ROMANTIC CONSERVATIVES:
The Inklings in Their Political Context
Charles A. Coulombe
Before we begin
our current discussion, I must invite my audience to forget everything they
believe they know about such words as “liberal” and conservative.” All of us have
been programmed to have immediate reactions to them --- good or bad --- but
such will be very unhelpful in dealing with the Inklings and their political
views.
It is not too
much to say that J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, were, in descending
order, arguably the most influential 20th century writers in English
--- certainly in the fantasy genre. As the success of the three Lord of the
Rings films and the upcoming release of a movie based upon The Lion, The
Witch, and the Wardrobe show, a new, less literate, generation is
discovering the Inklings’ magic; lest purists sniff too loudly at this,
watching the movies has led many a younger person to the books themselves. Of
course, Williams has yet to be translated to celluloid. At a guess, this writer
would bet on All Hallows Eve being the first such effort onscreen, if
any of his works make it.
But in any case,
the Inklings have actually had influence in three areas. Their literary impact
is too obvious to comment much upon here. Their religious views have also
generated a great deal of both examination and agreement, although their
influence here is far from being as great. But perhaps least looked at are
their strictly political views. Of course, they would be the last to speak of
their own political views as separate from their religious or literary, simply
because in all three men these impulses were united. None of the three held to
the American myth of separation of Church and State, and would certainly have
denounced any attempt to separate literature from either.
Nevertheless,
although there will necessarily be some overlap, it is precisely their politics
and the tradition from which they sprang that we will examine in this paper.
The first thing to remember is that while we tend to see the Inklings as a
bloc, a sort of “Chesterbelloc,” they certainly did not see themselves as such.
On the literary plane, although JRRT enjoyed Lewis’ Space Trilogy
(particularly the first two), he had little use for Narnia, which he considered
rather a thrown-together hodgepodge of incongruous myths --- and worse still,
allegory. For Williams’ novels, Tolkien had even less use. Religiously, the
Catholic-Anglican split was an ever-present source of tension among the
company. This carried over into political questions: JRRT was, as were most
Catholics aware of Communist atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, a sturdy
supporter of Franco and the Nationalists. Lewis, on the other hand, was not. In
a letter to his son Christopher on 6 October 1944, Tolkien described the
meeting of himself and Lewis with Roy Campbell. The latter was a South African
poet, a convert to Catholicism of Ulster Scot descent who had fought for
Franco. Therein, JRRT wrote:
C.S.L.’s reactions were odd. Nothing is a greater tribute to Red
propaganda than the fact that he (who knows they are in all other respects
liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that
is said for him. Even Churchill’s open speech in Parliament left him unshaken.
But hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C
of E --- so deep laid that it remains even when the superstructure seems
removed (C.S.L. for instance reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!).
Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are
slaughtered --- he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for
it).
Even so, despite
their internal divisions, in comparison to the most widely-held views of our
time, they appear monolithic. As John Wain, a staunch Labour supporter and
occasional participant in the Inklings’ evenings has written, “The group had a
corporate mind, as all effective groups must; the death of Williams had sadly
stunned and impoverished this mind, but it was still powerful and clearly
defined. Politically conservative, not to say reactionary; in religion, Anglo-
or Roman Catholic; in art, frankly hostile to any manifestation of the ‘modern’
spirit.”[1]
The latter two
observations are obvious, but what of the first? Just what did the phrase
“conservative” mean, in the Inklings’ context? Certainly, it did not mean a
mere adherence to the Conservative Party. None of the trio was a notable
advocate of Stanley Baldwin, or Harold MacMillan, either. It is of course
anyone’s guess what they would think of today’s Conservatives, transformed by
Lady Thatcher, as some wags would have it, into a mere copy of the American
Republicans (of course, the same sort would maintain that Mr. Blair has turned
Labour into a corresponding imitation of the U.S. Democrats, but that is
another matter).
“Conservative” is
one of those words that is meaningless without clarification as regards its use
in a particular case. Europe and Latin America traditionally defined it quite
differently from the United
States, in a political sense. What Americans
called “Liberals” their cousins to the East and South named Socialists;
American “Conservatives” would be “Liberals” in Europe and Latin America; what
the latter folk would call “Conservatives” really have not existed in the
United States as an organised political force on the national level since the
Loyalists were forced into exile or silenced in 1783. In a nutshell,
“Conservative” at the very least meant opposition to the French and succeeding
revolutions, and adherence to altar and throne, among other things. These other
things will require closer examination shortly.
But first let us
see precisely what the Inklings did believe, politically. Of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
political views, Humphrey Carpenter wrote:
His view of the world, in which each man belonged or ought to belong to
a specific “estate,” whether high or low, meant that in one sense he was an
old-fashioned conservative. But in another sense it made him highly sympathetic
to his fellow-men, for it is those who are unsure of their status on the world,
who feel they have to prove themselves and if necessary put down other men to
do so, who are the truly ruthless. Tolkien was, in modern jargon, “right-wing”
in that he honoured his monarch and his country and did not believe in the rule
of the people; but he opposed democracy simply because he believed that in the
end his fellow-men would not benefit from it. He once wrote: “I am not a
‘democrat,’ if only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles
corrupted by the attempt to mechanise and formalise them, with the result that
we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride,
till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power --- and then we get and are getting
slavery.” As to the virtues of an old fashioned feudal society, this is what he
said once about respect for one’s superiors: “Touching your cap to the Squire
may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you.” [2]
This was radical
stuff in J.R.RT.’s day, to be sure, but it is revolutionary in ours.
