'Amused Sympathetic Affection'

“He was not at all put off by the spectacle of human imperfection.”

 

That’s what keeps us amused, right? As a species we’re an inconsistent mess. We’re angry when we don’t get our way and when we get it we’re disappointed. That’s the engine that drives human affairs, our rapacious vanity and intolerance. Above, Lord David Cecil is writing of his friend the critic Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) in the preface to the latter’s posthumously published Humanities (1954).

 

I happened to be reading MacCarthy (an old-fashioned lover of books, prose and ideas) again when someone sent me a compilation video of various young Americans calling, in unambiguous language, for the murder of their fellow imperfect humans (a redundancy) – that is, people with whom they disagree. It was shocking to see such lip-smacking relish for homicide. They reminded me of the nihilists in late-nineteenth-century Russia, when murder became fashionable and members of the middle class and students endorsed and practiced killing. As Gary Saul Morson, the historian of that time and place, puts it in Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (2023):

 

“For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring; repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful; and the struggle against everydayness turns into an everyday affair that one must struggle against.”

 

Times change. Human nature doesn't. Good writers are more scarce and less valued. Cecil goes on to describe MacCarthy as grownup blessed with a sense of humility:

 

“The worried, undignified animal called man, bustling about with his unwieldy bundle of inconsistent hopes and fears, virtues and weaknesses, stirred in him the amused sympathetic affection of one who feels himself akin to him and, therefore, has no reason to look on him with dislike or contempt. Or even disrespect: there was nothing of the sentimental cynic about Desmond MacCarthy.”

 

Consider how MacCarthy treats Sydney Smith (1771-1845), Anglican minister, advocate for Roman Catholic rights and one of the greatest wits in the English tradition. MacCarthy finds much to admire and much to dismiss in Smith:

 

“Like many of the great wits, like Voltaire himself, he was a champion of bourgeois sense and rational philistinism. Like Voltaire he was intensely social and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than that prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap. He was good-natured – in fact an English Voltaire. Not such a good writer – Heavens no! But still he could say with truth, 'I never wrote anything very dull in my life.'”

 

[Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has republished Humanities and five other titles by MacCarthy.]