Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism 9780300157024

Citation preview

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealisn1 John Burt

Robert Penn Warren has distinguished himself in many sorts of endeavor- as a poet, a novelist, a critic, and an observer of American history and politics. In this book, John Burt examines Warren's writings in these apparently disparate fields and shows how they are tied togetl1er not only by their common themes but also by an inner logic tl1at captures tl1e analogies between artistic and political problems. Considering Warren's political writing, his fiction (in particular Night Rider, World Enough and Time, and All the King>s Men ), and his poetry (especially The Ballad ofBillie Potts, Audubon, and Brother to Dragons), Burt finds iliat Warren's works are everywhere marked by a strong romanticism and an equally strong impatience witl1 romanticism. According to Burt, Warren is at tl1e same tin1e fascinated and repelled by what Burt calls "inwardness," ilie idea that the private sensibility can yield a primary access to what is valuable in botl1 art and politics, to imaginative power; and to tl1e force of right. Inwardness gives direction and a sense of destiny to one's personal eftorts, says Burt, but at tl1e san1e time it finally swan1ps and obliterates tl1e personality and repeals the values it appeared to originate. Warren commits hin1self to tllis romantic state but, aware of its baleful consequences, continually attempts to find ways to reckon witl1 it. Burt thus finds tlut Warren is an autl1or at once caught up in - and capable wnrinucd 0 11 back flap

jacket photo: Office ofPublic Relations, Louisiaua State Universi~y.

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism

John Burt

Yale University Press: New Haven and London

Copyright© 1988 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sally Harris and set in Gilliard type by Rainsford Type, Ridgefield, Conn. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N.Y. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burt, John, 1955Robert Penn Warren and American idealism. Includes index. Warren, Robert Penn, 1905- -Criticism and interpretation. 2. Idealism in literature. I. Title. PS3545.A748Z64 1988 813'.52 87-14742 ISBN o-300-04067-9 (alk. paper) 1.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durbility of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 Permission to reprint the following material is gratefully acknowledged: "Interjection #4, Bad Year, Bad War: A New Year's Card, 1969" from Selected Poems, 1923-1975 by Robert Penn Warren.© 1976 by Robert Penn Warren. "Heart of Autumn" and "Rather Like a Dream" from Now and Then: Poems 1970-1978 by Robert Penn Warren. © 1979 by Robert Penn Warren. "Speleology" and "Language Barrier'' from Being Here: Poetry 19'77-1980 by Robert Penn Warren. © 1980 by Robert Penn Warren. All reprinted by permission from Random House, Inc.

For my mother, Mat;gery D. Burt, and for the memory of my father, William C. Burt

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction l Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 2 Neutral Territory: Pragmatism 3 Neutral Territory II: Mourning and Experience 4 Elegies, Love, and Accommodation 5 The Ballad ofBillie Potts and Value 6 Audubon and Evasion 7 Landscape and Death 8 Romance and Extravagance 9 Social Realism and Romance: Night Rider l 0 The Emergence of Romance in All the King's Men ll The Self-Subversion of Value: World Enough and Time 12 Brother to Dragons: A Verse-Romance Notes Index

1X

X1

10

*

43

66

84 92 112

121 127 141 172

199 219 231

Acknowledgments

My first acknowledgment should go to Mr. Warren himself, who graciously allowed me to examine certain manuscripts on deposit at Yale's Beinecke Library. David Schoonover of the Beinecke was also very helpful to me there. I owe thanks also to Random House, for letting me quote the following poems of Warren's: "Bad Year, Bad War: A New Year's Card, 1969," from Selected Poems, 1923-1975, "Heart of Autumn" and "Rather like a Dream" from Now and Then, and "Speleology'' and "Language Barrier" from Being Here. One chapter of this book, "The SelfSubversion ofValue in World Enough and Time" appeared in Robert Penn Warren: Modern Critical Views (New Haven: Chelsea House, 1986). The chapter called "Romance and Extravagance" is loosely based on my essay "Romance, Character, and the Bounds of Sense" published in Raritan. About half of this book descends from my Ph.D. dissertation (Yale University, 1983). I don't know how to specify my intellectual and personal debts to my advisers and friends at Yale. John Hollander's generosity and openness of mind gave me many leads. R. W. B. Lewis's careful intelligence kept me out of many a byway. To Harold Bloom I owe my first inklings that literature is a subject worthy of study and commitment, and to Richard Brodhead my decision to concentrate upon American literature. My friends James A. Clark, Matthew Abbate, Stephen Cushman, and Richard Millington all made material differences in the nature of my thought. Morris Brownell of the University of Nevada at Reno read an earlier version of this work in its entirety, and helped me bring it under control when it was far from tame. To my friends, students, and colleagues at Brandeis I owe many careful readings of this essay, and I am especially in debt to Michael T. Gilmore, Allen Grossman, Eugene Goodheart, Peter IX

x Acknowledgments Swiggart, Richard Onorato, William Flesch, Anne Janowitz, Helena Michie, Elizabeth Gifford, and Jonathan Scheffres. Scott Magoon of the Feldberg Computer Center at Brandeis gave me a great deal of help with computer support. Most of all, of course, I am grateful for the kind support of my wife, Donna, whose love always teaches me anew what we are put on this earth for.

Abbreviations

The following volumes are cited for the shorter poems of Robert Penn Warren quoted in these pages.

Selected Poems, 1923-1975. New York: Random House, 1976. Cited as SP. Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. New York: Random House, 1979. Cited as NT. Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980. New York: Random House, 1980. Cited asBH. New and Selected Poems, 1923-198s. New York: Random House, 1985. Cited as N & SP.

Xl

Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism

Introduction

his book will begin and end with Thomas Jefferson. But it will always have two Jeffersons in mind. About the first Jefferson, a romantic figure created to account for that strain of political idealism we ascribe to the Declaration of Independence, Robert Penn Warren is fond of quoting Adam Gurowski, a Polish nobleman who came to Washington in the 18sos as a "self-appointed spy on Democracy," and who discovered "that America is unique among nations because other nations are accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea. " 1 What Gurowski meant by this claim that America is not a race but an idea was that Americans have tended to treat the Declaration of Independence as the sacred book of American nationality rather than as what its authors intended it to be, an instrument designed to legitimize French assistance to the Revolution by proclaiming that the colonies were not revolting possessions of King George but already existing independent states. Our national mythology invests the Declaration with a host of powers its authors specifically refused to give it, such as the power of bringing a new state into being (a power the delegates were explicitly denied by the legislatures which appointed them, legislatures who were as jealous of their independence of each other as they were eager to be independent of Great Britain), and the power of constituting a new national consciousness (which Jefferson believed had already been accomplished by the original emigrations). But chief among the powers we give to the Declaration is the power to make anyone who ascribes to its principles into an American. As other nations trace themselves back to a racial founder, an Aeneas or an Abraham, so the United States traces itself back to an idea. We see the Declaration not as an announcement but as a promise, a promise that has the power of creating a state, and beyond that, a promise

2

Introduction that has the power of constituting, not merely defining, our nation's sense of itsel£ The Declaration is thus not only the instrument of a national purpose but the embodiment of that purpose and, beyond that, the origin of that purpose. It is at once the means by which our political aim-the creation of our state and nation-is achieved and the means by which we secure our access to those values our political practice is supposed to make real, the final aim beyond our immediate aims. The Declaration is the intellectual equivalent of a sacred space, a place to which political thought, if not practice, must continually return if it is to prove its integrity and compose its destiny. Other nations have been able to discover their aims, but only America has had, in the person of one man, Thomas Jefferson, in an upstairs room, to invent one. From Governor Winthrop on, this sort of thing has been the persistent story Americans tell about themselves. And whether it is true or not is really less significant than the fact that Americans have long felt the need to tell that kind of story, have felt the need to describe their history not (as the Romans did, and as the Puritans so easily might have done) by establishing continuity with a prior ethnic history but (in what, paradoxically, turns out to be the characteristic American national gesture) by denying the idea that ethnic or national history has any weight. Americans have traditionally replaced ethnic history by the guiding force of an idea that stands outside of history, an idea that history gropingly attempts to realize. Even the most disabused and skeptical American historians are part of this tradition; otherwise the fact that the Declaration does not describe any America ever seen on sea or land would not offend them so. Even when Americans have attempted to assert some ethnic continuities (as, for instance, when the Puritans attempted to see themselves as latterday Israelites) those assertions were of a self-consciously metaphorical and polemical character, and were therefore more closely tied to that idea they aspired to embody than to their actual history. Now perhaps all attempts to trace national continuities across ethnic or historical boundaries are just as metaphorical in character. When English Whig historians, for instance, attempted to see English history as a contest between Saxon freedom and Norman bondage, they also may have been merely making metaphorical and polemical contact with their governing ideas. But they, at least, were discussing something which might have been history, whereas even the southern claim that its people were the descendants of the Cavaliers (the American Civil War thus replaying the English one) was so transparently false that it must have been an attempt to understand "southernness," an attempt to define a tenable alternative to Yankee Puritanism rather than a serious historical statement.