Nevertheless, whatever Tolkien’s attitudes toward Charles William’s religious
and artistic views and work, in the light of the foregoing it would seem
obvious that he found Williams’ politics congenial, as they were set forth by Alice
Hadfield:
[Williams] had grown up much aware of political structure. He saw the res
publica, the matter of public life, the political community, presented in
the experience of love and the family, in Victorian poetry, in eighteenth
century thought in France
and England,
in medieval feeling, as a balance between equality and hierarchy. Though
youthfully a very temporary republican, he slowly created for himself over the
years a synthesis in which all men were equal and yet different within their
hierarchies of excellence and distinction, in which above political equality
everyone’s distinctiveness was embodied in the single person of the monarch, as
everyone’s personal equality and distinctness was held in Christ. He retained
his sense of monarchy, hereditary in that it must have a blood link with the
long history of England, visible to high and low, free from fashion, choice or
vote, apex of an administration free, equal and yet hierarchical in public
distinction. [3]
So too, with C.S.
Lewis. On the one hand, unlike Tolkien and Williams, he was quite happy to call
himself a “democrat.” But this must be understood in the sense in which he
himself meant it:
Being a democrat, I am
opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction)
because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique.
That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly
disciplined group of people; the terror and secret police follow, it would
seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power.
They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of
their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the
inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high
ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous
prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is
for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the
committee of public safety. The character in “That hideous strength” whom the
Professor never mentions is Miss Hardcastle, the chief of the secret police.
She is the common factor in all revolutions; and, as she says, you won't get
anyone to do her job well unless they get some kick out of it.[4]
That he shared
the basic outlook of his confreres is evidenced by his view of the Monarchy. In
That Hideous Strength, arguably Lewis’ most overtly political work of
fiction, Ransom responds to Merlin’s urging that the Pendragon and his followers
overthrow the powerless King of Great Britain, “I have no wish to overthrow
him. He is the king. He was crowned and anointed by the Archbishop. In the
order of Logres I may be Pendragon, but in the order of Britain I am
the King’s man.”[5]
His views here went beyond fiction:
Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the
accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the
polyphony, the dance, can reach -- men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more
beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality, they cannot
reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires,
athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For
spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served: deny it food and it will
gobble poison.[6]
In sum, the
political areas of agreement among the trio were greater than their
disagreements. All three in actuality had little use for politics as commonly
defined in their time (and in ours). This was because the Inklings did not
separate reality into little boxes marked “politics,” “religion,” “art,”
“science,” or “literature.” Rather, for all three reality is a seamless thing
in which all of these areas intertwine and affect the others, for good or ill.
For all their
shared adherence to Monarchy, to fully understand the political element in
their work one must start with the individual. As believing Christians, they
held that each man is on earth “to love, know, and serve God in this World, and
to be happy with Him forever in the next.” From this simple sentence stemmed
their view of his dignity as a child of God, from which reality stems all of
his rights, first of which is the right, so long as he obeys the law, to be left
alone. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia,
The Space Trilogy, and Williams’ seven novels we are presented with an
endless parade of dreadful would-be “organisers” and “rationalisers” of their
fellow man, from Lotho Sackville-Baggins to Jadis of Charn to the N.I.C.E. to
Sir Giles Tumulty. Much of their villainy in itself derives from their contempt
for the humble.
Their love of the
common man and hatred of any who would enslave him is mirrored in their shared
love of both nature and the built heritage. Whether one looks at Sharkey’s work
in the Shire or the plans of the N.I.C.E. for Edgestow and environs, one sees
their identification of oppressors of the individual with despoilers of the
landscape. What Patrick Curry says of Tolkien in his masterful Defending
Middle Earth, can, I think, safely be said of all three of our authors:
…we cannot simply drop the Shire and the Sea, the social and spiritual
dimensions; rather, they must be integrated into nature’s centrality. Their
final synthesis, I think, is that Tolkien’s work urges a new ethic of
human conviviality, respect for life, and ultimate humility. That ethic is to
be based on the experience of life on Earth, and therefore the lineaments of
life --- good earth, clean water, fresh air, and the like --- as sacred.
Finally, for that resacralisation to succeed, it must be deeply rooted in
culture, through being celebrated and communicated in local and traditional
ways. The result is not simply a negative critique of “positivist, mechanist,
urbanised, and rationalist culture” but a positive version of what one reader
well described as “sanity and sanctity.”[7]
Lewis’ depiction
of the N.I.C.E.’s opposition to the mere existence, for example, of the small village of Cure Hardy (“you can bet it’s
insanitary,” observes Cosser) with its “undesirable” population of small rentiers
and agricultural labourers is in much the same vein. Studdock finds upon
actually meeting these sorts of folk that he likes them better than his
colleagues. All three of our authors were great believers in the wide
distribution of property amongst country livers --- that is, in the
proliferation of small-holders, “brewing their own beer, and baking their own
bread.”
As implied in
this and in the Carpenter and Hadfield quotes regarding Tolkien’s and Williams’
politics, however, the Inklings, while believing in the innate dignity of the
individual and his equality before God and the law, nevertheless also believed
in class distinctions and hierarchy. But this hierarchy, to be authentic, must
be organic and natural, an earthly reflection of that hierarchy that prevails
in heaven. Moreover, like the Kingship of Christ and the authority of the
clergy, it must be based upon service to those beneath the office holders: with
privilege comes responsibility. Further, it must be a reflection of that
legitimacy of order that ought to characterise society and the nation as a
whole. A perfect illustration is the speech of the Mayor of Rich in Williams’ Many
Dimensions, when that worthy is faced with the healings in his town by the
fragment of the Philosopher’s Stone that has come to it:
“Good people,” he said in a stentorian voice, “you all know me. I will
ask you to return to your homes and leave me to discover the truth about this matter.
I am the Mayor of Rich, and if the people of Rich have been injured it is my
business to remedy it and help them. If, as appears, the Stone of which we have
heard is able to heal illness, and if the Government are using it, as swiftly
as may be, for that purpose, it is the duty of all good citizens to accept what
delay the common good of all demands. But it is equally their right to be
assured that the Government is doing its utmost in the matter, day and night,
so that not a single moment may be lost in freeing as many as may be from pain
and suffering. I shall make it my concern to discover this at once. I know the
hindrances which must, and I fear those which may, follow on what has happened.
