John Stobart paints a coasting sloop loading bales of hay at Ring 's End Landing, Darien, Connecticut. She is named Clio¡,for the Muse of History, whose concerns were celebrated with reverence, in time past, 1vith the concerns of all th e other arts. Is it irrational to think the artist felt that, in the natural grace he ca ught in this scene? It's a scene of some force, in its quietude: the sunlight of this quiet day not long past lends benediction to an experie nce of man that began, so far as we know, with Mesopotamian sloops on the River Euphrates.
LETTERS
IN CLIO'S CAUSE: Ortega y Gasset, in his resonant little book, discovered (t hat is a good word for it: he discovered this as surely as Columbus discovered America) that the salient characteristic of modern man is his ahistorical self-confidence. It is more nearly fatuity than self-confidence, if self-confidence connotes self-reli ance. Ortega's intuition was profoundly conservationi st. He felt that modern man ("mass-man" does not accurately convey the man Ortega was talkin g about) uses up hi s patrimony without a ny th o ught to refresh the wells from whi ch he drinks so voluptuously. But how can one refresh wells discovered for us by the divine dowsers of the past? How, conceretely, does o ne repay oile"s obliga tion to Aristotle, or to Shakespeare, or to Fleming? The answer is as simple as it is satisfying: by reverence. Piety is the co in of appreciation. It is what history asks of us, a nd what we owe to it. Ortega¡s Revolt of the Masses was as explosive a book in the thirties as the Treason of the Clerks: and , in the e nd , it justified its own thesis by being practically ignored. It is said about G handi that he became the idol of India in proportion as he was ignored by Indians. When he was lonely and unobserved, except by a few disciples, there were those few who so ught to li ve by a Ghandian philosophy. The nerve Ortega struck was that of a community that saw the terrible truth of indictment: modern man , th e swaggerer, unconscious of his dependence on what went before, insouciant toward the blessings others contrived for him , ignorant of any sense of obligation to reach o ut and extend the great c ircu it to anothe r ge neration. The vindication of Ortega's thesis was in the heedlessness
SEA HISTORY , SUMMER 1977
We Have Met Clio & She Is Us
"Modern man, the swaggerer, unconscious of his dependence on what went before . .. "
of those he addressed. By and large, they - we? perhaps: we are all guilty in some measure - ignore history, c hewing away at its capital without regard for the form, affection for the matrix , or devotion to the divine seed. It is a small commun ity, those who concern themselves with the museums - artistic, archaelogical, and philosophical - of this world, and they need to spend much of their time, as Ortega would have pred icted , begging the despoilers for help. But even in doing so, they kindle an interest in Clio, and it is what maintains such civilization as we have got. Wm. F. BUCKLEY , JR . New York. New York
A Footnote on "Relevance" Historians and journalists are constantly reaching for what is considered ""relevant. .. Thus, origin al thinkers of the past are often relegated to the dust bin of history . Professor Commager avo ids this foolishness by look ing below the periwigs causing us to think in fresh ways about those figures who breathed humanism into gove rnment. He makes them not merely rel evant but essential to an understanding of the Atlantic nations. -HERB E RT MITGANG , in a review of Henry Stee le Com manger's The Empire of R eason(< J 977 The New York Times).
We've turned our backs on history on the premise that it no longer has anything to tell us . .. not now, now that we have jets and TV and modern medicine. Life is different now. What have we to learn from our forebears , those quaint but backward folk , that can possibly be of any use? It sounds so rational: What's the use of history? But disorienting as recent changes have been , technology has only superficially changed our condition. The basic nature and needs of man as individual and social animal continue through those changing conditions. We still need social groups, and to find a role in them: we need love, dreams, purpose. We sti ll wonder why we are here and worry abo ut death. We are still very weak creatures, and we are still searching. And it is an arrogant assumption that we cannot learn about living from those less developed, whether they live today or lived 1000 years ago. How an individual handles the problems of living, or how a c ulture handles those problems, is of universal interest in the a ffairs of man. We have been surprised by the discovery of the Tasaday, these utterly primitive food gathe rers in the Philippines who seem so ge ntle, so loving, and devoid of violence. The African Bushmen of the Kalahari live in conditions that require a constant, strenuous effort for survival. Yet these people, so harshly driven by their environment, have a society that is well-ordered, caring, and full of purposive selfdiscipline. They seem to stand in dignified contrast to the unending wanting and whining we fall victim to.
3