Introduction 3 What interests Warren in this ideal view of American history is not the truth of that view but the consequences which follow from holding it. Concerning the Declaration, Warren remarks: When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem-particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America-you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks. [Talking, p. 40] Our second Jefferson, Warren's half-mad interlocutor in Brother to DrRtJons (1953, 1979) is a rider of this terrible horse. The thrilling power of the act of

constituting and compassing one's national destiny in words is also an enthralling power, a power that debases as much as it exalts the personality. In the opening lines of the 1979 version ofBrother to Dragons, Warren's Jefferson compares writing the Declaration to mistakenly worshiping the Minotaur who waits in the labyrinth of one's own imagination: Well, thus the infatuate encounter. But No beast then, the towering Definition, angelic, arrogant, abstract, Greaved in glory, thewed with light, the bright Brow tall as dawn. I could not see the eyes. So seized the pen, and in the upper room, With the excited consciousness that I was somehow Rectified, annealed, my past annulled And fate confirmed, wrote. And far off, In darkness, the watch called out ... Time came, we signed the document, went home. I had not seen the eyes of that bright apparition. I had been blind with light. I did not know that its eyes were blind. 2 Each of Warren's Jeffersons implies the other. The happy Jefferson betrays us inevitably to the unhappy one, for idealism naturally baits the historical trap, and does so so effectively that our own recent tendency to ascribe base motivations to the founders might be more self-defense

4-

Introduction than revision. But the unhappy Jefferson delivers us back to the happy one again, for only a genuine hunger for truth could nerve itself to the point of committing the horrors that both proceed from and betray one's national promises. The idea is at the same time vital and fatal; it makes one worth having been human, but it also makes one inhuman. It is, in the words of Conrad's Stein, that destructive element in which one survives only so long as one submits to it. 3 This essay will traverse four different regions of Robert Penn Warren's work, but the geographies of these regions are so similar that our travels within each of them will follow similar paths. What will link our examination ofWarren's political and historical writings with our examination of his elegies, of his narrative poems, and of three of his major novels will be not a set of common ideas (for the subjects are diverse) nor even a set of common attitudes (for even within one genre Warren continually corrects and repeals himself) but a common ambivalence about powerful experiences of meaning, an ambivalence which causes Warren to approach both the significance faced within the work by its characters and the significance of the work as a whole in an ambiguous manner, at once soliciting a transfiguring experience of meaning or contact with a transcendental ideal and attempting to ward off the power of that experience to derange the rules by which both artistic and moral conduct are governed. At the center of all four geographies is a promise of meaning, an originating power which creates meaning and which is not bound by any previous meaning, which creates the self, marking it off as an inward thing different from any outward thing, and which creates also those values to which the self stands in an essential relation. This center of meaning, however, because it originates meaning and transforms existing meanings, is as dangerous as it is valuable, for it is prior to any values it discovers. Its chief effect, therefore, is to promote a self-transcendence which is hard to distinguish from self-overthrow. It catches author, character, and reader up in an exalting but also horrifying thrill, promising the power to re-create both art and life, but perhaps delivering only the power to destroy it. As the center of meaning has both promise and threat, so Warren's characteristic movement is at once both approach and withdrawal, at once an attempt to seek experiences without which experience as a whole is empty, and an attempt to back away from those experiences under the cover of irony when it becomes too clear that the price of such experience is destruction. I intend here to trace this double movement in several

Introduction 5 areas which are apparently remote from each other but which share a certain logic. In each of these areas what is at once thrilling and horrifying is a version of the central claim that inwardness can provide one with a link to value. As an American and as a modem, Warren is, like many of us perhaps, so powerfully committed to this claim that he makes it almost unconsciously. But Warren is aware as perhaps few others since Hawthorne and Conrad have been that that claim is as costly as it is unavoidable. From it we derive our politics and also the ability to criticize our particular political practices. But from it we also derive a giddy indifference to human limitation which, more even perhaps than our baser ambitions, threatens our survival both as a nation and as a species. From it we derive that hunger which stings us into poetry and teaches us to love the poetry we read. But from it we also derive the temptation to drive through poetry into what cannot be spoken and therefore cannot be art, to descend beyond the deepest of the human into what, if we are lucky, is merely nothing. From it we derive those moral experiences which make us worthy to have been ourselves. But from it we also derive that temptation to hold moral experience in contempt and to direct ourselves into what delusively seems to us to be prior to the merely moral. Warren examines with courage and seriousness some of the primary questions of art and of value, recognizing the hypnotic power and threat of a primary concern while at the same time refusing to evade its centrality. Consider, for example, Warren's 1980 poem "Language Barrier'': Snow-glitter, snow-gleam, all snow-peaks Scream joy to the sun. Green Far below lies, shelved where a great cirque is blue, bluest Of waters, face upward to sky-flaming blue. Then The shelf falters, fails, and downward becomes Torment and tangle of stone, like Hell frozen, where snow Lingers only in shadow. Alone, alone, What grandeur here speaks? The world Is the language we cannot utter. Is it a language we can even hear? Years pass, and at night you may dream-wake To that old altitude, breath thinning again to glory, While the heart, like a trout, Leaps. What, Long ago, did the world try to say?

6

Introduction It is long till dawn. The stars have changed position, a far train whistles For crossing. Before the first twitter of birds You may again drowse. Listen-we hear now The creatures of gardens and lowlands. It may be that God loves them too. 4 The poem opens in an alpine landscape charged with a thrilling but also alien urgency. This sublime landscape, the landscape of Turner's alpine paintings, ofWordsworth's Simplon Pass in Book VI of The Prelude, and of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," is clearly trying to say something, but what it says is just as clearly not available either to human language or to human understanding. Warren's mountains, like Wordsworth's, convey the inadequacy of any meaning to do justice to a sense of meaningfulness always betrayed by language but never quite obscured by it. When Wordsworth saw Mont Blanc or realized that he had already passed the crest of the Simplon Pass, he recognized in the actual physical places "a soulless image on the eye I That had usurped upon a living thought I That never more could be" (1850 Prelude, Vl:526-28). But years later he recovers that power he had wrongly expected to discover in the landscape, finding it not in nature, nor even (as he had in ''Tintern Abbey") in a "sense sublime" that seems to be the joint property of mind and world, reconciling them to each other despite their apparent betrayals of each other, but in the mind itself, usurping and even obliterating external nature as nature had obliterated mind in the original scene years before. 5 He discovers in retrospect an awful power arising not from the physical abyss of the vale of Arve but from the abyss of his own poetic force, leaving him lost not only among his actual paths but also among his trains of thought, involved in a mist that reveals nothing except that there is something tremendous which it conceals: Imagination-here the power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveler. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say'I recognize thy glory': in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense

Introduction 7 Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbors, whether we be young or old. Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort, and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be. [VI:592-6o8] The urgency that charges Warren's landscape also perhaps only appears to be nature's; as in Wordsworth the power here seems to be a poetic power to which particular poems can never expect to do justice, a power frequently manifested in destructive urges against the poem itself, but often deflected into a usurpation by the poet upon the landscape or projected back as the lethal designs of the landscape upon the poet himsel£ What the peaks scream is "joy," Warren's repeated and talismanic word for an amoral and inhuman poetic power he cannot live without but cannot expect to survive. It is the energy of this "joy" that drives the prosody of the first line, spondee-throttled, repeating, as if under great strain, slightly varied patterns of consonants not as if searching for a right word which the poet keeps approximating but rather as if searching for the right magic sounds, the right incantation which the poet just barely fails to remember but which if he did remember would end both poem and poet. It is this same thwarted intensity which is reflected in Warren's characteristically tortured syntax, syntax wrought up with inversions ("green I Far below lies") and dusters of absolute phrases so dense that the logical relations between them are difficult to sort out ("shelved where a great cirque is blue, bluest I Of waters, face upward to sky-flaming blue"). ("Shelved" dearly refers to "green," "bluest of waters" to the ice of the great cirque, but which of these is "face upward to sky-flaming blue"?) Warren's poetic means here are under a kind of pressure which cracks them and seems to be on the brink of forcing them to give way entirely. Under this pressure the landscape suffers what the language cannot bear suffering, so that the mountain shelf "falters, fails" and transforms itself not into the purely natural and beneficent if mute frozen cataracts of Wordsworth's Chamounix (which spreads its motionless array of mighty waves below the blank Mont Blanc and "reconciles" the poet to realities) but rather into the purely mental, indeed mind-forged, landscape of Milton's Pandemonium, a "Torment and tangle of stone, like Hell frozen."

