A Grand Tour - Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe-Toward the Revival of Higher Education - Review

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by William F. Buckley Jr.

Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe-Toward the Revival of Higher Education, by Jeffrey Hart (Yale, 271 pp., $26.95)

The author is especially well known to the readers of this journal, having served as a senior editor for over 30 years. He is also a syndicated columnist, the author of seven books, and an essayist, widely published in the academic journals. What he has here is surely a crowning achievement.

Jeffrey Hart, as an undergraduate, never got over what he saw on climbing the marble stairs leading to Columbia's Butler Library. He stared up at the names carved in stone on the library's frieze: Homer, Voltaire, Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe.

It was a nice idea, somewhere along the line, when the artists/architects/designers resisted what must have been somebody's impulse, to list these ineffable men chronologically, or (God forbid!) alphabetically, as would have been required if William Morris was their agent. They're just there, and who cares that Aristotle had already passed on when Voltaire came around? Hart celebrates his writers and philosophers individually; but he also supplies a narrative, and its lodestone is Athens and Jerusalem, the two great poles of human attention, Athens celebrating, above all, cognition; Jerusalem, the soul.

This is hardly a disjunction devised by Professor Hart, who has traveled from Columbia undergraduate to Columbia Ph.D. to professor of English at Dartmouth, where one year he was acclaimed in a poll as one of the best teachers in town. The terms were used as paradigms by Tertullian, no less (3rd century a.d.), who attempted in a historical tug of war with Clement and Origen to stress the claims of God as exclusive. He failed, and the Athens-Jerusalem dialectic took root in the West.

So, Hart's crystallizations are under way. Achilles and Moses were fundamental to their civilizations, "both flawed, both heroic and exemplary." That heroic virtue of Achilles would be "internalized by Socrates as heroic philosophy." The commandments of Moses would be "internalized by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as heroic holiness." On to Paul, Augustine, Dante, Hamlet, Moliere, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Scott Fitzgerald.

In the end, the Church didn't throw Athens overboard, instead, legitimized it. Dante's sublime architecture brought together in uneasy synthesis Rome (i.e., Athens) and Jerusalem. And then Shakespeare. "I conclude that Hamlet's undoubted greatness as a tragic hero consists not in anything he does but in everything he says. He is a Prince not of Elsinore-at that he fails-but of eloquence, and composes his appropriate epitaph in his last words: 'The rest is silence.'"

The dialectic flowed forward into European civilization, its dynamic and its characteristic symbols. What came of it is very different from "the great stasis suggested by the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. 'Better fifty years of Europe,'" Hart quotes Tennyson, "'than a cycle [a thousand years] of Cathay.'" That said, it was others who gave us the alphabet and numeration, and we are reminded that the theorems of Newton and Einstein are as valid in China or Africa as they are in New York or Paris.

Hart is a master illustrator. Christopher Columbus was impelled westward by several motives. He was a navigator, moved by scientific curiosity. He believed the globe to be smaller than it is and tested his assumptions in the manner of an empiricist. He was a Christian who sought to extend the teachings of his faith. And he had manifest commercial ambitions. "This combination of motives gives us, in motion, the Athens-Jerusalem paradigm and the energies it generated in a man of the late fifteenth century."

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries brought the merciful end to the religious wars, and nourished science, logic, fact, reason, and experience. Its excesses brought rejection of it by Swift and Burke and Dostoyevsky, but its impact endures and, by the lights of Professor Hart, is welcome, its fruits manifest.

It is a grand tour, guided by Hart's learning, fueled by his passion, beguiling in its delivery, reflecting a lifetime's experience as a teacher. Consider, for its music alone, a passage in a chapter in which he addresses themes of magic, transformation, and actuality. The drunken driver cannot understand why, never mind that the wheel is detached from his automobile, he can't just put it in reverse and get away . . . Here is Fitzgerald: "The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch with his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell." Here is Hart: "The host, the wafer, the moon, and a benediction are there as Gatsby says farewell, sacraments in the parallel and parodic religion of magic. The drunken driver, of course, is a comic version of the tragic Gatsby. He ignores the detached wheel, and Gatsby, himself drunk on imagination and possibility, ignores the reality of time."