Things Past

...It is all very well to interpret the times, but Art, after all, transcends a critical understanding...

...It is better to be guided, in the end, by the instinct for that which is so than that which is right...

...In time it became an article of faith to believe whatever the casual pilgrim was told was so...

...One can easily recoil from the excesses of Right and Left, and find abhorrent the common character of both extremes...

...There is a palpable difference, for justice, inevitably, takes different forms when viewed through any number of lenses...

...The facts that came out of Russia in the 1930s were not facts at all, squeezed as they were through an official wringer...

...Muggeridge is rightly concerned with the evanescence of daily journalism, the sense that the vast bulk of verbiage-and the expense of effort behind it-is, in the end, both forgettable and forgotten...

...Perhaps he is right...

...The guiding passion of the age, he says, has been the pursuit of justice, while his, by contrast, has been the search for truth...

...Muggeridge has his own favorite examples, and they abound with the same fatal weaknesses and flaws: Mussolini, for instance, with his alternating common sense and absurd grandiloquence...

...Indeed, in his phrase, it has consisted largely of the spectacle of a disintegrating civilization "racing like the Gadarene swine to destruction...

...But there is wisdom in it anyway...

...But he is, first and last, a writer, and as any writer should, he informs his work with a point of view that is inimitable...

...Not only was he soon awakened by the obvious terror, but worse, he was awakened to the manner in which terror could be so easily translated into the commonplace...

...It was this inability to take sides that forced him to stake the intellectual claim that he has...

...Blissful Quakers would be whisked through villages, visiting sages would marvel at the ample stomachs and the smiling faces...

...Were it not for vanity, I suppose, nothing would ever happen, for just as the stage is cleared for action, the peacock will step forward...

...And ideology with power, of the sort of unholy brew that Stalin made, was magnetic...

...and to the Soviet Union, which, by a kind of public relations that was to prove a model for future regimes, gladdened the hearts of progressives everywhere, who either rationalized the mass slaughters, or ignored them...

...He has sought to transform the ingredients of journalism into the realm of Art, and by so doing illuminated his times, and, in flashes here and there, gone beyond that...

...As a colleague of Muggeridge's was to say, everything was true except the facts...

...Muggeridge suffers, at times, from a certain world-weariness that is too habitual to be wholly genuine...

...to the League, a solemn platform of sound and fury, signifying nothing, except that it should have concealed the horrors that it did...

...What is right, after all, depends on who is making the judgment, and it has been Muggeridge's sad fortune to see how often human life is expended by rectitude...

...He knows that hope-at any rate, hope about the works of his species-is largely a social convention, a kind of intellectual camouflage for the disheartening evidence that is all around us...

...What remains, in the end, is the unspoken fact about Muggeridge, which is his estimation of himself...

...and his faithful court recorder, Ciano, whose diaries Muggeridge edited...

...It may have been, as Muggeridge's relation-by-marriage Beatrice Webb put it, that people "disappeared," but it soon became apparent, if it was ever unclear, that no human instinct can ever transcend the importance of ideology...

...To have grown up in a socialist household, as he did, and to have been old enough to listen and learn in the full flowering of the League of Nations and the Bolshevik revolution, was to have been witness to the initial letdown of the century...

...These last two constituted the points at which people diverged in those days, as, in a slightly different way, they do now...

...Our times have been particularly plagued with them, whether as artists or artists of politics, regardless of race, creed, or color...

...But truth, it would seem, is immutable, even if it is not apparent, or cannot even be apparent...

...It was a version of justice that brought the foreign ministers together at Geneva, to lie sweetly, to divert artfully, to hide behind the soaring obstacles of rhetoric, the various phases of rearmament, and the facts of national greed...

...And the League!-where the assembly was haggling over universal road signs on the day Germany invaded Poland...

...The illusion of hope, then, has always been Muggeridge's theme, the underside of which, of course, is vanity...

...He practices a kind of offhand humility, which is pleasing for the purposes it serves...

...on the wlible, I confess, I am inclined to believe that he is...

...Muggeridge is not a believer, except in Christ, which makes him uncomfortable in a credulous age...

...Muggeridge recurrently uses the example of the Soviet Union, and with good reason...

...But it is the value of Muggeridge's particular journalism that even transient events, and transient names, gain a certain value for what they tell us about human fallibility...

...Muggeridge, tired of a tired England, burned the encumbrances of Ms past life and repaired to Moscow...

...It is true, as it has always been, that the madness and despair surrounding resignations or disarmament conferences seem, a few months later, wasteful, even comic...

...In its heyday, before revisionism, it stood out, for malcon-tented souls, as a state defiant, a place where the forlorn hopes of crackpots and ideologues were finally being translated into statistics and tractors...

...One can easily recoil from ideology...

...He has often alluded to the tight little conclaves of Fabians, encased in tweed and surrounded by billows of pipe smoke, planning and hoping, setting down, with scientific precision, the way and the life...

...How frequently all faith resides in a roomful of men, or a theatrical personality...

...It had as well all the contemptuous trappings of military tyranny to which we have, in more recent times, grown so accustomed: inspired youth, party uniforms and memberships, parades, stirring music, the sense of all sides of human life embodied in the posturings of a single man, or the banalities of a single text...

...How soon those deluded hopes were to be forlorn, but not before they had wrung a generation's faith dry...

...What perplexed Muggeridge then was that the world should necessarily be divided into two distinct camps...

...The truth, moreover, has been a more remote ideal anyway...

...Italy, indeed, may serve as a fair example, for fascism, like Bolshevism, appealed to the exhausted minds of Europe after World War I. Here, different by degrees but similar in intent to Lenin's grand plans, was a religion of national renewal, a combination of spurious efficiency and morale boosting...