I will myself go to London.”
He paused a moment, then he went on. “Some of you may know that my son is dying
of cancer. If it is a matter of ensuring swiftness and order he and I will be
the last in all the country to claim assistance. But I tell you this that you
may be very sure that he shall not suffer an hour longer than need be because
of the doubts or fears or stupidities of the servants of the people. Return to
your homes and tomorrow at this time you shall know all that I know.” He paused
again and ended with a loud cry, “God save the King.”
“God save the King!” yelled Oliver in a thrill of delight, and assisted
the Mayor to descend. Who turned on him at once and went on talking before the
Chief Constable could interrupt.
“I shall want you,” he said.
“I want all the information you can give me, and I may need your personal help.
Are you free? But it doesn't matter whether you are or not. I demand your
presence in the name of the King and by the authority of my office.”
Their ideal
society would no doubt endorse the traditional rhyme:
Oh let us love our occupations,
Bless the Squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.
Yet by the same
token, they held out for the ability of those gifted with superior virtue and
ability to rise by pluck and luck, as witnessed by Sam Gamgee --- all the while
respecting the integrity of those remaining in the humbler place birth had put
them: a birth seen, not as accident, but as deliberate work of the God Who
presides over the great tapestry of human society, so far as human Free Will
permits Him to.
All three writers
had a love of the traditional offices of Great Britain, and in the country’s
ceremonial idiosyncrasies. These are reflected in such characters as Tolkien’s
Mayor of Michel Delving, Master of Buckland, and Thain of the Shire; as
Williams’ aforementioned Mayor of Rich and, in War in Heaven, the Duke
of the North Ridings, “Marquis of Craigmullen and Plessing, Earl and Viscount,
Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Sword and Cape, and several other
ridiculous fantasies;” and in Lewis’ obvious hatred of the “Progressive
Element’s” dismantling of traditional collegiate ritual at Bracton College. It
is not just that these things are pleasant and pleasing in themselves, lending
mundane life a touch of colour; it is also that they are seen by the Inklings
as remnants or signs of greater things, which may spring back into action as
needed. The placing of the Sovereign over this hierarchy is obvious.
Just as obvious
is the love of the trio for England
herself, and for her towns and shires. But what about the rest of the world?
Certainly, Tolkien was notorious for disliking the French (yet another area
where this Francophone must dissent from the master --- but of course JRRT
never forgave the Norman invasion). Lewis was, thanks to his Ulster
background, provincial to the core. Williams seems to have been the most
cosmopolitan, culturally. But it would be incorrect to think of any of them as
“nationalist,” in the modern sense. For in differing ways, all of them saw
their beloved England as a
part of a greater whole, even as were their favourite places all essential
components of England.
That greater
whole was Europe --- not , however, a sort of
sterile mechanism as the EU appears headed for, but as a religious and cultural
entity: Christendom, or, as earlier thinkers would have it, the Holy Empire.
That is say, a higher unity that did not repress local or national liberties.
As Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher, in a letter dated 31 July 1944, “I
should have hated the Roman Empire [that is, the pre-Christian one --- CAC] in
its day (as I still do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while
preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in
Carthaginians.” That he applied that view to current events may be seen by
another letter to his son, this time of 9 December 1943: “…I love England (not Great
Britain and certainly not the British
Commonwealth (grr!))…” Certainly, the Shire is his idealized
vision of England
--- self-governing, and that government itself extremely limited in day-to-day
affairs.
But the
Shire-folk are also bound (however tenuously prior to the War of the Ring) to a
greater unit --- the Kingdom
of Arnor. Where Tolkien
hates the grinding power of the Roman Empire prior to Constantine, his Numenorean realms in exile
mirror the Christian Empire. Arnor itself is very like the Western
Empire; counting progressively less militarily as the decades
pass, it nevertheless survives in the minds of its subjects, even after the end
of its actual existence. Its revival under Aragorn (or Elessar, as we must call
him at that stage) bears a striking resemblance to the Carolingian revival.
Gondor, on the other hand, reminds one of the Eastern Roman Empire, an analogy
expressly made by JRRT in a letter to Milton Waldman in late 1951, wherein he
speaks of Gondor’s initial glory, “almost reflecting Numenor,” and then fading
“slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly
impotent Byzantium.” As opposed to the mere force of arms and weight of
government machinery that Tolkien hated in the pagan Roman Empire, the restored
Kingdom under Elessar exemplified the “unity-in-diversity,” the preservation of
local freedoms under an overarching Monarch, that Medieval theorists ascribed
to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1963, he wrote to
a fan: “A Numenorean King was a monarch, with the power of unquestioned
decision in debate; but he governed the realm with the frame of ancient law, of
which he was administrator (and interpreter) but not the maker.” Another Holy
Roman Emperor manqué was Ingwe, chief of the Vanyar and High King of all the
Elves.
That Tolkien, in
reality as in fiction, saw his beloved England as properly a part of such
an organic whole may be seen from his 8 February 1967 reply to the first
draught of an article about him by Charlotte and Denis Plimmer:
Auden has asserted that for me “the North is a sacred direction.” That
is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have
lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and
know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is
not “sacred,” nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a
particular love of the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish.
That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses would show. The
North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale
ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman
Empire with its seat in Rome
than anything that would be devised by a “Nordic.”
One of the
reasons (though by no means, of course, a major one) for his love of the
Catholic Church was its universality; this was part of his dislike of
abandoning Latin in the liturgy for the vernacular.
With C.S. Lewis,
one finds, as might be expected, greater insularity. But despite that, he too
had an appreciation of sorts for at least the historic unity of Christendom.
