'Make the Best of a Bad Job'

I mentioned Agnes Repplier in Friday’s post and an old friend, a former newspaper colleague who lives in Philadelphia, writes: 

“She owned the building where I now live. I have a small condo in this red-brick three-story building, which was built during the Jackson Administration. From the tall windows in my living room I look out onto the 19th Century. Repplier died here in 1950 at the age of 95. A one-horse stable stood at the back of the building.”

 

Like me, Tim is alive to the dead, sensing traces of their passage. It’s a comfort to know we share a world with our admirable forebears, that they have left vestiges for us to appreciate and learn from. Sometimes the dead are more interesting and companionable than the merely living. Tim writes:

 

“She was born the year that Leaves of Grass was published [1855], and I’ve read that she befriended Whitman in his later years when he was living in Camden, N.J., just across the river from Philadelphia. She brought him to some literary functions, and I’ve wondered if she ever brought him here. She also persuaded Henry James to visit Philadelphia, and I wonder if a visit to Clinton Street was part of his stay too.”

 

Like many good writers, Repplier is effectively forgotten. For seventy years she worked industriously as a literary journalist, producing hundreds of essays for such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal and The North American Review, and for various Roman Catholic publications. Like Chekhov, she supported her family (mother, sister) with her writing. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was a serious Catholic, proudly old-fashioned and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. In “Consolations of the Conservative” (The Atlantic, December 1919), Repplier sounds like Michael Oakeshott:

 

“If belief in the perfectibility of man — and not of man only, but of governments — is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the checkered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbors. He has been carelessly defined as a man who is cautious because he has a good income, and content because he is well placed; who is thick-headed because he lacks vision, and close-hearted because he is deaf to the moaning wind which is the cry of unhappy humanity asking justice from a world which has never known how to be just.”

 

“Consolations” was collected in what may be her finest collection, the nicely titled Points of Friction (1920). The essay “The Cheerful Clan” opens with a sentence that shows Repplier has the gift for fashioning “a good lede,” at once amusing, provocative and thematically relevant: “Now that the Great War is a thing of the past, there is no longer any need to be cheerful.” She goes on to describe “popular optimism” as “the apotheosis of superficiality,” and then gets down to business:

 

“Things are as they are, and no amount of self-deception makes them otherwise. The friend who is incapable of depression depresses us as surely as the friend who is incapable of boredom bores us. Somewhere in our hearts is a strong, though dimly understood, desire to face realities, and to measure consequences, to have done with the fatigue of pretending. It is not optimism to enjoy the view when one is treed by a bull; it is philosophy. The optimist would say that being treed was a valuable experience. The disciple of gladness would say it was a pleasurable sensation. The Christian Scientist would say there was no bull, though remaining–if he were wise–on the tree-top. The philosopher would make the best of a bad job, and seek what compensation he could find.”

 

As I suggested earlier, “It’s a comfort to know we share a world with our admirable forebears . . .”

[Dave Lull reminds me that Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitized three Repplier titles: A Happy Half-Century (1908), Counter-Currents (1916) and Points of Friction (1920).]