Some Notes on the Southern Agrarianism of John Crowe Ransom John Crowe Ransom reviewing Russell Kirks The Conservative Mind in 1953: The difference between a total conservatism, like that of Burke and Kirk, and the campaigning conservatism that we are more familiar with, is that the one has a pragmatic doctrine and a theological doctrine, and the other has only a pragmatic doctrine. There is not much enlightenment from Mr. Kirk concerning the economics or pragmatics of the conservative position, though one might like to feel sure that this department had been given a thorough going over; but there should be a great deal of interest in his theologism and humanism. (Empirics in Politics, Kenyon Review, Autumn 1953, 648). Ransom goes on: We are familiar with the over-all practical argument of Burkes on behalf of sticking too an existing order of society: it is an old order, which has come to represent the accrued wisdom of the ages, and that is necessarily superior to the opposed wisdom of our own single age; and it is the one among all possible orders under which its members may know by actual experience that they can support life and happiness. But it was a point of doctrine with him also to defend it theologically, as the order which came into being in the inscrutable and divinely ordained historic process, and must be so acknowledged by religious persons. Unfortunately, the conservatives do not always win their case against the innovators, and then the question rises of whether they have properly understood the divine principles of history. Indeed, since Burke, history would seem to have brought the conservatives to defeat in a long succession of furious engagements. They cannot but count these occasions as defeats, and setbacks for mankind; but on the other hand they usually accept the result. We may see in our own country today how conservatives when they return to power do not proceed heroically to undo the innovations of their enemies, as they may have threatened they would; but acquiesce in them, almost without a word of explanation, [but as if another chapter of history had been written irrevocably.] [Ibid., 648-9]. And further down: When a party is prepared to accommodate itself to the stream of alteration even after resisting it, that would seem much to the public advantage. Evidently the badge which the conservative wears must have two faces. One is resistance to the new event; this is the fighting face, the one that ordinarily we choose to know him by. The other is acceptance after the event, permitting the expectation that when once the new ways are shaken down and become old ways they too will be loved. And that might argue a saving ultimate sweetness of disposition. (Ibid., 649-50). [But] one of the institutions in the universal order, perhaps even the most notable one, was that natural and orderly institution, the English state. Its rate of alteration had been so slow! A little alteration at a time, so that it had never broken the pattern; that was hardly the history of a human production. And that statesman had only to preserve the constitution of this state as he had received it. By no means was he to reason freshly about it; he had his own natural and proper prejudice, a far better guide, to go by. (Ibid., 652). Locke believed in knowing the natural order, and adapting to it in general, but also in reasoning from it as boldly as one knows how. The productive arts and sciences, for instance, are empirical because, characteristically, they reason from artificial dispositions of nature, or contrived experiments; but they come back if not to original nature then to re-formed nature, which still must yield full experience. It is unfortunate that the Greek root from which a whole family of terms is taken means, indifferently, either experience or experiment. So there are two faces to empiricism. One is the process of fresh experiment, atomizing nature and re-combining it; the other is the appeal to the routine of ordinary experience because there is already a fixation upon some familiar object so good that it must never be let go. (Ibid., 653). Ransom, of course, [and] here too, had some experience of trying to influence politics towards a fixed and familiar traditionalism, using experimental means, and reasoning from the natural order as boldly as one knows how. And the shade or strain of conservatism that informed his politics was theological enough, or aesthetic enough, to inform his work in poetry, too. And this is reflected or extended both in Ransoms attitudes towards change and alteration, or in literary terms revision, in general, as well as in the particular acts of literary alteration or conservation which he effected at different times in his literary career. Ransom very much took to heart the social and philosophical sophistication, those of a set order, yet not lacking in bold reasoning, which he experienced during his time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before the first world war. The impressions England made upon him were quite definite, as indicated by this passage from his 1928 essay The South--Old or New?, an early run towards his essay Reconstructed But Unregenerate of two years later: Everything that the lay observer notes about England bespeaks a country of wonderfully stable customs and institutions. There is no doubt that the English tradition expresses itself in laws and in literature, but even more important is the consideration that it expresses itself in a specific material establishment. The chief concern of Englands half-mythical pioneers was with making a living, but fortunately the methods they worked out proved transmissible, proved in fact the main reliance of the succeeding generations. The pioneers explored the soil, determined what concessions it might reasonably be expected to make them, apportioned the natural wealth, housed the population, and arrived by painful experiment at a thousand satisfactory recipes by which they might secure the necessities of life. Their descendants in each generation have simply appropriated this whole establishment. Living their comparatively easy and routine lives after the tradition, they have enjoyed a leisure, a security, and an intellectual freedom which were never the