One would be hard put to define the role of the Christian Emperor as seen by
contemporary writers better than Merlin’s advice to the Pendragon in That
Hideous Strength: “Then we must go higher. We must go to him whose office
it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms. We must call on the
Emperor.” For a moment, we almost share the old wizard’s shock when Ransom
replied, “there is no Emperor.”
But Lewis
appreciated the fact that the ideal England he believed in was, while
certainly legitimate in its own sphere, not the end all and be-all. It is a
part of a greater whole. Thus, Dr. Dimble expostulates:
“Don’t you feel it? The very quality of England. If we’ve got an ass’s
head, it is by walking in a fairy wood. We’ve heard something better than we
can do, but we can’t quite forget it…can’t you see it in everything English ---
a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness? How right Mr.
Pickwick was when he called Sam Weller
an angel in gaiters! Everything here is either better or worse than---“
“Dimble!” said Ransom. Dimble, whose tone had become a little impassioned,
stopped and looked towards him. He hesitated, and (as Jane thought) almost
blushed before he began again.
“You’re right, Sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you
warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every
people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England --- no
nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our
haunting, the one we know about.”
“But this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very round about way of saying that
there’s good and bad men everywhere.”
“It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble. “You see,
MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon
reaches the fatal idea of something standardised --- some common kind of life
to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to
which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s
not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how
much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus
depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still
alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates
Britain, when the goddess
Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France,
when the order of Heaven is really followed in China, why, then it will be spring.
But meantime, our concern is with Logres.”
Despite his
apologia for the Reformation, and his love-hate relationship with Rome, Lewis was very
conscious of (and nostalgic for) the old, pre-Reformation --- I had almost
written, pre-political --- unity of Christendom. He was enough of a Latinist to
carry on a correspondence in that language with an Italian priest, Don Giovanni
Calabria.
While they are writing back and forth about the Continent’s future, Lewis
observes, “Let us beware lest, while we rack ourselves in vain about the fate
of Europe, we neglect either Verona or Oxford.” Here again, in
the universal language we see the ongoing juxtaposition of the local and the
supra-national.
Williams was of
course the author of the Logres/Britain dichotomy Lewis deals with so well in That
Hideous Strength. But while so much of his work is as deeply English as
those of our other two authors, Williams also sees that what he loves in his
own country is found --- in different ways --- elsewhere. In describing the
visit of a fictional Zulu King in Shadows of Ecstasy, he writes:
For a few moments royalty -- a dark alien royalty --- had appeared in
the room, imposed upon all of them by the mere intensity of the Zulu
chieftain's own strength and conviction. By virtue of that wide reading which
both she and her husband loved, she had felt a shadow of it at times; in the
superb lines of Marlowe or Shakespeare, in the rolling titles heard on
ceremonial occasions at Church or in local celebrations: “The King's Most
Excellent Majesty,” “His Majesty the King-Emperor,” “The Government of His
Britannic Majesty.”
But Kingship is
not the only motif to transcend boundaries in Williams’ work. The Mass of the
Grail in War in Heaven is perceived by each of its witnesses on
precisely their own terms. Williams’ description of the effect it has on the
Catholic Duke of the North Ridings is all the more striking given his own
Anglicanism:
In each of them differently the spirit was moved and exalted --- most
perhaps in the Duke. He was aware of a sense of the adoration of kings --- the
great tradition of his house stirred within him. The memories of proscribed and
martyred priests awoke; masses said swiftly and in the midst of the fearful
breathing of a small group of the faithful; the ninth duke who had served the
Roman Pontiff at his private mass; the Roman Order he himself wore; the
fidelity of his family to the Faith under the anger of Henry and the cold
suspicion of Elizabeth; the duels fought in Richmond Park in defense of the
honour of Our Lady by the 13th duke, when he met and killed three
antagonists consecutively --- all these things, not so formulated but certainly
there, drew his mind into a vivid consciousness of all the royal and sacerdotal
figures of the world adoring before his consecrated shrine. “Jesu, Rex et
Sacerdos,” he prayed…
Given the very
sympathetic way he had written of the first Protestants in various of his
histories and plays, Williams was certainly a man who could see past his own
positions.
But it is in his
poetry that the figure of the Christian Empire becomes an explicit motif. Agnes
Sibley well describes the view of the Empire that Williams conjures up in Taliessin
through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars:
The universe of the poems is sixth-century Europe,
where the historical Arthur might have lived.
Logres is a province (“theme”) of the Byzantine Empire, the seat of the
Roman Empire after the provincial tribes had captured Rome. Williams chose Byzantium as a symbol of wholeness, a perfect
balance of body and soul --- possibly because under Byzantine rule the church
and secular society were more unified that at any other period of history.
The Empire, as Williams sees it, is not only a unified community but
also a symbol of the “whole nature of
man,” including, of course, his body. For the first edition of Taliessin
through Logres, a friend of Williams drew a map of Europe
in the form of a woman’s body, the parts of which are frequently mentioned in
the poems. Logres is the woman’s head; her buttocks (Caucasia) represent the
natural, physical side of the human being, and her hands are at Rome, where the Pope
performs with his hands the Eucharist, in which body and soul are of equal
importance and are seen as one in Christ.[8]
Logres, and the
Empire of which it forms an integral part, is held together, not by force, but
by its shared Faith and the resulting “Co-inherence,” in which each part of the
Empire is connected to each other, as are the individuals that inhabit the
provinces. It is love, in essence that gives the Empire unity --- and that
maintains Arthur’s kingdom as a constituent part of it. All of this is maintained
by “exchange” accepting one another’s burdens, and by prayer --- most famously,
the “Prayers of the Pope,” in the poem of the same name.