8

Introduction "Snow-glitter" and "snow-gleam," this is to say, collapse (both semantically and phonetically) into "scream." But screaming, even screaming joy, only indicates its subject and cannot bring it forth, much less convey any information about it, as if all accesses of poetic power become less articulate as they become stronger, become more like screaming and less like language. This is the "Language Barrier" of the title-not just that barrier which intervenes between the mind (both Warren's and ours) and the world, which is a language we can't utter and may (although clearly the poem would evaporate into mere illusion if this were really so) not even be able to hear, but also that barrier within the poet's own mind (or, if the poet is really successful, between his mind and ours) between that utterance which is alone worthy of poetry and the capacity of any particular poem (or the mind of any particular poet) to utter it. Like Wordsworth at Mont Blanc, Warren's eye is drawn down from an unbearable sublime place to a bearable if somewhat less thrilling one. Wordsworth goes so far-as Leslie Brisman points out6 -as to momentarily transform himself from a romantic into an Augustan: There small birds warble from the leafY trees, The eagle soars high in the element, There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf, The maiden spread the haycock in the sun, While Winter like a well-tamed lion walks, Descending from the mountain to make sport Among the cottages by beds of flowers.

Warren seeks similar refuge. Waking in the middle of the night years later with a start that is at once a remembrance of this scene and a presage of death, he once again cannot comprehend what the world tried to say so long before. Yet here at last the poet does not seem stymied by his failure but curiously refreshed, and his verse is untroubled and smooth. He prepares himself for a long night of wakefulness, not with that sense of misery with which he faces such nights in other poems, but with a sense that something is being disclosed to him, although not the secret he had earlier failed to grasp. The metaphorical sounds (screaming of snow-peaks, the language of the world) of the first half of the poem modulate not into the magical white noise Wordsworth hears when he gets excited but into the actual sounds of an actual night: "a far train whistles I For crossing. Before the first twitter of birds I You may again

Introduction drowse. Listen-we hear now I The creatures of gardens and lowlands. I It may be that God loves them too." Notice how Warren's pronoun modulates from a "we" that includes poet and reader to a ''you" who is clearly the poet .alone (and the reader only to the extent that he privately shares in the poet's accusation whenever he addresses ''you," as Warren frequently does), to a ''you" who may be the poet himself in a more ordinary sense (or maybe his wife), to a "we" whom he addresses directly and in the present tense and who seems generously to include everybody. The real thrust of the poet's generosity is in the last line: maybe it is all right after all to fail before the sublime; maybe doing so makes available the gentle and humane qualities of which God and the tamed poet are trying, perhaps a trifle hard, to approve. But that "may be" is as far as he is willing to go-and I can't help but hear in it a rather desperate hopefulness. Yes, to fail the poetic makes us human, makes us capable ofloving each other. And it may be that even Warren's raw-faced, ironical, sharp-tempered God approves of that, although that's scarcely likely. Warren wants to present the end of the poem as an achieved moment of stasis. But he can't help also presenting it at the same time as a kind of consolation prize. In the final analysis I'm not sure, and I can't be sure, which of these opposite qualifications lurks most under Warren's "may be"-that humaneness is finally only poetic failure, or that poetry is not finally to be tamed after all. In every area ofhis oeuvre Warren attempts to work an accommodation with transcendental ideals with which by nature accommodation is very difficult. Whether Warren can do this, can define, through his ambivalences and ambiguous movements, a neutral territory in which life is possible, or whether he leaves us instead merely with a clearer notion of where we find ourselves, between the devil and the deep blue sea, is the question which this essay will make it necessary to ask, but which perhaps no essay can answer.

9

1 Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History

sked by Ralph Ellison in an interview published in the

Paris Review to account for the outpouring of letters in the South in the decades after the First World War, Warren compared that outpouring to the sudden maturation of New England letters in the decades before the Civil War. Both, he said, can be tied to a cultural shock administered to a static culture, a shock which, simultaneously threatening the integrity of that culture and offering it new opportunities, forced its artists into a moral and social self-consciousness not available when their society was not under mortal pressure. 1 Warren goes on to compare the phenomenon in New England and the South to the larger scale artistic and political upheavals in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. But the most telling comparisons to which Warren refers are to cases where the culture that is under pressure is, as that of the South before the 1920s essentially was, a colonial one. Social historians have long known that when a colonial economy disintegrates, certain characteristic political and artistic movements tend to arise. These movements, even when they are seen by contemporaries to be of opposite political persuasions, will always bear strong similarities. They will always defend a constellation of values whose inner unity is the unity of the colonial people's own experience of subjection; they will bind together, as parallel expressions of the same cultural identity, traditional patterns of economic life, an essentially religious respect for the decorum of nature, and a high regard for feeling and intuition. The traditional habits of production express in practical terms the respect for the course of nature that informs their piety, and in honoring feeling and intuition these thinkers honor those aspects of the human psyche that they feel most faithfully bind them to the rhythm of nature. This constellation of IO

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History n values arises not only when a colonial people begins to throw off a foreign colonizer but also when deprived segments of an advanced economy likewise begin to discover their independence, as the remarkably similar behavior of the white South, the blacks, and the women's movement at similar cultural moments can bear witness. It is as if every developing nation or part of a nation had to replay the quarrel between "Westemizers" and "Slavophiles" of late nineteenth-century Russia. John Shelton Reed has recendy pointed out how the quarrel between the Chapel Hill progressives and the Vanderbilt Agrarians, with whom Warren was tangentially associated, resembled the earlier quarrel, and the Agrarians themselves were conscious of their affinities. 2 Warren himself remarked in an interview with Marshall Walker that the Agrarians recognized something of their own circumstances in the cultural situation of the Irish Renaissance: It was a part of a turning back, a turning from their interest in poetry to try to see the setting of the kind of poetry that interested them. The notion oflreland was deep in this too, though it was not specified often-the notion of a somewhat backward society in an oudying place with a different tradition and a rich folk-life, facing the big modem machine. This notion was in the background, talked about not as a model but as a parallel somehow. [Talking, p. 176] These movements are often called reactionary in character, and often they are. But what is common to all these movements, even to those that do not embrace reactionary politics, is a desire to vindicate the folkways and political traditions of a subject people by defining certain artistic and philosophical habits of thought different from those of the more economically advanced culture they are under pressure to emulate. These movements represent a threatened culture's attempt to retain its spiritual integrity. One of their common features is the habit of equating political divisions with psychological ones. The aesthetic theories of such movements tum on these divisions, locating the seat of artistic integrity at some place other than the seat of rationality and economic power. Whether these artists' politics are an external version of their aesthetic concerns or whether their art is a reflection of their political predicament is a nice but perhaps unanswerable question. It would be easy enough, as well as satisfying, to assign the priority to politics, but to do so one must ignore how much the political ends such artists strove for were aesthetic in character, how much the society they envisioned was not only one in which they could imagine themselves working but also one which

