'We Must Have Within Us That Spirit of Quiet'

“I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one; and as I don’t like excitement I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, round-about way. I am all for a quiet life. That is a deplorable confession, I suppose.” 

Some of us thrive on adrenaline, the rush of current events, melodramatic entanglements and a Wagnerian soundtrack. Others by nature are spectators, content to watch and listen and let others carry on as they wish. I rank myself among the latter. When young, I would have found such an identification shameful. Life is meant to be swashbuckling. One embodies a “can-do,” “change-the-world” spirit. A life spent pondering is not worth enduring. These are a young man’s delusions.

 

The tone of muted irony in the passage quoted above is the give-away. Max Beerbohm was constitutionally incapable of being strident. The words are drawn from his September 18, 1942, broadcast on the BBC, “Advertisements,” collected in Mainly on the Air (1946; rev. 1957). The worst of the Blitz in London was over and the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks would come in the future. Having returned to England from Italy at the start of the war, Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the BBC. After Churchill, this neo-Victorian was the nation’s most popular broadcaster, with millions of listeners.  Of his radio talks Rebecca West wrote: “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”

 

The sensibility described by Beerbohm is today dismissed as apathy, an indifference to the world. Rather, it suggests an acceptance of one’s limitations. What can one realistically accomplish? Little beyond our tiny concentric world. Many of our troubles today are encapsulated in a single word: “activist,” and not only in the political sense. Useful synonyms include “busybody” and “scold.” The best we can hope for is a revision in our own behavior, a little more kindness and tolerance. Writers work best when they accept their limits and leave the world-changing to others. Michael Oakeshott wrote in a 1922 notebook: “To produce great literature we must have within us that spirit of quiet, that ‘central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.’" Oakeshott quotes Wordsworth's “The Excursion.”

 

In his biography of Beerbohm, N. John Hall writes of the essayist/broadcaster: “His tone is fatherly, or rather grandfatherly; he champions the good old days. Occasionally he can sound a bit of a crank, an old man lamenting change and new machinery. But even when he is complaining, his mood is soft, modest; and so he gets away with it.”

 

[The Oakeshott passage is taken from Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]