate (’37) of Henry David Thoreau. This set to me to wondering — would Thoreau ever have borrowed this book from Haskins? Thoreau himself could not have afforded a Delphine edition. But he loved Vergil’s Georgics, a poem about farming and the world of nature, which many consider Vergil’s most technically finished work. More than one critic has suggested that Thoreau learned how to write about nature from Vergil’s lovingly detailed descriptions of how to raise field crops, how to tend vines, how to raise cattle, and how to keep bees. Could he have held this book in this hands just as I have been holding it, off and on, for 40 years?

I recently called the Concord Free Public Library to ask anyone there if the library would accept David Haskin’s Delphine Vergil as a donation. The answer was yes. So when the weather clears, my wife and I will drive to Concord to deliver the book up to people who know how to care for it better than it has been cared for in the last 200 years.

******

March 11, 2026 was a btight sunny early spring day. We delivered David Haskins’ Delphine Vergil to the staff of the special collections department of the Concord Free Public Library, who accepted it most graciously. One librarian brought out a box that contained the handwritten manuscripts of Emerson’s essay “Culture” and Thoreau’s great essay “Walking”. I touched both, with the hand that is writing this! Another pointed out to me the glass case containing Thoreau’s surveying equipment.

Ave atque Vale, Vergili, in domo sua nova.

Dear friends, I am writing this for you my readers after a year’s silence on my part. I spent at least half of that year in hospitals and rehabilitation units, where I was treated for nearly intractable infection, and then for the debilitating effects of spending months in a hospital bed. I wish I could say that the experience made me stronger or wiser but it didn’t. It did give me great respect for the almost countless number of doctors, nurses, nurse’s aids, and physical therapists who worked with such skill and dedication to salvage the superannuated specimen of humanity that I am.

I would appreciate hearing back from — just brief notes to confirm that our connection is still up and working.

Then I will begin to write about books again. I’ve been reading some good ones.

John

This is the second movie review that I’ve written — but the first dual review, of Jean Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion” (1937) and John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” (1962). The comparison is unequal; “La Grande Illusion” is a great movie, one of the greatest ever made, while “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” is merely a first rate movie, the masterpiece of one of America’s greatest directors. Maybe that isn’t much of a difference.

These movies are so different in their historical settings and their cinematic styles that I had to watch each of them several times before I became aware of their similarity of theme — that of the necessary disappearance in the course of history of an aristocratic type of human being.

An aristocracy is a privileged social class that earns its privileges, such as exemption from taxes, by shouldering important public responsibilities. As de Tocqueville pointed out in L’Ancien Régime et La Révolution Française, an aristocracy can maintain its privileges as long as it is seen to be earning them, but let it become otiose and its privileges will be seen as illegitimate. This is what happened to the French aristocracy when it moved from the land to Versailles and devoted itself to distractions: it became merely parasitical. The middle and commercial classes, which had been growing in wealth and political importance, demanded privileges and recognition in proportion to their real importance, and sought them through revolution. But first, a partial description of each movie.

La Grande Illusion is set in the early months of the First World War. It relates the attempts of a small group of officers in the French army to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp. The commandant of the camp is an aristocratic Prussian officer named von Rauffenstein (played by the great Eric von Stroheim). Although von Rauffenstein treats his prisoners according to the conventions of war, he singles out one of them, an aristocrat named de Boildieu, (played by the distinguished Pierre Fresnay), for preferred treatment, going so far as to invite him to his chamber for cigarettes and conversation. During one discussion, von Rauffenstein, reflecting on the various costs of the war, says that whichever side wins, it will be the end of the little that is left of the aristocratic order that produced the likes of us, de Boildieu and von Rauffenstein — and won’t that be a shame? De Boildieu reflects a moment and says, “maybe”; but aren’t his fellow French officers excellent soldiers, plebeian in origin though they may be? “Jolis cadeaux de la Revolution Francaise”, replies von Rauffenstein scornfully. (“Pretty presents from the French Revolution.”)

Von Rauffenstein was right, of course; the “Great War”, whatever its outcome, would be the end of the European aristocracy, with its code of honor, its stylized manners, its anti-intellectualism, its trans-national outlook. “And don’t you find that a pity?” asks Von Rauffenstein? “Perhaps,” says de Boldieu. The rest is spoilers.