12 Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History would have manifested in itself some of the integrity and density they valued in a work of art. 3 One might, of course, turn the screw again, but even the unmasking impulse which tempts modern readers faced with these continuities between aesthetics and politics to cry, "Aha! But even their aesthetic theory of politics conceals primary political motives!" is itself aesthetic in character, is not different in kind from the impulse an artist has when he or she makes a poem turn on itself in its concluding lines. The temptation to trace hard continuities between art and politics is so strong that I feel myself compelled to state at the outset the kinds of continuities I think it reasonable to consider. Warren himself, early and late, has always been interested in these continuities between art and politics, particularly in that southern context we have just been looking at, and I am inclined to follow his lead, not only to elucidate his habits of thought, but also to see what conclusions follow from them. For all of the evolution of Warren's political allegiances, his reflections on art and politics have consistendy tended in the same direction. It is the same resemblance between political and aesthetic reasoning that fascinated Warren in the Nashville of the 1920s and that fascinates him in his 1975 Democracy and Poetry,4 where he claims that politics itself might be healed by a concern with form, that to produce a satisfactory formnot a rigorously symmetrical form but a form that does justice to the ironies, the dissonances and unexpected harmonies, of experience-itself requires a certain practical insight into human nature that deepens political considerations. Warren's reluctance to trace hard continuities between art and politics, and his impatience with rigorous ideological deduction (whether of the Marxist or of the Agrarian sort), has in many minds obscured his interest in how they do hang together, but the looser continuities he does trace have always been a part of how he thinks about other people's art and how he plans his own. That I allow Warren's practice to color my own, that I too am interested in how thought and social life condition each other but am reluctant to argue that thought is a rigorously defined consequence of "material conditions" (or to argue, as such rigor would force me to do, that all mortal flesh except me is incapable of reflecting in intelligent good faith upon social life, since thought in that case-or at least everybody else's thought-is the prisoner of material interests), I fully admit and see no reason to apologize for. Perhaps it is best simply to note how much political and aesthetic reasoning resemble each other, and to note in the same breath that each has a way of unhappily lurking within and tripping up the other. As the

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 13 principles of taste often mask an unpalatable political program, so the most bloody-minded political orthodoxies may often be the prisoners of their own ideological symmetries. The most one can say, I think, is that art and politics both depend upon the same set of crucial discriminations in whose terms a people makes sense of its experience and that therefore they share a similar logic. I am resisting, for reasons that I hope will become clear, the temptation to call this logic which binds together an aesthetics and a politics an "ideology." I would rather call this logic a "form of life," and note that, for all its apparent rigor, it turns out to be surprisingly malleable. This logic is generally not something any culture is capable of speaking about self-consciously. A culture can be self-conscious only about what it argues with itself about, for we can make telling discriminations only about choices that are alive to us. It is difficult to be articulate about those conditions which shape how we make telling discriminations, because this "logic," this "form of life" or "set of boundary conditions," is usually not a matter in which we feel we have any choice. They are not what our culture argues about but the values and rules to which both sides in any argument within a culture will appeal. They are not what we argue about but how we argue, how we are. Boundary conditions, the rules under which other discriminations can be telling, are hard to talk about from within a culture because they have the status of unconscious commonsense assumptions about which it is useless to disagree. Inarticulate as we always are when we talk about boundary conditions, they are nevertheless the seat of some of our deepest loyalties. They express the integrity of the culture (to the extent that it is expressible) and thus can enlist all the powers that hold a society together in their defense. They are the only things on behalf of which a culture will go to war, because a threat to them is the only thing capable of moving a society as a whole to defend itself, and in their defense there is probably no act of violence-even universal annihilation-which a culture will not commit. Why, then, am I resisting calling boundary conditions an ideology? To identify the two, I think, would be to argue that the coherence of a culture is finally expressible and describable. Boundary conditions express the coherence and integrity of a society to the extent that it is expressible, and they enlist all the passions and all the sources of violence to defend that integrity. But they cannot be the final determinants of cultural identity. If they were, then the only solutions to conflict between cultures would be endless force or extermination. Boundary conditions give shape to the coherence of a society, but they

14

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History cannot finally express its essence. Whatever we say is true about a culture cannot be the whole truth about that culture. Whatever we think is a crucial fact about a culture, there is always some way, some unimagined way, in which that culture can be different while still remaining true to itself. The real integrity of our thoughts and deeds, I think, never does lie in what we can specify, and no matter how deeply we seem to be invested in some particular habit of being, there always turns out to be some as yet unimagined way in which we can do otherwise while still exhibiting the deep continuities of our experience. It is only this surprising ability to be true in the midst of change that makes persuasion across ideological boundaries imaginable, for only this ability accounts for what intellectual freedom we do have, accounts for the fact that sometimes we are not entirely the slaves of habits of mind which not only entangle us but seem to define us, both to ourselves and to our opponents. If we take anyone seriously we recognize in that person the power to become, and the more we know about such people-ourselves, for example-the less willing we are to specify those things for better or worse they cannot become. Even changes that in prospect seem to require some unimaginable leap of faith in retrospect seem not only continuous with what is most deeply characteristic of us but inevitable given that very past we had only a short while before assumed made that change impossible. All persuasion finally rests on the recognition that one's opponents are capable in mysterious ways of becoming, that cases that every conceivable evidence argues are utterly closed are not closed after all. If we can strongly derive all of our opponent's beliefs from interest, then no claim that opponent can make can conceivably tell with us, can prompt us to surprising reflections, can help us discover common grounds on which to argue in good faith with each other. If we can strongly derive all of our opponent's beliefs from interest, then we can rule out in advance any argument that opponent may bring against us, and we must think of persuasion as merely a diluted kind of violence, what weak-stomached people do who, had they the courage of their convictions, would kill each other instead. I am unwilling to argue for a rigorous continuity between thought and politics or between art and politics because I am unwilling to argue that I already know everything I might need to know about people I dislike, and I am unwilling to do that not only because I've seen how often my confident theories about how other people think have been wrong but because I see the necessity of living with them. What the idea that we are not finally the prisoners of our interests

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 15 forces us to recognize is that there is more to a culture with which we are in conflict than the particulars we are quarreling about. Further, it forces us to recognize that there are ways which we do not know about (and which they do not know about either) in which both of us are capable ofbeing simultaneously ourselves and at peace. We cannot specify in advance what those ways are, and it may be that we will never stumble upon them, but in the recognition that neither we nor they are exhausted by our descriptions we lay the foundations, even in the midst of conflict, for cultural respect. Whatever else the term respect means, it must mean finally the recognition that the foundations of identity, whether personal or cultural, are not totally subject to comprehension. To ignore the force of boundary conditions is to fail to see that sometimes one culture really does have a different habit of mind from another, to fail to see that arguments between them frequently run at cross purposes since each turns to different courts of appeal and argues in different although deceptively similar terms. But to invest cultural integrity entirely in boundary conditions is to despair of ever finding common grounds of argument, to argue that it is not only unnecessary but impossible to persuade. To argue, this is to say, that a culture is rigorously defined by its boundary conditions, its ideology, is finally to argue that force is the only medium of political exchange and annihilation the only conclusion to political conflict. However those authors who write as traditional economies come apart may respond to the chicken-and-egg problem of the relative priority of art and politics, mind and world, when they equate political divisions with psychological ones they almost always assign rationality to some part of the world not their own, usually to some region that has their own at a disadvantage. 5 So Tolstoy assigns it to Western Europe, Ransom and Tate to New York, Gandhi to England, Eldridge Cleaver to whites, certain feminists to men, and so on.6 The rationality such writers envy and expel tends to appear to them as a form of exploitation or repression. They see rationality attempting to master the whole self, ruthlessly suppressing inspiration or emotion in favot: of demonstration or calculation, and directing the whole effort of the personality away from transcendent sources of value and toward mere material improvement. As many have noted, rationality stands in the same relation to the rest of the personality that industrially developed cultures do to their exploited colonies, and linked to a preference for the "whole person" as opposed to his or her rationality alone is a desire to claim moral superiority for those who suffer the effects of colonial economies? Having banished rationality abroad, such writers look at home for