In the
simultaneous embrace of the local, the national, and the supranational, the
Inklings were not proposing the construction of a specific political
arrangement – rather they believed that society on all levels ought to reflect
a higher reality. As believing Christian Medievalists, each of the three had
absorbed a great deal of Neoplatonism; to a great degree through St. Augustine, but also
through other Church Fathers and directly from Plato himself.
This influence
expresses itself in their political views by holding that the Divine Order is
at once concealed and symbolised by the earthly, and that legitimacy in government
derives from the governing folk attempting to realise in this world the order
that reigns in Heaven. But the Augustinian view opposing the City of God to the
City of Man is also present in their thought: the latter city becomes evil to
the degree that it deviates from the norm offered by the former, and all good
men are required to struggle, one way or another, against that deviance; but at
the same time the two Cities are distinct, and that of Man can never replicate
exactly that of God --- it can only become somewhat closer. Yet this seemingly
endless and unwinnable (in earthly terms) struggle can help the individual
attain eternal salvation, and at times, as a bonus, actually improve the
situation for a while. Paradoxically, however, attempts to replicate the City
of God using
illegitimate or evil ends must inevitably bring about worse evils than those
being struggled against --- as Galadriel reminds us when refusing the Ring.
This, then, was
the common political teaching of the Inklings. But whence did it come? What
name can we give it? Was it autogenetic, or were they part of a larger stream?
Did any of their contemporaries hold similar views?
The reply to the
last question is --- certainly. The Distributists, led by G.K. Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc are the most obvious seconders of the views of the Inklings; as
a rather well known group in England between the Wars, our authors were
extremely aware of their views regarding little England, the widespread
distribution of property (from whence the title came) and the like. In That
Hideous Strength, Curry says of Denniston, “A brilliant man at that time of
course, but he seems to have gone quite off the rails with all his
Distributivism and what not.” In fact, the Chesterbelloc had a tremendous
effect on the three authors, literarily, religiously, and politically.
Mention of them,
however, automatically brings into play a host of writers of the period:
Maurice Baring, Christopher Hollis, Douglas Woodruff, T.S. Eliot (whose work
Lewis initially loathed but came to appreciate) and many, many more, whose
complex interaction was so masterfully chronicled by Joseph Pearce.[9]
Alongside the host of characters Pearce explores, however, there were other
figures such as fantasist and horror writer Arthur Machen, whose similar
religious and political opinions were put for in such works as Dr. Stiggins:
His Views and Principles and Dog and Duck; naturalist and organic
farmer H.J. Massingham, co-founder of the Soil Association who combined defence
of the countryside and organic farming with Catholicism and Distributism; and
Halliday Sutherland, travel writer, medical doctor, and anti-contraception
writer. There were all sorts of political movements like Guild Socialism and
Social Credit that aimed on reorganising society and the economy on a
non-Marxist and non-Capitalist basis, deriving inspiration from various aspects
of the Medieval past and advocating, in addition to their particular mechanical
solutions to the problems raised by the Depression, renewed devotion to altar
and throne. As with the Inklings, these individuals and groups were extremely
disparate among themselves but were similar enough to find common expression in
the pages of such publications as Douglas Jerrold’s English Review and
Stephen Orage’s New Age. In such a milieu of writers, artists, and
thinkers (for very few were practical politicians) the politics of the Inklings
were unremarkable, however eccentric they might have appeared to the media and
political classes of their time --- to say nothing of our own.
But from whence
came this family of views? Well, there actually is a line of descent to be
traced. To begin with, all of these ideas might be described, as John Wain did,
as “conservative.” But just what did that word mean in this case? As mentioned
earlier, it did not necessarily mean adherence to the party of Stanley Baldwin.
Certainly the Conservative Party in some sense traditionally encompassed
loyalty to both the Crown and the Established Church --- or at least the Once-Established Church. But as early as 1844 in his
novel Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli jibed about “A sound Conservative
government, Tory men and Whig measures.” At that time, the fiery anti-slavery,
anti-child labour, and anti-poverty Tory reformer Richard Oastler was rousing
the factory workers with his battle cry of “altar, throne, and cottage!” We can
see, looking at such men as Oastler, William Cobbett, and Sir Francis Burdett
why the first Labourites, men such as R. H. Tawney, were accused of being “the
new Tories.” It is in this direction we must look, if we are to place the
Inklings in context.
It has often been
remarked that Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams --- as well as their circle --- were
late manifestations of English Romanticism, and this is also true of their
non-Inkling contemporaries who held similar ideals. This has been considered to
be particularly true as regards their theology. But it applies to their
politics as well. As we have seen, Medievalism played a large part in the
social worldview of the Inklings and like-minded contemporaries. But it was a
Medievalism filtered through the 19th century, and owing its origins
to Sir Walter Scott, the foremost practitioner of Romanticism (of which more
later) in Great Britain.
Powerful as was
Sir Walter’s influence on the literature of his day, it was just as strong,
ultimately, in religious, social, and political matters. For rather than
portraying the age of Ivanhoe as the realm of superstition and
oppression denounced by the writers of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, Sir
Walter presented it as a time when society was an organic whole, when
oppressors were --- despite whatever office in either institution they might
have held, even the highest --- rebels against the order of Church and State,
rather than as their prototypes. He also recast the Jacobites, in the popular
mind, as heroic loyalists to a dying, but worthier state of affairs, rather
than as the obscurantist traitors they had been seen as. In so doing, he turned
the minds of many of the intelligentsia of Britain into an entirely new
direction.