.John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” deals with the end of an American aristocracy, that of the men who, through force of character and handiness with a rifle, could provide frontier settlements with a minimum of order and a rough ad hoc justice.

The movie begins with the funeral of one such man, Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne), who had tried to protect the raw frontier community named “Shinbone” from the depredations of the outlaw Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin). The funeral is attended by Ransom Stoddard (played by Jimmy Stewart) his wife Hailie (played by Vera Miles). Years before, Stoddard, fresh out of law school, had come to Shinbone intending to civilize it by applying the ordinary processes of law. Doniphon had laughed at him, saying that a gun was the only thing that Liberty Vallance respected. The tension between Doniphon and Stoddard is increased by their common interest in Hailie, who marries Stoddard. The rest is spoilers.

de Boldieu, Von Rauffenstein, Tom Doniphon, are admirable men for whom the world no longer has much use. Neither Jean Renoir nor John Ford protests their obsolescence; but they do ask us to ponder the loss of grace and honor that the world has suffered with their passing.

These two movies are also united by use of a device that Renoir and Ford had the tact and judgement not to lean on too heavily: a flower. Von Rauffenstein cultivates a geranium in his quarters; “C’est la seule fleur dans la fortresses,” he replies when de Boldieu praises the care he has been taking of it. When Tom Doniphon is courting Hailie, he presents her with a wild cactus rose that he has found flourishing in the desert.

I prefer not to think of John Ford’s cactus rose as a reference to Jean Renoir’s geranium. I see it as a mark of the natural affinity that the genius of one true artist has for the genius of another.

See these movies.

 

 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden’s book A Certain World was published in 1970, making it one of the last books that this amazing writer produced — he died in 1973. The book’s subtitle is A Commonplace Book, which means that it is a scrapbook of poems, quotations, short essays, word puzzles, and pieces of information that the compiler of the commonplace book wanted to have available for future use. In most cases, very little of such a book is in the complier’s own words; Auden’s book is an exception. At the same time, such a compilation can be intimately revealing of its author’s likes, dislikes, interests, obsessions and fears.

Commonplace books are something like the diary of a mind, and thus are mostly intended only for, at most, a small circle of readers. Ralph Waldo Emerson compiled a commonplace book devoted to poetry and titled it Parnassus. It is a strange book, evidently meant for his family circle, because a large number of the poems included in it are second rate and apparently sentimental favorites of one or more members of the family.

A Certain World is obviously intended for the public. The entries in it are almost without exception fresh, surprising, and, to use a flabby inexcusable word, interesting. They are grouped into 173 named sections, arranged alphabetically.

I can think of two groups of readers whom this book might interest: students of Auden’s mind, who hope to be able to discover something about the workings of that mind from the items in this miscellany; or, people who simply enjoy the poems, word puzzles, or odd scraps of information that Auden enjoyed. I belong to the second group of readers.

I especially enjoy several different kinds of items in A Certain World; first, aphorisms:

”Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.” Hugo von Hoffsmanthal

”God loves all men but is enchanted by none.” W. H. Auden

”Men are not punished for their sins but by them.” E. Hubbard

”Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks that it is Don Quixote.” Stanislas Lec

”Our notion of symmetry is derived from the human face. Hence we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only; not vertically or in depth.” Blaise Pascal

Then there are quotations from the works of poets I was only slightly acquainted with or didn’t know at all: John Betjamin, William Barnes, John Clare.

Then there are excerpts from essays about things that Auden was interested in: hangmen, Napoleon, moles, book reviews, food, the medieval cosmos, poetry.

And, not surprisingly since Auden was a convinced and practicing Christian, reflections on God, by Auden and others.

The extremely miscellaneous character of the entries in this book bears the message of this book, if it has one: this world is odd, enchanted, surprising, disturbing, and worth attending to.

Unfortunately, A Certain World is out-of-print and fairly scarce, but scrounging for it online can turn up reasonably priced copies.

To wish to be someone else is to wish to cease to be, and I cannot say that I wish that there were an end to John Breithaupt, the person who I am. But when I read the scholarly works of W. P. Ker (1855 – 1923) and read about his life, I envy him his being who he was.

