Acts of Recovery
Hart, Jeffrey
J effrey Hart has achieved distinction J as a scholar, editor, teacher, historian, and conservative thinker. Central to all of his attainments, however, and key to the value of his work in...
...Civility and good humor rank high with me...
...Hart manages to take a rather wooden, uninteresting hero—a gallant but self-contained and probably incomplete man—and make him interesting in the context of his times and the framework of a story (the case for the traditionally chivalrous English/American gentleman) skillfully told...
...Isn't this really just a diplomatic way of saying that, in dealing with contemporary reality, Hilaire Belloc was often his own reductio ad absurdum...
...some people manage to get along, and some just do not...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 47...
...T hus, in his chapter on Allan 1 Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, aptly titled "Blooms-day," Hart encapsulates Bloom's central message better in one concise sentence than his subject managed to do in his windy, winding tour de force...
...Much of what he has to say in these generous gleanings from his essays and reviews, wide-ranging and engaging pieces on everyone from Belloc, Chesterton, Lewis, and Burke to Boswell and Johnson, Frost, Eliot, Hemingway, and Allan Bloom, is as much about criticism itself as the names in the chapter heads...
...even the author may have been unsure how many contemporary readers were capable of appreciating the subject...
...It exhibits a powerful hostility, strange to say, toward both the individual work of literature and to the very idea of literature, positing circumstances under which, for example, Shakespeare is no more "privileged" than a television cornAram Bakshian, Jr., a member of the National Council on the Humanities, writes and broadcasts on politick history, and the arts...
...With G. K. Chesterton, Hart is on much more solid ground, perhaps because Chesterton was a much more solid artist and thinker than Belloc...
...Appropriately, it is as an accomplished critic that he presents himself to us in his latest book, Acts of Recovery...
...For example, he bends over backwards to make excuses for a prickly pet eccentric like Hilaire Belloc, pleading that "Belloc was so much the natural don that he even had some of the weaknesses of the academic mind...
...It is a sad commentary on the times that Hart included this essay only after the repeated urging of Dartmouth colleagues and past students...
...It does not address itself to a common intelligence or to a shared civilization, but to the specialist and the initiate...
...It has virtually nothing to do with journalism or public discourse and by its very nature could not, because it tends to be esoteric and exclusive...
...This is not as narrowing as it may sound, for Professor Hart's brand of criticism is a far cry from the niggling, incestuous variety common to much of modern academia, a problem the author addresses in his preface: The critic . . . [should be] closely acquainted not only with the range of English literature and the literature of other languages, but with the classics of his Western civilization...
...It might be more useful, however, to end with the author's closing words in his last chapter ("The Ivory Foxhole"), an amusing tour through the joys and jeopardies of modern and, for the most part, liberal-dominated academia...
...He may also have had a strong death wish, never wearing a headguard in football and ultimately dying in a suspect 1918 plane crash after having cheated death during wartime service in the Lafayette Escadrille (perhaps he thought that death had cheated him...
...ne could continue to sample and praise this highly enjoyable collection of leavings from a magnificent and generally amiable mind...
...Central to all of his attainments, however, and key to the value of his work in each discipline or vocation, is his critical faculty...
...He even chooses his Chestertonian quips well, viz...
...I f there is any fault to be found in 1 this collection, it is that occasionally, when Hart writes about one of his literary hobbyhorses, the quality of his mercy is strained...
...0 ACTS OF RECOVERY: ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND POLITICS Jeffrey Hart/University Press of New England/260 pp...
...He also pinpoints the Achilles' heel of Bloom's work, the fact that its "brilliant dissection of the ills of relativism is weakened by his inattention to religious truth," without which everything would indeed be relative...
...all that there is of him is admirable...
...Under these auspices, literary criticism exhibits an aspiration to become philosophy, linguistics, psychology, a quantitative and exact science, an ideology, and a private esoteric vision...
...I am sure that I am detested by some, mostly silently, and that many regard my opinions as deplorable, but in the latter group, many also like to ski, play tennis, or hang around football practice with me...
...Critical or artistic "relevance," that often-abused word, is thus, in its truest sense, both timely and timeless, the application and elaboration of civilized values and aesthetics to a critic's existing audience in his contemporary setting...
...Few critics writing today meet this standard better than Hart, and he manages to take even the most basically sympathetic subjects with a grain or two of salty critique...
...As a historian and as a moral and religious thinker, he was admirably concrete, but when he wrote on current political and social matters, a don-like abstraction took over...
...He also evokes the mixture of stoicism, idealism, and emotional reticence or blandness that has characterized a certain type of WASP hero, from Hobey Baker through George Bush...
...In a true "act of recovery" in his first chapter ("Out of It 'ere Night"), Hart lovingly resurrects the figure of Hobey Baker, a once-famous but now virtually forgotten WASP hero of the early 1900s...
...Which is precisely as it should be but, alas, there are other beasts lurking in the contemporary academic forest: The appearance and growing influence of another sort of criticism in the academy, however, represents a different and contrary intention altogether, and it has been good neither for the academy nor for the culture at large...
...19.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Existence, thank God, includes much more than opinions...
...Shaw is like the Venus of Milo...
...But for all of this, his work remains essentially sociable and accessible and therefore likely to be rooted in journalism, a sign not only of its accessibility but of its involvement in both the larger and the commoner concerns of the world...
...It would be difficult to think of anyone else who has written so clearly and understandingly about a dwindling but far from vanished elite that is little understood by others because it seldom bothers to articulate any understanding of itself, to the degree it possesses any...
...Bloom's great theme throughout, writes Hart, "is that ideology has invaded the academy to an absolutely unprecedented degree, closing the American mind—at least the American academic mind—to the truths about human nature as it actually is and has aspired to be...
...Handsome, modest, a Princeton gentleman athlete and the epitome of Ivy League sportsmanship, Baker was the beau ideal of his pre-World War I peers, and the virtual idol of aspiring outsiders like the young E Scott Fitzgerald...
...Some of our more dour conservative readers might profit from Jeffrey Hart's conclusion that, philosophy aside...
...K.'s" gently dismissive characterization of his friend "G.B.S...
...My personality does not resemble that of Thorstein Veblen...
...mercial or statistical survey...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