16

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History spirit, feeling, value, Reason (with a capital R), or some other transrational source of meaning which, aesthetically, motivates their search for organic form and, politically, supports their endorsement of traditional but threatened habits of life. They separate the method of rationality from its purpose, rejecting the means by which we describe explicit and verifiable principles of order in our world, the means by which we subdue our world to comprehension, in favor of those unexaminable origins of value which by rights ought to motivate rationality and inform it with purpose. In the stead of rationality, they place some time-honored form of activity, such as subsistence farming or religious devotion, in which value is embodied in action but never subject to explicit examination; they reject what can be described or proved in favor of what can be done and felt. Robert Penn Warren, no less than these others, is given to describing psychological and political divisions in the same breath, and the divisions that most command his attention are, as with the Agrarians, those that issued in the American Civil War, that political and moral crisis that gave us Americans both our sense of being a nation and our awareness of having a history in the deep sense-that is, gave us our recognition of the cost of our principles. But unlike the other Agrarians Warren does not place himself within his geography; he does not describe the divisions that interest him in terms of which side is to be rejected and which to be embraced. He is, despite all of his much-proclaimed Confederate sympathies, a border-state writer, which is to say a writer both morally and geographically from what we can view either as neutral territory or as no-man's-land. Warren treats the experience of history as the experience of suffering moral cruxes. This habit, along with his claim that the Civil War was America's initiation into history, is reminiscent of C. Vann Woodward's claim in The Burden of Southern History that the Civil War taught us that "history is not just something that happens to everybody else.'>~~ Woodward's claim, in tum, bears conscious affinities with Reinhold Niebuhr's views in The Irony ofAmerican History. 9 I have attempted to follow Warren's lead in the historical speculations that follow, looking at history not as a matter of conflicting forces capable of being measured in terms of per capita income and tons of pig iron produced but instead as a matter of conflicting habits of thought and socially entangled moral cruxes which we must attempt, so far as is possible, to see from within. Warren's little book of 1956 on segregation, Segregation: The Inner Conflia in the South, for example, perhaps even more than the famous Who Speaks for the Negro?10 emphasizes how the complexities and ironies of political divisions

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 17 match the mixed feelings of those caught up in those divisions, and describes the failure to achieve racial integration and the failure to achieve personal integration as linked problems. It is characteristic of Warren as the inhabitant of an intellectual and geographical border that his discussions of the Civil War avoid both the Grand Moments dear to southern fancy and the Grand Ideals dear to northern fancy. 11 The scenes to which Warren's imagination returnsthe Battle of the Wilderness, for instance-serve nobody's program. What Warren always focuses upon are the cruxes and ironies-how in fighting bushwhackers Forrest's men used methods scarcely less lawless than the bushwhackers' own ("Court Martial"); how high purpose and vanity are inenricably combined ("Battle Fatigue"); how Union antiracism turns into racist condescension and disgust (Tobias Sears in Band of Angels [1955], the wounded Lieutenant in Wilderness [1961]); how even the emotions of the blacks themselves are horribly complicated (Talbutt in Wilderness, Rau-Ru in Band ofAngels) .12 Warren's Civil War, like Shelby Foote's, is alive to the ironies of events and the self-entrapment of the principal actors in the entanglements of their own ideas. But Warren, again like Foote, never uses these ironies simply to cast discredit on either side, a critique of someone else's selfrighteousness being, as Warren would say, a disguised form of one's own. 13 Warren learns from the irony of history not that idealists are shallow fools but that ideals are costly, and that their cost is at once an oblique testimony to their seriousness, a warning to the uncircumspect and unself-conscious, and a measure of the force of the unsolvable conflict between experience and right. Warren puts it this way in The Legacy of the Civil War:

In a Civil War-especially in one such as this, when the nation shares deep and significant convictions and is not a mere handbasket of factions huddled arbitrarily together by happen-so-all the selfdivision of conflict within individuals becomes a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-division of the country a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.... It draws us to the glory of the human effort to win meaning from the complex and confused motives of men and the blind ruck of the event. 14 What is more interesting than Warren's moral acuity and impartiality, however, is how different the terms of the oppositions he describes are

r8 Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History from the terms used by the other Agrarians. We do not have the familiar opposition between a rational, industrial North and a spiritual, agricultural South. Warren instead distinguishes North and South not by contrasting industry and agriculture but by contrasting sympathetic and unsympathetic attitudes toward economic improvision. 15 And the psychological-or rather moral-opposition to which Warren equates the economic opposition is not one between two regions of the mind but rather one between two possible responses to a moral crisis that cannot be answered adequately by either one. The two responses are characteristic of opposing habits of thought whose tension in Warren's view characterizes American history as a whole. Warren's artistic work is itself characterized by a tension related to that which he describes in American history, in the first place because his fiction tends to turn on the particular crucial questions he discussed in his historical books, and in the second place because his central artistic question, the question of the internal authority of imagination, is simply a translation into the language of aesthetics of the question of the internal authority of conscience which American history is a groping attempt to answer. When a moral crisis such as that of the years preceding the Civil War calls into question the rules which have hitherto governed our political conduct, Warren argues, we naturally reach for a higher level of abstraction in the hope of discovering a controlling principle that will resolve our difficulties. The political controversies of the r8sos, as Warren describes them in John Brown: The Making of a Martyr and The Legacy of the Civil War had the effect of reopening the debate about the nature and origin of law which had been closed at the time of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. 16 Both sides could trace their positions to clearly articulated statements in the foundational documents of our nation-antislavery advocates referring to the statements of principle listed in the Declaration of Independence, proslavery advocates referring to the implicit recognition of the Peculiar Institution in the Constitution-and therefore both sides had to turn to some source of legitimacy logically prior to either of these documents. Behind the conflict between the two documents on this particular issue is a deeper conflict about the nature of the law. The contradiction between these documents expresses the contradiction between the two vital principles of American political life, those vital principles Jeremiah Beaumont, the main character ofWorldEnough and Time, 17 calls "the idea" and "the world." On the one hand, we have the unitary abstractions of the Dec-

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 19 laration as it has traditionally if wrongly been read, abstractions that ground our sense of national sanction and purpose and provide us with political unity by dedicating us in common to certain values. On the other hand, we have the principle of federation embodied in the Constitution, which unifies American political practice by establishing procedures whereby political divisions that might otherwise threaten unity become, through their embodiment in an institutional system of separation of powers, the ways by which union is dynamically maintained. 18 Succeeding political conflicts have a way of being translated into the terms of the conflict that each generation believes it discovers between the Declaration and the Constitution. In the 18sos, abolition pitted what it saw as the purity of principle of the Declaration against the messy compromises of the Constitution, which it termed "A Covenant with Hell." After Fort Sumter, southerners looked upon the Constitution as the instrument of northern coercion and chose to cast the Civil War as a replay of the ratification struggle-as a war between "Confederates" and "Federals." Progressive historians like Beard and Parrington could not resist seeing the conflict between the Declaration and the Constitution as a foreshadowing-a type, really-{)f the Bryan-McKinley contest of 1896. Always the Constitution comes off as the flawed and sordid document, and always the Declaration seems to transcend its equally tortured composition. It is worth noting at the outset that the Founders themselves as a rule saw no such conflict between the two documents, and that it is not true either that the Federalists were McKinleyites in disguise or the AntiFederalists the ancestors of those political traditions variously manifested in Jefferson, Jackson, and Bryan. They did not find the two documents to be contradictory, as Garry Wills has recently argued, because their concept of rights was different in crucial ways from ours. Our traditional understanding of the opening words to the Declaration reads Jefferson's notion of inalienable rights as if they represented prepolitical imperatives upon which no state can trespass because they take their origin from something higher than and logically prior to either the state or social life. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we say, are inalienable rights because they spring from a private moral fountain-{)ur existence as human individuals-which no social act must be allowed to muddy. We think of these rights as having the same kind of authority private conscience has, and we set them up as a kind of force capable of holding its own against the public forces of duty, responsibility, and role. This understanding of the unitary abstractions of the Declaration, if Garry Wills