Ker was fortunate above most mortals in being able to do the thing he loved all his adult life, without distraction or financial anxiety. This was, to study the western world’s poetry and stories and write about them engagingly. He once described his calling as “a pleasant duty that I have been chosen as one of the captains of a band of adventurers whose province is the ocean of stories, the fortunate Isles of Romance, the kingdoms of wonder beyond the furthest voyage of the Argo.”

He was born in Glasgow and educated in Scotland and at Oxford University. He was trained to be a classicist but his interests turned to European literature of the period between end of the classical world and the start of the renaissance, or roughly 500 to 1500 A. D. He read widely and always in the original languages; his learning was said to surpass even that of the polymathic critic George Saintsbury.

His first book, Epic and Romance, was published when he was 42; it established him as the leading scholar in this field. The publication of this book was followed by many honors, including an appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a position whose only requirement is that the occupant deliver three lectures on poetry a year. Oxford then elected him a fellow of All Souls College, where he was a don without students, his only duty being that he spend a certain amount of time in the college each year. This was a lifetime appointment.

Ker had his limitations, of course; he was not himself a creative writer; his prose was clear and readable, but not distinguished; and in most cases he was content merely to quote poems rather than analyze them. But his love for and insight into what he read lifted what he wrote above the level of routine scholarship.

W. H. Auden wrote eloquently about his debt to Ker:

what good angel glured me into Blackwell’s one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost.

He was fortunate in living in a time when a life devoted to the study of poetry and stories was not thought to require justification. He once wrote, however, that

Imagination and the pure delight in stories drive out fear.

He was reticent about his religious beliefs, but once, when he was out walking with a student, he pointed to a bird snd said, “There is a woodcock.”

”That’s not my idea of a woodcock,”:the student replied.

Ker replied, “It’s God’s idea”

I have copies of several of his books: Epic and Romance, The Dark Ages, Form and Style in Poetry, and Medieval English Literature. I haven’t read any of them straight through. I leave them around the house where I can pick them up and read five or ten pages at whim. They have the merit of all the best criticism, in making you put down the criticism and take up the originals. In this case, though, a caveat is in order: a sudden passion for Boethius can be disruptive of your life’s ordinary routines..

I recently had a discussion about global warming with several people who believed that they had done all that they needed to do to have a sound opinion about the subject. They had read State of Fear, a novel by Michael Crichton about a group of environmentalists who plot mass murder to publicize the dangers of global warming. Although the book is fiction, it includes charts, graphs, and a bibliography in support of its view that climate change is a hoax or is at least far less a danger than the environmentalists think.

When I mentioned other books on the subject that they might want to read, they asked me why they should bother. State of Fear was, in their opinion, final and authoritative. When I pointed out that Michael Crichton was not a climate scientist, and that books written by people who are climate scientists would be better guides to the subject, they replied that climate scientists are academic bureaucrats saying whatever they need to say to get grant money. Their belief in the truth of this was unshakeable.

This discussion made me think, quite naturally, of Matthew Arnold, and in particular of his book Culture and Anarchy (1869). There may be a sense in which any work of literature is an implicit criticism of the civilization in which it has its roots; Arnold’s book explicitly criticizes the civilization where it has its roots, that is, the civilization of Victorian England.

Arnold criticized England by proposing “culture” as an ideal and “anarchy” its opposite. Culture, Arnold says, is

a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.

”Anarchy” is the state that a civilization falls into when its members are satisfied with their opinions simply because they are theirs. They believe that they are in possession of the best that has been thought and said on whatever subject. It follows from this that a person can have any opinion about anything, and is justified in standing by it. There is no umpire of thought or feeling, no striving for perfection. There is anarchy.

Arnold’s book was controversial when it appeared. Hadn’t Macaulay shown in his History of England that the English people, despite their crimes and follies, were solidly in the path of progress? Who is this sniping critic Matthew Arnold who tells us that we lack “culture”? Aren’t the subscriptions to our concert series routinely sold out? And look at the enormous sums that we spend on education.

All that is the sort of complacency that we don’t need a Matthew Arnold to recognize and deplore. And who is to say what is in fact the best that has been thought and said about any particular subject? These are serious criticisms and Arnold did not successfully refute them, as far as I know. Culture then is a mirage and anarchy simply the natural state of a healthy snd strong civilization.

