Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Interesting NR Review of Brookhiser's "What Would the Founders Do?"

The modern free state was born in late-17th-century England, and the American Founders were close enough to the English example to preserve its most sensible features. Like a lawyer who prepares a new contract by marking up the last one, the Founders lifted words, phrases, arguments directly from the English precedents. At the same time, Brookhiser observes, the Americans designed their republic in blissful ignorance of the next great moral and spiritual upheaval: The “Romantic age came too late for the Founders. It was as remote from them as Marx, Freud, or post-modernism. By missing the Romantic revolution, they missed the urge to uncover an authentic inner core, which we, as Romanticism’s late children, still feel. The Founders were always either learning, via their senses, or learning to control themselves.”

The pre-Romantic mind of the 18th century was, T. S. Eliot said, a “mature mind: but it was a narrow one”; John Henry Newman complained of the “dryness and superficiality” of the neoclassical sages. The poetry of the 18th century means less to us today than that of the ages that preceded and followed it; but where constitutions are concerned, the qualities of maturity and self-control valued by the Augustan temperament were wholly a blessing. Their love of order and restraint enabled the chief political actors to resist the utopian impulses that Romanticism was subsequently to nourish. When, at length, an American statesman shaped by the Romantic tradition appeared, and obtained power in a revolutionary moment, he devoted his genius not to overthrowing but to protecting the Founders’ 18th-century achievement. At Gettysburg and in the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln used Romantic techniques to strengthen the neoclassical Constitution. The Romantic mind gloried in the highly colored poetry of the past; Lincoln rallied the North with a quasi-religious rhetoric derived from the Bible and the country’s earliest spiritual inspirations.

By contrast, countries without an 18th-century political tradition — regimes founded solely on a Romantic inspiration — have fared less well. The difference between Lincoln and his contemporary Otto von Bismarck is instructive. Bismarck, like Lincoln, had been influenced in his youth by Byron and the poetry of Romanticism; his rhetoric, like Lincoln’s, was pregnant with the figurative language of the past. The philosophy of “blood and iron” was shot through with the spirit of the primitive Teutonic myths and romances — but Bismarck used this poetry, not to strengthen free institutions, but to destroy Prussia’s fledgling liberal tradition. No wonder Americans are grateful for their 18th-century revolutionaries, narrowness and all.