'The Independence of Her Spacious Mind'

The finest tribute to one writer by another I’ve read of late is John Lukacs’ “Agnes Repplier, Writer and Essayist.” Repplier (1855-1950) published perhaps one-thousand essays during a writing career of seventy years. Lukacs unabashedly admires her and her work and convinces me that Repplier may be the most unjustly forgotten of American writers. His thirty-six-page essay generously quotes her work (she’s eminently quotable, as is Lukacs) and serves as an excellent introduction to so strong-willed and idiosyncratic a writer. She’s an excellent antidote to such earlier nineteenth-century Americans as the pallid Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lukacs writes: 

“She read everything; indeed, what she reread would be sufficient unto a department of English in our colleges now. One of the most attractive features of her writing is its unpredictability: neither frivolous nor impulsive, it sprang from the independence of her spacious mind.”

 

Repplier was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her writing in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains in some ways a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life. She never married, had no children and published work on a sprawling array of subjects. Like the best journalists, she was a generalist, no specialist, widely knowledgeable, curious, democratic in spirit, with an occasionally acerbic wit. I’ve known several like her, few so industrious. Lukacs writes:

 

“‘Stupidity,’ she wrote wisely, ‘is not the prerogative of any one class or creed.’ She knew that most stupidity is not the result of neuro-cerebral incompetence but that it is self-induced and willful. ‘What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms—in other words, the reformation of our neighbors. What the Gospel asks, and had always asked, is the reformation of ourselves—a harassing and importunate demand.”

 

In her essay on “Leisure” (Essays on Idleness, 1897), Repplier writes: “And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusations on the score of indolence. In the world and of the world, yet always able to meet and greet the happy solitude of Gascony; toiling with no thought of toil, but rather ‘to entertain my spirit as it best pleased,’ this man wrought out of time a coin which passes current over the reading world.”

 

Repplier deserves rediscovery. Hers was a largely self-taught intelligence. She was proudly old-fashioned, autodidactic and a self-identified conservative, though not particularly interested in politics. Repplier at her best is piquant, witty and cant-free. She’s a fine model for essayists, a free-flowing aphorist and blessedly prolific

 

Her books are difficult to find, though Gutenberg has digitized eighteen of them. In 2009, Lukacs published a selection of her work, American Austen: The Forgotten Writings of Agnes Repplier (ISI Books).

 

[Lukacs’ essay is collected in Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge, a Reader (ISI Books, 2005). It originally appeared in Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).]