One of his
disciples, Kenelm Digby, in 1822 produced The Broadstone of Honour: or,
Rules for the Gentlemen of England,
a book whose influence in its own time is equalled only by its almost complete
obscurity in our own. An attempt to show the young men of the time how they
might lead the sorts of chivalrous lives themselves that they had read of in
Sir Walter’s novels, it took the young Oxbridge intellectuals of the time by
storm. It had of course its more ludicrous results: the celebrated Eglinton
tournament of 1839, for example, when rain drenched the attempts at jousting by
a sort of 19th century English SCA. But it created an atmosphere
from whence came rather more lasting results. Converting to Catholicism
himself, Digby’s work made the idea of returning to the Old Religion more
respectable, showing that the Faith was more than just the tribal belief of Old
Catholic gentry and nobility, and poverty-struck Irish immigrants. The Oxford
Movement, which transformed the ritual life of Anglicanism and created an
important (if never dominant) party in the C of E wedded to Medieval religion,
owed much to Digby. The code of the Gentleman, which so dominated much of
Victorian social life finds its origin in him as well.
There were also
political results. The first and most obvious was Young England, whose leading proponents, George Smythe
(later 7th Viscount Strangford), Lord John Manners (later 7th
Duke of Rutland),
Henry Hope, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, and, the young Benjamin Disraeli
launched their political effort in 1841. Influenced by Digby and by the Oxford
Movement, as well as by such as Cobbett, Oastler, and Burdett, Young England
strove to restore the class unity of Medieval England and to limit the power of
industry over agriculture. In Lord John Manners’ 1841 England's
Trust, and Other Poems he “falls into a reverie before St Albans Abbey.
Reflecting on episodes from the early days of Christianity in England, he regrets the passing of
the ancient Church.. . . and sees rationalism as a spiritual sickness of modern
times.”[10]
Lord John mourns “the loss of values and disruption of social order that he
attributes to the absence of a strong monarch and Church, and he finds hope for
England's future in its fictional medieval past when,”
Each knew his place king,
peasant, peer, or priest
The greatest owned connexion
with the least;
From rank to rank the
generous feeling ran,
And linked society as man to
man.
As its few
members were all in the House of Commons, they backed up their writings with
votes, using their influence in favour of various schemes for industrial reform
and amelioration of the misery of the poor, toleration for Catholics and Jews,
and opposition to weakening of the Established Church and the Monarchy. In the
end, the group began to splinter when Disraeli, out of opposition to the Prime
Minister, Robert Peel, voted against the Maynooth Grant Bill in 1845. This
measure, providing a subsidy to the Irish Catholic seminary of that name, was
typical of the things Young England had supported. But Disraeli could not
resist a chance to embarrass Peel.
Nevertheless, the
end of Young England was not the end of English Romantic Conservatism. For from
the influence of the Oxford Movement also emerged Pre-Raphaelitism on the artistic
front, and such of its practitioners as Dante Rossetti and William Morris
applied their Romanticism first to literature and, in the latter case to
politics. Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement’s social implications were an
important part of the rise of Guild and other non-Marxist Socialisms. Here we
see the ideological origins of such as R.H. Tawney, whose analysis of
Capitalism as a product of the Reformation[11]
was shared by the Distributists. Such as F.D. Maurice began a strain of
Anglican (and even Anglo-Catholic) Socialism firmly rooted in the Romantic view
of the Middle Ages.
But some of Young
England’s views continued to be seen in the ranks of the second rung of Tory
Party leadership in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. On the one hand, some of the circle called the Souls, especially
George Wyndham (not surprisingly, a close friend of Belloc) continued to push
for Romantic Conservative ideals --- not just for the political goals of social
union under the altar and throne, but also in literature.
Another result
was 19th century Neo-Jacobitism, finding its ultimate roots in
Scott’s Waverley
novels, but receiving an impetus from the Oxford Movement’s revival of
Anglican devotion to Charles I as a saint and martyr and a desire to find a
dynasty that would reinvigorate the Monarchy. This led not only to the
foundation of the Order of the White Rose (a group that attracted a number of
19th century artists, such as Whistler, and eventually became a
co-founder of today’s Royal Stuart Society) but also, alongside the influence
of a resurgent Irish Nationalism, to the origins of Cornish, Welsh, and Scots
nationalism. Not surprisingly --- although they would take a leftward turn
after World War II --- the Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party numbered
a great many Catholic Distributist types among their pre-war founders.
At any rate, it
is to this historical development that we must look for the origins of the
political ideas espoused by the Inklings and their like-minded contemporaries.
Yet, if the social notions dominant at the Manor of St. Anne’s, the Citadel of
Minas Tirith, and the Rectory at Fardles owe their origin, as it would seem at
the moment, to Sir Walter Scott, is Romantic Conservatism a purely British
phenomenon, with a purely British relevance? By no means.
As mentioned, Sir
Walter Scott was indeed the foremost British literary practitioner of
Romanticism. But it must be remembered that Romanticism was a Europe-wide
phenomenon, and so one may well speak of it as a European family of ideas. We
must now take a look at it in itself, and then take an-all-too-speedy look at
some of its parallel developments in the various nations of the West.
To begin with,
just what is Romanticism, anyway? There do seem to be as many definitions as
there are writers; but it is as accurate a one as any might be to call it
Europe’s artistic and philosophical reaction to the arid rationalism of the
Enlightenment, the horrors of the French Revolutionary Wars, and the
centralising hand of Napoleon Bonaparte. As with any other current of thought,
Romanticism did not spring from a vacuum, and scholars trace it origins back
before the Revolution to the German Sturm-und-Drang, the cult of
Sensibility, and various other interesting phenomena. What is certain is that
it began in Germany with such folk as Novalis, Goerres, and the like; France
picked it up with Chateaubriand, and then the British Isles gave us Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and of course Sir Walter Scott. From there it spread throughout
Europe and the Americas.
