'Convention, Tradition, and, Not Least, Religion'

In less than two months in the winter of 2019-20 we lost four of the elders, teachers, guides: On November 24, Clive James and John Simon; December 30, Gertrude Himmelfarb; January 12, Roger Scruton. I had been reading Simon the longest and he probably produced the most laughs (“Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.”). For sheer entertainment value in multiple genres, James takes the prize. Scruton made philosophy accessible to non-philosophers and was a writer we can describe without irony as “wise.” 

Perhaps Himmelfarb will have the most lasting impact. She salvaged the Victorians for our generation in such books as Victorian Minds (1968) and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991). She became the anti-Lytton Strachey of our time and was a rare historian who could actually write. I recently read her first book, Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952), and she reclaimed for me a thinker previously reduced to a single cliché.

 

She referred to Michael Oakeshott, winningly, as “the political philosopher who has so modest a view of the task of political philosophy, the intellectual who is so reluctant a producer of intellectual goods, the master who does so little to acquire or cultivate disciples” – the very opposite of a so-called “public intellectual.”

 

My favorite among her books is The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009), the story of Eliot’s final novel and the finest English novel of the nineteenth century, Daniel Deronda (1876). Himmelfarb places it in the context of the author’s life, Judaism, Jewishness and Zionism. In his review of the book, Joseph Epstein reminds us that “the cavalcade of Victorian genius is greater than that of any other period in any other nation in the history of the world” – a realization Himmelfarb helped us understand. In the final paragraph of her book, she writes:

 

“Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”

 

In “A Dead White European Male Comforts a 20th-Century Jew,” a 1997 essay in The American Enterprise, Himmelfarb relates the moral life, essential values and Judaism to the decidedly non-Jewish Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

 

“Perhaps the most provocative, and profound, passage in the Reflections is the vindication of ‘prejudice’ as a source of wisdom and virtue. ‘Prejudice’ is Burke’s shorthand for all those aspects of life -- habit, custom, convention, tradition, and, not least, religion -- which did not conform to the Enlightenment’s view of reason. Prejudice in Burke’s sense is not arbitrary or irrational. On the contrary, it has within it the ‘latent’ wisdom and virtue that has accumulated over the ages.” 

 

Himmelfarb was born one-hundred years ago today in Brooklyn.