'Our Own Felicity We Make or Find'

“Calling Beerbohm apolitical is like calling the Pacific wet.”

My parents were New Deal Democrats, but passively, like a congenital condition. Neither was politically self-reflective. In a sense, they were apolitical. They grew up with FDR in the White House and Benny Goodman on the radio. The president got them and the nation out of the Great Depression and led us to victory in World War II. They believed in fairness and labor unions, and expected little of government. Neither was what today is called a progressive. Nor were they Robert Taft-style conservatives. My father was a casual, nonideological racist. The Sixties left him confused and bitter, like many of his contemporaries. His notion of politics was voting every four years and assuming every officeholder was a crook. I came across the line quoted at the top in an article about Max Beerbohm written by the Australian music writer R.J. Stove, author of a fine biography of César Franck. He continues:

“Though coeval with the rise of red-meat empire-builders and of Fabian social workers, Beerbohm advocated no such strenuous world-saving. In a throwaway line from his old age he once described social classes as ‘so deplorable sociologically, so dear to anyone with eyes in his head.’ As this indicates, he represented a conservatism imaginative rather than theoretical. It so detached itself from plans of action as to make Russell Kirk look like Karl Rove.”

My father was no Beerbohm but came close to adopting the essayist’s eccentric perspective. Politics is eccentric – that is, away from the center of essential human concerns, secondary at best. Good politics gets the potholes patched. Our age has made politics central. In part, that’s because it has become binary, a choice between two stances, one right, one wrong. This understanding makes life simple and appeals to the self-righteous and lazy-minded. Instead, I prefer to remember the lines Dr. Johnson contributed to Oliver Goldsmith’s 1764 poem “The Traveller”:

“How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity we make or find.”

Beerbohm, a Johnson admirer, would have agreed. In “Servants 1918” (And Even Now, 1920) Beerbohm sensibly distills his political vision: “I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.” And he comes close to articulating my political philosophy in the essay “General Elections” (Yet Again, 1909): “Of politics I know nothing. My mind is quite open on the subject of fiscal reform, and quite empty; and the void is not an aching one: I have no desire to fill it.”