20

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History is right, is a nineteenth-century romantic misreading ofJefferson's essentially eighteenth-century document. What Wills understands to be Jefferson's concept of right owes more to Francis Hutcheson than to John Locke (whose famous Second Treatise on Government Jefferson apparently never did study carefully). Hutcheson understood government to be the instrumentality of public happiness, the means by which the natural human desire to reason fairly with other people ("candor") and to make each other happy ("benevolence") could be realized. Government is not invented to repress the elemental violence of human nature (as in Hobbes), nor is it intended chiefly as the guardian of the individual's purely private welfare (as in Locke). It is always and only the arena of essentially public and sociable acts. Hutcheson understood a "right" to be a license to perform any act that tends to the general good, and he understood the general good to be a function of public rather than of private life, to be a matter of common life rather than simply a matter of consumption. An inalienable right, therefore, is not a right grounded in some seat of transcendental authority but merely a right that is a logical precondition for benevolence and candor. One has a right to life, this is to say, not because God endowed one with an infinitely valuable conscience but because one cannot act in the public arena unless one is first alive. Right is not a sort of property that one takes into society from some prepolitical state of nature; it is always social and derives its force merely from the fact that it is logically necessary for social life. I find Wills's reading persuasive because it fits in well with the general desire of the Founders to avoid hauling in transcendence wherever possible. And it shows that there is a deep harmony between our two apparently contradictory foundational documents, for in Wills's reading the Declaration, like the Constitution, is not founded in brooding omnipresences but in what its authors took to be the minimal logical requirements of all social life. We traditionally like to read both documents as specifying the nature of conflicting forces-the Declaration describing the conflict between the private individual and his or her society, the Constitution describing conflicts within that society. Both documents increasingly seem to me instead to specify the conditions under which social life is possible. Rights are inalienable not because society ought not to compromise them but because society cannot be society if it does so. Powers are to be separated not because doing so will prevent one section from trampling another but because no government can be legitimate in which one is allowed to be a judge in one's own case. Even if the Founders saw no contradiction between the Declaration

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 21 and the Constitution, the fact remains that the contestants of the 184-os and 18sos saw one, and it is this illusion-and its tragic consequenceswith which Warren is chiefly concerned. Because the debate pitted two foundational documents against each other, both contestants had to reach for a still higher level of abstraction, had to ask "From whence did the Founders derive their constitution-making power?" Each side turned to opposite sorts of authority to answer this question and in so doing misread our political traditions in ways that, as Warren argues in The Legacy of the Civil War, continue to deform our political practice. Both sides, aware of being minorities, avoided deriving this power from "the will of the people." But it may well have been something more than mere self-interest which led them to do so. For what they sought was not only an ability to describe the origin of the power any state wields but also an ability to weigh competing uses of that power against each other. Power clearly arises from the ability of people in public arenas to enter into deliberations with each other. What they do with that power, however, must be subject to limitations about which they themselves cannot deliberate, for public power can no more will its own legitimacy than my mind can will its own correctness. The purpose of law is clearly not only to embody the popular will but also to determine whether or not the popular will, even when unanimous, is wishing for a worthy object. To identify law and power is to commit politics to the vagaries and brutalities of collective passions. It entraps politics in a vicious circle whereby a constitutional convention becomes only a legislature with grandiose ambitions, attaining the translegal power to make a constitution by an act, at once sinister and risible, of the very power it claims to be setting limits upon. Law and power must have separate sources not just because the people are "untrustworthy" and "subject to passions" but because even a perfectly trustworthy people must be able to assess the correctness of their actions from some external point of view. To identify law and power is (to borrow a metaphor from another context) like checking the veracity of a newspaper story by buying a second copy of the paper. Perhaps six decades of republican rule had convinced both sides of the conflict of the 185os how heterogeneous and unstable the popular will is. Certainly it persuaded even the most radical on both sides that the art of constitution-making is not the art of establishing procedures for carrying out the popular will under circumstances where its dictates are clearthat is a trivial problem-but is rather the art of designing institutions that address conflicts within the body politic by embodying that conflict in

22

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History the internal structure of deliberative bodies. Both sides had to return to the Founders' concerns, which were not to enact the popular will but to design a deliberative body whereby the divisions in a heterogeneous body politic can be negotiated. Their chief method was separation of powers, both between the various branches of the government and within the legislative branch. This is why the crucial debates--over the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Wilmot Proviso, the KansasNebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision-turned on the question of the status of slavery in the territories, which is to say, on the question of how new conditions that affected the legal standoff between the sections were to be addressed. 19 The law-if it is to limit power and not simply to embody it-necessarily requires a higher law to ensure its legitimacy. In Arendt's phrase, power must come from below, but law must come from above. It is clear enough what we mean nowadays by the phrase "higher law''-we have been taught how to use that phrase by Emerson and Thoreau. For Warren, the phrase "higher law" is always "fighting words," the battle cry of sanguinary folly. Speaking of the "Bloody Kansas" fighting in]ohnBrown, Warren writes: ''The disagreement [over the Constitution of Kansas] might conceivably have been settled under terms of law, but when it was transposed into terms of theology there was no hope of settlement. There is only one way to conclude a theological argument: bayonets and bullets" (p. 31+). But the search for a higher court of appeal need not always lead one in this direction, and before we turn to the deadly parody of political thought which, in Warren's view, characterized the political debates of the 18sos, it is worthwhile to reflect for a few moments on how the question of discovering a higher court of appeal might have been answered differently, how it was in fact answered by the Founders. The Founders solved the legitimacy problem, they thought, by establishing procedures that would limit the scope of power. They did not legitimize this act by referring to the power vested in them by the people who had selected them (which would have trapped them in a logical circle). Nor even, except in perfunctory ways, did they do so by referring to Divine Will. Rather than citing any extralegal source of authority and legitimacy, they referred instead to what struck them as the necessary institutional basis for preserving fair disagreement. As Garry Wills has persuasively shown, separation of powers originates in the maxim that no party can be a judge in its own case. Hence no legislature should rule on the legitimacy of its own laws, nor should any executive be the judge of its own fairness in applying those laws or have

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 23 the power of making those laws it is the executive's job to enforce. The Founders here had in mind what a government must have in order to make the slightest plausible claim to legitimacy.20 Wills insists on the distinction between a mixed government, in which each branch is capable of acting in every capacity but represents a distinct interest (the system Polybius describes and that eighteenth-century writers claimed to discover in the British Constitution, which distributes power among king, nobles, and Commons), and a government by separated powers, where the government is divided along .functional lines into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Wills argues that the Founders had only the latter in mind, not the former, and that therefore their aim in setting up the separation of powers was not to stalemate a government whose force they expected would be sinister and excessive but simply to separate those who make and execute the laws from those who judge the legitimacy and fairness of those laws. The separation of powers is not a means to protect private interests from the intrusions of the public realm by crippling the government's ability to act; it is rather a means by which a public deliberative body can signify its own good faith. Its skepticism is not the skepticism of those who have no faith in human uprightness but the skepticism of those who understand that uprightness itself must be able, in order to be uprightness, to specify those cases it has no right to judge. If Wills is correct that separation of powers and mixed government are different things, then perhaps we are lucky in that the functional divisions of separated powers have become somewhat contaminated by the political division of separated interests. For this contamination enables separation of powers to serve both the legitimizing function Wills describes for it and the stabilizing function that would have been more direcdy served by "mixed government." That our political divisions map partly onto the divisions of our institutions enables them to be used to address those divisions. That our political divisions do not map precisely onto our institutional divisions, however, probably also saves those institutional divisions from embodying political conflicts in a way that would preclude solution and produce either stalemate or civil war. The Founders chose-even in the face of some of the particular disagreements in which the Republic was to be caught up-to attempt to set up the procedures they would wish to see applied to any imaginable quarrel. They hoped to discover procedures that were sturdy enough to adjudicate even cases of conflict in which they could not anticipate which side would be stronger or which more right. Their guiding principle was not the desire to secure what some transcendental imperative would define