portion of pioneers. (Sewanee Review, April 1928, 140). This was the ideal, then, an ideal of things known and loved, and conserved, and having been established by immemorially prolonged and arduous experiment, bold reasoning in action. Passages in The South--Old or New? were closely appropriated, if rearranged and brought to greater detail, in the essays next and considerably expanded incarnation a year later in Harpers, as The South Defends Its Heritage. Ransom: The lesson of each of the European cultures now extant is this--that European opinion does not make too much of the intense practical enterprises, but is at pains to define rather narrowly the practical effort which is prerequisite to the reflective and aesthetic life. [...] It is the European intention too live materially along the inherited line of least resistance, in order to put the surplus of energy into the free life of the mind. Thus is engendered that famous, or infamous, European conservatism, which will appear stupid, necessarily, to men still fascinated by materialistic projects, men in a state of arrested adolescence; for instance, to some very large if indefinite fraction of the population of these United States. (109). And then, pointing up the difference between English culture and American: The human life of English provinces long ago came to terms with nature, fixed its roots somewhere in the spaces between the rocks and in the shade of the trees, founded its comfortable institutions, secured its modest prosperity--and then willed the whole in perpetuity to the generations which should come after, in the ingenuous confidence that it would afford them all the essential human satisfactions. For it is the character of a seasoned provincial life that it is realistic, or successfully adapted to its natural environment, and that as a consequence it is stable, or hereditable. But it is the character of our urbanized, anti-provincial, progressive, and mobile American life that it is in a condition of eternal flux. Affections, and long memories, attach to the ancient bowers of life in the provinces; but they cannot attach to what is always changing. (110). It was in the South that Ransom perceived a deeper and older affiliation with such a European conservatism (as opposed to the threatening twin-headed hydra of modern Progress and Industrialism) during the time when he was writing the body of his Agrarian essays (1928-1936), though he would later come to temper or distance himself from his professed belief in the prospects and ideals of absolute Agrarianism, [1945] explaining his early infatuation away as an aberration of nostalgia and sentimentality. Of Industrialism, A program under which men, using the latest scientific paraphernalia, sacrifice comfort, leisure, and the enjoyment of life to win Pyrrhic victories from nature at points of no strategic importance (Ibid., 113), he ventured that Only a community of tough conservative habit can master it (Ibid.). He described the Southern conservatism this way: There are a good many faults to be found with the old South, but hardly the fault of being intemperately addicted to work and to gross material prosperity. The South never conceded that the whole duty of man was to increase material production, or that the index to the degree of his culture was the volume of his material production. His business seemed too be rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence. On this assumption the South pioneered her way to a sufficiently comfortable and rural sort of establishment, considered that an establishment was something stable, and proceeded to enjoy the fruits thereof. The arts of the section, such as they were, were not immensely passionate, creative, and romantic; they were the Eighteenth Century social arts of dress, conversation, manners, the table, the hunt, politics, oratory, the pulpit. These were arts of living and not arts of escape; they were also community arts, in which every class of society could participate after its kind. [The South took life easy, which is itself a tolerably comprehensive art.] (Ibid., 111). In opposition to this was the dominant Northern machine of Progress and Industrialism: Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine, with its laboratory centers of experimentation, is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace. (Ibid.). He spelled out the essential conflict this way: Will the Southern establishment, the most substantial exhibit on this continent of a society of the European and Historic order, be completely crumbled by the powerful acid of the Great Progressive Principle? Will there be no more looking backward but only looking forward? Is our New World to be dedicated forever to the doctrine of newness? (Ibid., 115). Yet his conservatism was open to a certain degree of compromise, flexibility and acceptance in the face of changes which were likely irrevocable: . . . the reconstruction may be undertaken with some imagination, and not necessarily under the formula of a literal restoration. It does not greatly matter to what extent the identical features of the old Southern establishment are restored; the important consideration is that there be an establishment for the sake of stability. (Ibid., 117). This puts one in mind of Ransoms famous prescriptive theory of poetry: a logical structure with an irrelevant local texture. The basic idea or structure is stable, while the local texture that fills out its body may be irrelevantly variable. Ransoms conservatism may have been theological in its root essence, but it was also pragmatic in its substantive detail. Yet these concessions or attitudes of concession were not without their tactical and firmly theological bearings: The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up. But the historian and the philosopher, who take views that are thought to be respectively longer and deeper than most, may very well reverse this order and find that the Southern idea rather than the American has in its favor the authority of example and the approval of theory. And some prophet may even find it possible to expect that it will yet rise again. (Reconstructed and Unregenerate, Ill Take My Stand, Ransom et al, 1930; Repr. Peter Smith, 1976, 3). Thus, in