.So I concluded, twenty years ago, after reading the attractive copy of Culture and Anarchy that I had bought at Myopic Books in Providence, Rhode Island.

And then it struck me more and more that although Arnold had not succeeded is defining what culture is very clearly, its absence can always be felt unmistakably. The civilization of the United States of America is profoundly anarchic and the chief Anarch is Donald Trump.

Arnold wrote:

One must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it.

Trump’s days lack solidity and value in large part because he doesn’t read. There is no free play of fresh ideas on his stock beliefs.

But can we hold Trump in contempt without ourselves sinking into anarchy? Is there a free play of fresh ideas that we could turn on our stock ideas about Trump? Isn’t it the case, for example, that as president he did not once use our country’s military might to force upon another country our own ideas of right? Reflections in this vein might lead us to more complicated and nuanced ideas about Trump.

No, the left has its own stock ideas and shibboleths and stands condemned of not loving culture enough. Even so, I have known cultured leftists. In the 1980s I was active in the nuclear freeze movement, the members of which held to their convictions passionately. The leader of our local group was a brilliant woman whose dedication to the cause was of a strength and purity such as I had never seen before. But one day she told our group that some nights she can’t sleep for fearing that “we might be wrong.” From somewhere, she had tapped into a fresh — and unsettling — play of new ideas that challenged her most settled convictions. That was culture.

But we are an anarchic nation, and Pope supplies our epitaph:

Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos! Is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

The Silken Tent, by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when the sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 

And its supporting central cedar pole, 
That is its pinnacle to heavenward 
And signifies the sureness of the soul, 
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To every thing on earth the compass round, 
And only by one's going slightly taut 

In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Robert Frost’s superb poem “The Silken Tent” isn’t exactly unknown to most lovers of Frost. It sometimes makes it into the anthologies, although not nearly as often as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Randall Jarrell did not include it in his famous list of Frost’s fourteen best poems, but it can of course be found in every copy of Frost’s Complete Poems. The poem is hiding in plain sight.

Why isn’t so extraordinarily beautiful and moving a poem better known?

The poem can be dismissed as a mere conceit: the comparison of a beloved woman to a silken tent. But poems of this type have become well-known and well loved; for example, Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

It can be dismissed as a mere tour de force (albeit an astonishing one), for it is a sonnet (Shakespearean) consisting of a single sentence that moves effortlessly from an initial statement of the terms of the comparison through all the points of likeness. But the poem’s doing a difficult thing so easily can hardly seem to explain the poem’s comparative neglect.

The poem no doubt puzzles a certain type of reader who needs to add a haec fabula docet to the end of every poem that they read. But what does this poem really teach, beyond the fact of a woman’s being like a tent in certain respects?

I have carefully considered the possible reasons for this poem’s comparative neglect and have concluded who the hell cares. Back to the poem:

The poem begins with the only line in which there is the slightest dislocation of words from their normal order in speech:

She is as in a field a silken tent

This line seems to announce, by its slightly dislocated word order, that what is to follow will be an exercise in ingenuity, something cerebral in the line of John Donne and his fellow metaphysical poets. But with one slight exception, the word order in the following lines is perfectly natural and unforced. The contrast between the oddness of the first line and the flowing naturalness of the rest of the poem develops with a certain bravado, but a very subdued bravado, unlike Donne’s unapologetic kind. Ars est celare artem.

I read this poem several times, and thought I knew it well, before I realized that it is a sonnet. It is seldom printed as a sonnet, as I have done above, but that is not why I missed so important a feature of the poem. I missed this feature because in most English sonnets the form is conspicuous, and conspicuous for a reason: the sonnet form was not invented with the English language in mind..

The sonnet form was created for Italian poets, whose language has so little variety in word endings that rhymes can go unnoticed. The sonnet form makes the rhyme scheme intricate so that rhyming can become, in Italian, a matter of skill.

That was very well for Italian poets. but English poets, eager to show that they, too, could write sonnets, soon found that writing them in their own rhyme-poor language was an exercise of considerable technical difficulty. It is seldom that an English sonnet does not convey a sense of difficulty overcome, however gracefully. An English sonnet, then, is an exercise in bravado.

Frost’s poem “A Silken Tent”, however, overcomes the difficulties of form so easily that it conveys no sense of difficulties overcome at all. And that is true bravado.