24-

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History as "the right'' but instead to design a procedure whereby opposing parties could hope to address each other fairly. Not knowing which side some future conflict would find them on, they strove to devise institutions and rules that both sides could fairly be expected to agree to. Recognizing that democracy and freedom are often contradictory terms, they chose to protect freedom by forcing democracy in advance to agree to rules that would prevent democracy from governing in cases where it would abolish freedom. They paid particular attention to the political rights of minorities because even those in the majority on the issues of the day could imagine later circumstances under which they would be in the minority. Politics, they felt, begins with the act of imagining how one can fairly disagree, and its chief aim is to design a procedure to which even bitter opponents could be expected to agree. (And perhaps any political theory that does not begin and end here describes not politics but Punch-and-Judy.) Succeeding generations reinforced this solution of the higher-law problem by establishing a cult of veneration of the Founders, who became as it were the lares and penates of the American republic, the embodiment not of direct access to the Absolute but of a tradition of political adjustment in whose terms their successors-even Calhoun during the Nullification crisis-had to cast their disagreements. For these later politicians, to refer to the Founders was not necessarily to refer to political thinkers wiser and closer to transcendence than themselves but to take their own place in an organic tradition of "human worldliness that will save men from the pitfalls of human nature" (Arendt, p. 175). The concern of the Founders and their immediate successors was to solve the higher-law problem in a way that would not call upon transcendence, for they dearly realized how fatal such an act would be. They thought, in Robert Ferguson's telling phrase, not like ministers but like lawyers. And the law they saw themselves as representing was not a technical codification of transcendental imperatives but a commonly possessed set of first principles about which there was explicit public consensus. In the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century, this position became increasingly untenable, both because of the increasing technicality of the law itself and because of the increasing temptation to refer to transcendental sanctions in American political life. Pro- and antislavery radicals, both doubting the efficacy of the Constitution to settle their cases, resorted to higher-law arguments which, different as they were from each other, were more different still from the understanding of higher law they derived from the Founders. Both sides realized that the earlier version of higher law, a practical tradition not

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 25 bound in any strong way to transcendental sanctions, had failed them, and both therefore reached directly for that very support-theological support-which the Founders had been at pains to exclude.21 Both sides, realizing that their conflict was ultimately between external institutions and internal sanctions, solved their problem by eliminating the vitalizing conflict between the world and the idea upon which the idea of justice and the act of serving justice depend. The proslavery and characteristically southern response, according to W afren, is rigorously external. It calls for dogmatic adherence to the rules the crisis has cast doubt upon. Because the human laws that have governed us are the product of agreements entered into willingly, so the "southern" argument runs, those laws remain binding and are to be interpreted with rigorous and merciless logic no matter what the cost. 22 The result of this legalistic and deductive bias of mind, Warren argues in The Legacy of the Civil War, is a closed and inhumane society incapable of self-criticism and therefore incapable of those changes which might secure survival if not improvement.23 The northern response to moral crisis, Warren argues, is rigorously internal, and what it calls for is the abandonment of positive law in favor of what Warren calls "higher law." The appeal to a higher law appears to be similar to an appeal to what Aristotle calls "natural law." Both disclose an authority more fundamental than those which have hitherto governed conduct, an authority that determines the interpretation, application, and even the justice of the positive law. But there is a crucial difference. For the authority of natural law is the authority of first principles which one holds in common with one's opponents and which one normally recognizes as informing some institution capable of adjudicating one's differences. When one appeals to natural law, both sides of the dispute know exactly upon what grounds the case will be decided and what sorts of arguments will tell. To make such an appeal is to recognize that the conflict remains capable of mediation by an institution designed to provide procedural fairness to both sides, and for this reason those who appeal to natural law necessarily admit to large areas of agreement with their opponents. Both sides must subscribe not only to common procedures but also to common values, for it is only by appealing to common values that adjudication can proceed. In contrast, to appeal to a higher law (as it was understood by the Abolitionists) is to appeal to a moral insight that one's opponents are too depraved to grasp. When one makes this appeal, one claims, in effect, that one does not have values in common with one's opponents, and that the differences between one

26

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History and one's opponents are so fundamental that no institution is capable of resolving them. The distinction is ultimately between, on one hand, an external but unwritten tradition of worldly wisdom-what Arendt calls "the rights of Englishmen," the last court of appeal for the American revolutionariesand on the other hand, an internal and in principle unwritten origin of force and right-what Arendt calls "the rights of man," the last court of appeal for the French revolutionaries. The appeal to the natural law is an attempt to reach accommodation by retreating to a higher level of abstraction. But the appeal to the higher law is an attempt to justify abandonment of accommodation, to justify some discontinuity of practice, some suspension of the rules, in order to meet the demands of a political emergency. 24 When during the Anthony Burns crisis Garrison publicly burned the Constitution, calling it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," he demonstrated the logical consequence of higher-law thoughtthe destruction not only of the particular public institutions described in that instrument but also of the idea that any public institution is capable of mediating serious conflicts, of the idea that one has any obligation to construct a common life with those with whom one is in profound disagreement or that one has any duty to them except to force them into submission. In ] ohn Brown Warren says of the higher law among the Abolitionists: "They were so sure that they knew the truth Theodore Parker quoted what Cromwell said in the House of Commons: 'There is one general grievance, and that is the law!'" (p. 318). If politics is the art of imagining how one will live with disagreements, how one will discover grounds for public life in the face of conflicts one cannot expect to be able to always settle, then the last victim of the higher law is politics itsel£ As Warren acidly remarks in The Legacy of the Civil War: "the higher-law man, in any time and place, must always be ready to burn any constitution, for he must, ultimately, deny the very concept of society" (p. 26). The immediate outcome of the doctrine of the higher law must beas Garrison and most others with him realized-the secession of the North. And the ultimate outcome must be-since this understanding of the higher law destroys the belief that accommodation can be anything but self-betrayal-the destruction of the idea of society itself, and with it the destruction of the idea of freedom, for it is only within a society that the concept of freedom has any meaning. The irony is not lost on Warren that it was the legalists rather than the higher-law men who finally seceded.

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 27 Nor is the irony lost on Warren that in some ways the two combatants exchanged roles once the war began-the Union displaying that centrality of control and coordination of purpose that legalism must value, the Confederacy-shackled with its doctrine of states' rights and thus (as Arendt has remarked) more an alliance than a republic-caught up in struggles between states which vitiated its ability to fight and dissipated its political loyalties in a swarm of particularisms much like those to be feared from the higher law.25 The higher law as Warren describes it in The Legacy of the Civil War is never a written law, subject to interpretation and therefore to compromise. It is not even, in any definable sense, law at all. For since it justifies excursions from the law, it is always higher than law, and those who claim its warrant consider it prior to law, the basis of law, and therefore not subject to legal criticism or even scrutiny. The higher law, that is, is not simply a pious Supreme Court, but is rather a radically interior source of authority more fundamental than law. It is, in other words, not a form of law but a form of willingness to overthrow law, and it can make itself manifest only to the extent that it creates legal difficulties, because by nature it cannot manifest itself as any portion of positive law. It is the blind and unwordable imperative those who adhere to it feel in their hearts. It is inward, even private, but it is often claimed in common by all the members of one faction and provides them with motivation that is at once political and psychological, for in linking private judgment and communal willingness to overthrow institutions it identifies the individual consent upon which democracy is based with the revolutionary propensities to which democracy is always subject. It is a transcendental ideal, and like every transcendental ideal we can be aware of it only when it causes us confusion. The actions to which a warrant that cuts us loose from law urge us are inevitably violent ones, for it is particularly in the act of violence that one feels most forcibly the sense of transcending those human or positive laws which the higher law licenses one to reject. As Hannah Arendt, perhaps an even more trenchant critic of higher-law thought than Warren, argues in On Revolution: "Since the days of the French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunction in sacrificing to their 'principles,' or to the course of history, or to the cause of Revolution as such" (p. 90). On one hand, one's commitments drive one to violence. As Warren