A Capitol for the New Deal (1933): Exit Mr. Hoover and the view that the system was a sacred institution; enter Mr. Roosevelt assuming at last that it was a profane one, and subject to treatment. (ACFTND, American Review, December, 1933, 134). And in Land! An Answer to the Unemployment Problem (1932), Ransom could write: Let us conceive the economic problem of our society in its simplest sense as an occupational problem: how to find occupation for those who have none and how to find remunerative occupation for those whose occupation has become only a formal or waiting one. The chief desideratum of any political economy at this moment is to assign a really economic function to every member of the economic society. (Land!, Harpers, July 1932, 216). The answer to the crisis imposed by the devastations of Industrialism would have to be found in the pragmatic actions taken by knowing, governing forces of almost parental stature within an at least partially enlightened society. The intended logical structure is economic and societal stability; the irrelevant local texture is specific acts of employment, or the measured assignment of appropriate roles to individual members within society. Thus change or alteration itself may be an act of conservation, protecting and promulgating that which is characterized by stability and an inclination towards tradition. We will see before long how very specifically this attitude relates to Ransoms attitudes towards the generation, alteration and conservation of his own literary works. And this idea of a pragmatic, and even symbolic, societal traditionalism extended itself in imaginative projections of creative and ideal beauty. Here Ransom floats fellow-Fugitive and Masonic mystic Sidney Mttron-Hirschs visionary solution to the ailing nations economic troubles: There is not a city in whose erection the expenditure of love and labour has really been lavish and unstinted. Probably there is no people which is prepared to make such an expenditure upon its national city, and not to stop short of whatever perfection is humanly possible for the contemporary generation, unless it is ourselves. Our national energies could scarcely find a field for prouder expression than in raising a national city which would stand henceforth as the object of veneration and the symbol of our unity in diversity, our power, and our peculiar character. [...] It is Mr. Mttron-Hirschs thought that the only appropriate site for the city is somewhere along the forested banks, both banks, of the Mississippi. That stream is perhaps the most distinctive physical feature of our territory, and the most beloved and legended. A city situated there would be somewhat west of the centre of population and somewhat east of the geographical centre. He proposes for it an area of one hundred miles square, with an expectation of housing fifteen millions of inhabitants. [...] The Ideal City is to be a shrine, a perpetual American Fair, an instrument for improving all those Americans who will go there privately or officially to see it. He thinks, like Confucius, of noble forms and ceremonies which will take place there. It is to house national monuments, art galleries, exhibitions, museums, literary and musical occasions; and perhaps it will be the seat of a national or federal university, to which collegians from all over the nation, according to some principle of representation, are to win their admission by competition; and in which they are not to be instructed in the technique of business (since it is not to be a university in the usual sense for getting on in the world) but instructed in the more timeless and less utilitarian branches of art and science, in order that our citizens, like the European citizens of a few generations ago, may have within them the dignity of citizenship and the matter of culture. (ACFTND, Ibid., 138-41). Contrastingly, yet supportingly, in an essay of a few months later, The Aesthetic of Regionalism, which also appeared in the American Review, Ransom cites contemporary alterations to the State Capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as evidence that what is called progress is often destruction (310): ...the manner of the expenditure of the millions of dollars that went into was peculiarly unimaginative, like the manner in which money is inevitably spent by new men who have made their pile. The State of Louisiana took its bag and went shopping in the biggest market; it came back with New York artists, French and Italian marbles, African mahogany, Vesuvian lava for the paving. The local region appears inconspicuously in some bas-reliefs and statues, and in the alligators, pelicans, magnolias, sugar canes, and cat-tails worked in bronze in the gates and the door-panels. They are so ineffectual against the shameless eclecticism of the whole that the Louisiana State Capitol could almost as easily stand in Topeka or Harrisburg or Sacramento as in Baton Rouge. (Ibid.). Commentary: diversity without unity; irrelevant local texture without a binding logical structure. These revisions are not correct. Ransom seems insistent upon Mttron-Hirschs Capitol City. Ransom takes pains to point out that his preference for Southern habits of mind in addressing economic problems is what he would describe as early American, and again as constitutional. (The South is a Bulwark, Scribners, May 1936, 301). (Commentary: none.) When, a few years later, in Art and the Human Economy (Kenyon Review, Autumn 1945, 683-8), Ransom chose to distance himself from his own earlier Agrarianism, it was in these terms: ...Mr. Southard proposes to found an agrarian community within which innocence may be recovered. I can reproach him for his phantasy with the better conscience inasmuch as I have entertained it too as one of the Southern agrarians. [...] But I think the agrarian nostalgia was very valuable to the participants, a mode of repentance not itself to be repented. It matured their understanding of the forward-and-backward rhythm of the human economy. And now, for example, whatever may be the politics of the agrarians, I believe it may be observed that they are defending the freedom of the arts, whose function they understand. (Ibid., 686-7). Now may we segue a little into