Opposing the
Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational thought and individual freedom (and noting
how these contradicted themselves in the Revolutionary bloodshed inspired by
them) the Romantics looked to intuition and traditional wisdom (especially
religious and folkloric). To the Enlightenment’s love of classical antiquity,
the Romantics replied with an exaltation of the “barbarous” Middle Ages, and
where the Enlightened, Revolutionaries, and Bonapartists alike attempted to
overthrow both hierarchies and local peculiarities, the Romantics revelled in
both. Not too strangely, after 1806 they rallied to the fight against Napoleon;
from the critiques the Romantics mounted against their foes emerged a sort of
Conservatism of which Klaus Epstein has said of the German variety in that
year, “The Romantic movement --- appealing to the eternal human craving for
miracle, mystery, and authority --- had begun to put the [Enlightenment] on the
defensive in German cultural life.”[12]
By 1815, it was
the same throughout Europe, and in many ways
the Congress of Vienna was the high-water mark of political Romanticism. The
Holy Alliance represented the effort of Tsar Alexander I (a Romantic if ever
there was one) to unite Europe’s sovereigns on
a basis of shared mysticism. It seemed
as though a golden age had arrived.
It had not,
however. Many Romantics were eventually disappointed with the regimes that
succeeded Napoleon --- hence the transformation of such as Victor Hugo, who had
written an ode for Charles X’s coronation, into a republican. Thus was born
Romantic Liberalism. For those who remained attached to Conservative
Romanticism, the steady march after 1830 of
a decidedly un-Romantic Liberalism (of which the Manchester School was
the leading British exponent), with its industrialisation, its governmental
centralisation, its secularism, its
republicanism (or least, its limitation of the Monarchy where retained), and
its substitution of bankers and industrialists for nobility and gentry, of a
proletariat for peasantry, called for their contempt and their resistance. This
latter occurred in many different fields --- literary, political, and even
military. As in Britain,
this contributed to both a Catholic revival and, where Protestant State
Churches existed, a “High
Church” movement.
So in Germany and Austria,
folk like Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Mueller rallied to the House of Austria,
in hopes of recalling the glories of the Holy Roman Empire.
After 1866, when the Habsburgs were definitively ejected from Germany, these
folk looked to a spiritual and literary revival of the Empire --- and hatred of
what they saw as the Bismarckian “pseudo-empire,” hence such disparate groups
as Richard Kralik’s Gralbund and the Stefan
George Circle.
Chateaubriand, De
Maistre, de Bonald, and their many disciples acted as the ideologues of the
Restoration in France.
After the overthrow of Charles X in 1830, their successors, men like Barbey
d’Aurevilly, Blanc de St. Bonnet, and Paul Bourget wrote both defences of altar
and throne and, in many cases, fantastic literature.
Spain and Portugal saw civil wars that pitted
traditionalist proponents of the senior lines of the two royal families, the
position of the Church within the State, and traditional local liberties
against Liberals. Defeat coming in both cases, they transferred their efforts
to the literary field. In Ibero-America, similar folk continued, after
independence, to write on behalf of Hispanidad and Lusofonia,
closer ties between the former colonies and their motherlands. These folk
worked and wrote particularly against the dominating efforts of the United States.
In Italy, the effort to unite the country split
into a Romantic or Neo-Guelph wing, which advocated a federation under the
Pope, and a Liberal wing that wished to bring all the Italian states under the
sway of Savoy.
Still other Romantics pressed for continued independence or autonomy for these
little entities.
Russian
Romanticism resulted in the Slavophile movement, which sought to reject Western
European influence in favour of native tradition. But perhaps the greatest
later exponent of Russian Romanticism was Vladimir Soloviev, who evolved from
Slavophilism to a desire to reconcile Russia
with Papacy, and to have the Tsar take the lead in the spiritual regeneration
of all of Europe.
In the rest of
Eastern Europe, as in Scandinavia, Romanticism
led also to movements in favour of reviving native traditions, in the former
case to reviving national sentiment among such suppressed minorities as the
Serbs and Slovaks. Even the Meiji Restoration in Japan
and the abortive similar attempt in China owed a little to Romanticism.
In the United States,
as mentioned, political Conservatism of the European type died in 1783. Even
so, such Romantics as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,
and Fitz-Greene Halleck (son of a Loyalist and notorious public defender of
both Catholicism and Monarchy) were, in the first three cases, as close to
Romantic Conservatives as an American could be. The South, in love with Sir
Walter Scott, provided fertile ground for it; defeat in the War Between the
States sealed this, resulting in the 1930s in the Southern Agrarians. A coming
together between these and the British Distributists was perhaps to be
expected. Even in New England, however, such
as Ralph Adams Cram --- famous writer and architect, as well American head of
the Order of the White Rose --- joined in the chorus.
As with every
other current of European thought, Romantic Conservatism received a dreadful
shock in World War I. But it nevertheless rebounded after the War, as the
survivors tried to make sense out of what had happened to them, and to repair
the ills of their respective nations; the need to do so was exacerbated by the
Depression, and it was from this ferment that the Inklings as well as many
other such groups emerged. But just as the Cataclysm of Robespierre and
Napoleon had called Romantic Conservatism into being, that of Hitler
effectively destroyed it. This was partly because some of its proponents saw
alliance with Fascism as a quick way to score a victory against a Liberal
establishment which had previously seemed impregnable; but it was also because
the Nazis directly destroyed as much of it as they could. A fitting end-scene,
perhaps, of the movement in Germany might be seen in the execution of Count von
Stauffenberg, a member of the George Circle, crying “long live Secret Germany!”
as the firing squad’s bullets cut him down. As might be guessed from this swift
encapsulation, volumes might be written about this history.
The aftermath of
the War saw the world divided between American-sponsored Liberal Democracy and
Soviet-style Communism, each in their way equally opposed to Romantic
Conservative views, albeit in different ways and on different fronts. Even so
they managed to survive as a sort of literary mood amongst a number of writers,
including, of course, the surviving Inklings and a few of their disciples. The
collapse of the Soviet Union did not affect
the retreat of Romantic Conservatism into complete political irrelevancy.