28

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History remarks in The Legacy of the Civil War: ''The man who is privy to God's will cannot long brook argument, and when one declines the arbitrament of reason, even because one seems to have all the reason and virtue on one's own side, one is making ready for the arbitrament of blood" (p. 20). On the other hand, one hungers to shed blood to prove the force of one's commitment. Speaking of the contempt of the higher-law men for the moil of politics, Warren notes how it mrned them from the northeastern labor problem, which offered only politics, to the slavery problem, which promised them what he calls the last infirmity of the noble mind, conscience without responsibility. "Not only [by dealing with the labor problem] would one dirty one's self by trying to reform the local system. One would have to deal with it piecemeal; one would have to work out compromise solutions. But with slavery all was different. One could demand the total solution, the solution of absolute morality; one could achieve the apocalyptic fri.tron)) (p. 29). The result of the dive into apocalypse which the higher law requires, however, is that the value which one rums to the higher law as a means of finding becomes evanescent and empty. The price of rejecting dirty social instimtions is that doing so makes the higher law indistinguishable from mere will-to-kill. Without the presence of those conventions which higher law is at pains to destroy the higher law itself evaporates into mere enthusiasm. This is not to say, however, that the claim to the sanction of the higher law is always or was then merely a cover for an apocalyptic hunger. What it is to say, however, is that the program of the higher-law men necessarily undoes itself. Left to the higher law, the just cause and the dark compulsions of the heart mustered in the name of that cause become indistinguishable. Worse even than the anarchy that is the necessary consequence of the appeal to the higher law is the emptiness the higher law reveals itself to be when left on its own. Warren puts it this way in The Legacy of the Civil War: "With every man his own majority as well as his own law, there is, in the logical end, only anarchy, and anarchy of a peculiarly tedious and bloodthirsty sort, for every drop is to be spilled in God's name and by his explicit directive" (p. 33). If for Warren the southern habit of mind was most fully realized in such figures as Calhoun, who locked himself and his people with merciless logic in the prison of his rationalizations, or Jefferson Davis, whose unbending adherence to conventions that appeared to him to be principles disabled the Confederacy from examining itself, never mind defending itself, the northern habit of mind-although dear in its outlines in Emer-

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History son and Thoreau-was most fully realized in the figure of Garrison, who proclaimed the higher law by burning a copy of the Constitution, that "covenant with hell," replacing it with the urgent and nonnegotiable claims of his fury for justice, and in the figure of John Brown, whom Thoreau called an "angel of light," whom Bronson Alcott called "superior to any legal traditions," and whose superiority made itself most clear at the Pottawatomie massacre and at Harper's Ferry.26 One need not go so far as John Brown, however, to see that the appeal to the higher law is necessarily antisocial. For at times of political and moral crisis, when the institutions that are supposed to mediate conflicts seem irremediably corrupt, and when one's opponents seem capable of nothing but bad faith, appeal to the higher law, and the rejections of institutions which is implied in such an appeal, seem hard to avoid. But since the higher law cannot by nature be explicit, one's opponents cannot determine what will tell for or against them when they are judged by such a law. Its rulings are not subject to the calculus of negotiation, and therefore no institution is capable of mediating it. In the absence of either a forum in which to argue or mutually agreeable rules of argument, the natural consequence of conflict is violence, even when neither side has bloodthirsty intentions. Appealing to the higher law, they leave themselves no alternative but to engage in acts which may discredit the values they are attempting to uphold and which, joyfully mustering their dark impulses in a just cause, may transform them against their will into something they scarcely wish to recognize. The appeal to higher law, then, is difficult to distinguish even in its sanest uses from the appeal to force. It is not argument but a way of declaring that one's attempts to persuade are at an end. It is an internal and self-justifying power which seems above morality but which may just as easily be beneath it. It is an apparently transcendent warrant which debases those who claim it, a high moral intent which leads to the repeal of morality, a private language in which no proclamation can be made. And it is also deeply fascinating. Warren notes in The Legacy ofthe Civil War that it is the actions of those in the grip ofthemselves which give us the heroic, charged images that our hearts and imaginations strenuously demand-for instance, that of the Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy rushing out from the warehouse in Alton, Illinois, to meet his death at the hands of the lynch mob. It even gives us the image of John Brown, abstracted from his life and from his history, standing on the scaffold and drawing a pin from the lapel of his coat and offering

29

30

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History it to the executioner to use in adjusting the hood. Such images survive everything-logic, criticism, even fact if it stands in the way. They generate their own values. For men need symbols for their aspirations. [p. 33] It is curious that Warren turns to Brown, of all people, when he looks for a symbol of aspiration. Perhaps this reflects the danger of high aspiration. But perhaps it also reflects the power of those aspirations too, for what else could lead Warren to admire John Brown, about whom, thirty years before, he had written a caustic biography? The fascination of such figures is that for all their flaws they embody our values, or more exactly, our hunger for values, in compelling ways. They move, even if they do not guide, our aspirations. What is more, they present to us the cost of having those aspirations in the first place. It is their virtues, in other words, rather than their vices that are dangerous, and it is on this account that the griffi farces they enact must be taken with the seriousness of tragedy. 27 This is perhaps why Warren's most compelling advocate of the higher law is not his vile John Brown but his deeply sympathetic if monstrous Jeremiah Beaumont, the protagonist of World Enough and Time, who comes to learn the hard way that "it is the first and last temptation to name the idea as all" (p. 463). We take the higher law seriously because we take ourselves seriously, for one cannot be a self without some private and self-transcending passion that dedicates one's self to something of which one is neither fully in control nor fully aware. "What is man but his passion?" as Warren asked in Audubon. The higher law is the self's attempt to validate itself It is the sort of thing to which one resorts when one first feels one's self to be a self. It is also the first resort of moral seriousness, for even as the experience of higher law creates moral difficulties it persuades us that that experience is the origin of value. In the fate of those who appeal to the higher law we see not only one possible consequence of the reliance upon private judgment and internal authority which is the basis of democracy, but we see also one consequence of the concern with selfhood and with placing the self in some essential relation to what it values. What raises this attempt to found the self above narcissism and wishful thinking is that it of necessity commits the self to unhappiness. For a transforming passion, even if it appears to be only a pretty name for a sordid hunger, is a difficult master. It must, to found the self, always be larger than the self it defines. If its appeal is that it licenses freedom, that it cannot be reduced to formulation by others, its

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History 31 threat is that it remains unformulable even to the self which would define itself in its terms. One is tempted to say "the self is a mystery'' and throw up one's hands. But it is a peculiarly urgent mystery. For it is not the mystery of an unsolved problem but the mystery of an unanswered desire. If recognizing the reality of others is an act of generosity (of a sort), recognizing the self is an acute sort of failure. For one needs to know the self in order to know whether it has a purpose, but nothing one knows can be either self or purpose. And of course it is not only the self that suffers on account of this failure. For it seems to be our habit (or at least it seems so to Warren) to turn to violence in an attempt to prove to ourselves that we do grasp what must by nature elude us, as if selfhood, no less than the higher law, always demands blood. Warren's fanatics from John Brown up seek to demonstrate the integrity of their commitments by showing to what lengths they will go in their service, as if imitating those whose commitments lead them to violence will yield them a self-justifying insight into those commitments. The most dangerous fanatic is after all not a man driven by profound beliefs into violence sanctioned by those beliefs; rather, he is a man driven by the fear that he has no beliefs and by the hope that violence may reveal beliefs capable of justifying and provoking the acts he has already resolved to commit. He does not violate the social compact because he has a selfhood and a transforming ideal which are above the law; he violates the social compact because he knows that no act less sweeping will allow him to discover that ideal or to found himself. And as what he seeks continues to elude him, his acts necessarily become more and more violent. Warren notes in "Terror," an early poem, how, in search of a vivifying definition of terror, his contemporaries (later collectively embodied in Brad Tolliver of Flood) seek out death, fighting first for the Left in Spain, and then for the Right in Finland:

So some, whose passionate emptiness and tidal Lust swayed toward the debris of Madrid, And left New York to loll in their fierce idyll Among the olives, where the snipers hid. And now the North-to seek that visioned face And polarize their iron of despair, Who praise no beauty like the boreal grace Which greens the dead eye under the rocket's flare.

32

Law, Higher Law, and the Irony of American History They fight old friends, for their obsession knows Only the immaculate itch, not human friends or foes.

[SP, p. 284-] Warren wrote in 1981 a more acerbic and contemporary version of this poem, "Rumor Verified," in which he contrasts the terror-seeking and vacant protagonist with one who has passed through terror into a selfhood founded not on transcendental sanction but on appropriating the sad experience of lacking such sanction: But even in the face of the rumor, you sometimes shudder, Seeing men as old as you who survive the terror Of knowledge. You watch them slyly. What is their trick? Do they wear a Halloween face? But what can you do? Perhaps pray to God for strength to face the verification That you are simply a man, with a man's dead reckoning, nothing more. 28 Warren's fanatics, then, are not so much adherents to the higher law as people who desperately wish they had a higher law to adhere to. But since the higher law is transcendent, perhaps we can draw no distinction between those driven to violence by commitment and those driven to violence by doubt and longing for commitment. For transcendent things-such as a law higher than law, or a metaphysical self, to which such a law is allied--