that defending of the freedom of the arts, as we turn our attention to one of the critical essays which Ransom published in the American Review, and then considerably revised for its publication in his first volume of literary criticism, The Worlds Body (1938). The first two paragraphs of the essay as it appears in the American Review were excised completely from the essay as it appeared in The Worlds Body. These are worth quoting immediately for their intimacy: The Poet as Citizen,* [* ] which consists of miscellaneous lectures delivered at Cambridge University, must be number sixty-something among Sir Arthur Quiller-Couchs published works. It displays the best qualities of a dialectic that flourishes in the Senior Common Rooms and even the Junior Common Rooms of Oxford and Cambridge but has never quite borne the translation to our own seats of learning without suffering a sea-change, in the course of which most of its grace and resiliancy has disappeared. There they make it an art to wear their learning lightly, and to employ the informal and allusive style. Sir Arthur cites with relish John Henry Newmans reference to a dialectician who was obstreperous at Oxford: He was deficient in depth, and besides, coming from a distance, he had never really grown into an Oxford man. Deficient in depth may come too mean, I can imagine, deficient in elevation, that is, not up to a certain HIgh Table or All Fellows style, which is local, exclusive, and delightful. Sir Arthur has the Cambridge air, which is the same thing as the Oxford air. The late George Saintsbury had an air, but it was just the generic British-university air; it was playful but subdued by the sense of important business, and by the hard substance that was going into the books in hand. These papers are critical, and beautifully mannered, but they do not have that hard substance. They are never trifling, for they have behind them a formidable tradition; but what is that tradition? It is Victorianism, now called, I think, Liberalism, and it is not sufficient for today; it has become the enemy of thinking. Sir Arthur with studied courtesy makes a criticism of Mr. T. S. Eliot in one paper, and beside Sir Arthurs prose touch that of Mr. Eliot seems a little heavy; but when we view the two writers under the aspect of Man Thinking, Sir Arthurs lightness ceases to be an obvious virtue. I know nothing about the future of literature, which is involved in the future of society, but I suspect that the end is approaching for these informal academic essays that refuse to be laboured and philosophical and are only allusive, on the assumption that the labours of philosophy have already been done. I have the impression that the arts are passing into the hands of a generation of critics who are technically cruder but in spirit much more radical; that is, prepared after a series of crises to go back to the roots of things. (287-8). So then, by the summer of 1935 Ransom is prepared to celebrate some newnesses of his own, kicking away a bit from the obvious and local virtues of the Cambridge and Oxford schools. He wants philosophy, and he wants it from the root up. There is traditionalism in this, and, it would seem, a worldliness surpassing provincialism. Ransom is no longer content with an academic Aristotelianism, even of the best schools. He observes a prime regeneration of the radicalism that he wants in the new critics of the modern age. From the third paragraph: To the moderns it will not matter that Sir Arthurs view of Aristotles view is one to suitable to a certain academic background; or that Butchers view, upon which Sir Arthurs is based, is only a little more Aristotelian; nor will it matter even that Aristotles view itself, construed this way or that, has been canonical ever since it was resurrected several centuries ago, if it is not a view that accords to art its proper meaning and dignity. Yet what sticks out most in the mind, for this reader at any rate, and which amounts perhaps to the same thing, is that, for Ransom, the future of literature [...] is involved in the future of society, and the labours of philosophy have not been completed. A reasonable position for someone aiming to redo philosophy in 1935, three years before the publication of his first critical volume. Yet nowhere else in the 1935 essay does Ransom mention T.S. Eliot, having sufficiently employed an allusive style in advancing Mr. Eliot into his argument. Whereas the model of 1938 brings up Eliot at once, and with greater distinction, and even in this accord mentions Mr. Blackmur, whose first full-length volume of criticism was published in 1935. The second paragraph in 1938: I suppose our modern critics have learned to talk more closely about poems than their predecessors ever did. The closeness of Mr. Eliot in discussing a text may well be greater than anybodys before him, and he in turn may now be even exceeded in closeness by Mr. Blackmur, and perhaps others. These are close critics, and define our age as one of critical genius. This is indeed a closer reading of the critical situation. Yet with just enough room to move around in. (There is in fact a sense in which revisions are always also additions.) Ransom amplifies the topic: Mr. Blackmur, however, and even Mr. Eliot, had to change the style of their criticism, insensibly it may be, as they went along. Looking if possible ever more closely at their texts, at the same time they have seemed to find bigger and harder and more theoretical questions always being forced upon their attention. These words are so profound, they defy commentary; and what Ransom goes on to say, at this moment, defies quotation, so that if one searches quickly for some nugget that one might grab on to, one finds it: Theory, which is expectation, always determines criticism, and never more than when it is unconscious. One trusts that ones allusory functions are functioning. For what use would there be of an irrelevant local texture unless it were attendant upon a logical structure. They had to change the style of their criticism. This was the hard work of philosophy, involved in the future of society.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 16:04:06 +0000
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