Indeed, in the years since, the gradual emergence of the Nanny State
in the various nations of the West epitomizes everything the Romantic
Conservatives loathed. Of course, such events as the United States’ Supreme Court’s
ruling that the government may seize any private property to give to developers
who might pay larger taxes, and Tony Blair’s outlawing of hunting might well
give comfort to any remaining Fascists. Government management of private
ownership of property and the means of production was a cardinal dogma of
Fascist economic theory, and Hitler’s outlawing hunting with hounds is one of
the few bits of Nazi-era legislation to remain on German law books.
In the face of
all of this, is Romantic Conservatism dead? By no means, although it is virtually
confined to literary or enthusiast circles --- it might be said to have become
entirely Romantic, in the vulgar sense of being purely theoretical and
seemingly unattainable. In Great Britain, such groups as the Prag Magazine
crowd, the circle inspired by the group at Oxford centring around Fr. Aidan
Nichols, O.P. (author of the groundbreaking book, Christendom Awake!),
and the Royal Stuart Society, to name a very few, keep the ideas of Romantic
Conservatism alive. Writing in a publication of the latter, the late Robert
F.J. Parsons, O.B.E., wrote:
Traditional values are constantly under attack. The media are not
exactly governed by their supporters. Even those who profess support, as does
Mrs. Thatcher with her reference to the merits of ‘Victorian values,’ do little
in practice to express that profession of faith. Church, home newspapers,
television, police, Parliament, are all permeated with a spirit that is
fundamentally hostile to the cornerstones of our civilisation either actively
or, more often and in ways more dangerously, passively because either not
understanding or not feeling able to summon up the requisite energy against
heavy odds.[13]
So too, on the Continent, such groups as
Italy’s Identita Europea, the Paneuropa Union, and France’s Alliance
Royale deal with such ideas, as do various groups advocating single issues
from quality education to traditional Christian liturgy to organic farming to
conservation of the built heritage. Groups dedicated to the writings of various
such thinkers serve much the same purpose.
All of that being said, being effectively
severed from any chance, as things stand, from influence on governance, do the
political ideas of the Inklings and their innumerable confreres have any
relevance at all to-day? Certainly. The West faces a number of large and
seemingly insuperable problems. European Unity, for instance, may be inevitable
and perhaps even essential. But what will the shape of that unity be? What
about the demographic problem, the “population implosion,” in Europe and North America? The
threat posed by Radical Islam, especially in terms of terrorism at home? What
is certain is that the current rulership in the “developed” countries have no
long term solutions for any of these problems; it may well be that the Romantic
Conservatives do. For example, in response to the first-named issue, Fr.
Nichols in his work earlier cited wrote:
Catholicism,
as Orthodoxy, has, historically, regarded the monarchical institution in this
light: raised up by Providence to safeguard the natural law in its transmission
through history as that norm for human co-existence which, founded as it is on
the Creator, and renewed by him as the Redeemer, cannot be made subject to the
positive law, or administrative fiat, or the dictates of cultural fashion. Let us dare to exercise a Christian political
imagination on an as yet unspecifiable future.
The articulation of the foundational natural and Judaeo-Christian norms
of a really united Europe, for instance, would most appropriately be made by such
a crown, whose legal and customary relations with the national peoples would be
modelled on the best aspects of historic practice in the (Western) Holy Roman
Empire and the Byzantine "Commonwealth" --- to use the term
popularised by Professor Dimtri Obolensky.
Such a crown, as the integrating factor of an
international European Christendom, would leave intact the functioning of
parliamentary government in the republican or monarchical polities of its
constituent nations and analogues in city and village in other representative
and participatory forms. As the Spanish
political theorist Alvaro D'Ors defines the concepts, power --- that is,
government --- as raised up by the people can and should be distinguished from
authority. Power in this sense puts
questions to those in authority as to what ought to be done. It asks whether
technically possible acts of government, for co-ordinating the goals of
individuals and groups in society, chime, or do not chime, with the
foundational norms of society, deemed as these are to rest on the will of God
as the ultimate power of the shared human goal.
Authority, itself bereft of such power, answers out of a wisdom which
society can recognise.
Utopian? Perhaps. But it is couched in terms
that each of our three authors would in all likelihood recognise and agree
with, as would most of their Conservative Romantic colleagues. As things stand,
it is doubtful that the powers-that-be would ever permit such things. Still and
all, a cataclysm gave birth to Romantic Conservatism, and another eliminated
it. It may well be that a third shall will bring it back. For all that I myself
agree with the Inklings and Co., it is not an eventuality I look forward to.
[1] Humphrey
Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and
Their Friends, London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1978, p. 206.
[2] Humphrey
Carpenter, J.R..R. Tolkien: A Biography, Boston
and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p.132
[3] Alice
Mary Hadfield, Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work, London and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983, p. 21.
[4] W.H.
Lewis (ed.), Letters of CS Lewis. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966, p. 83.
[5] C.S.
Lewis, That Hideous Strength, New
York: Scribner, 1945, p. 289.
[6] quoted
by Lady Elizabeth Freeman, The Traditionalist's Anthology, Privately
Printed, p. 161
[7] Patrick
Curry, Defending Middle Earth --- Tolkien: Myth and Modernity, New York: St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1997, p. 154.
[8] Agnes
Sibley, Charles Williams, Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1982, p. 92.
[9] Joseph
Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief,
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999
[10] Louis
Cazamian, The Social Novel in England
1830-1850. Trans. Martin Fido. London and Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 98.
[11] R.H.
Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New Brunswick: Transaction publishers, 1998
(1st ed., 1926).
[12] Klaus
Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 674.
[13] Robert
Parsons, O.B.E., “The Role of Jacobitism in the Modern World,” Royal Stuart
Paper XXVIII, Huntingdon: The Royal Stuart Society, 1986, p. 39.
