Books, Arts & Manners: Dark Horses

There must be distinction of some sort in being incorporated into the welt-known and well-edited Viking Portable Library, which at least to my knowledge has hitherto confined itself almost exclusively to readings culled from the works of a particular author, generally a poet or a novelist. There must be too some cultural message to be read in the publication of The Portable Conservative Reader (Viking, $17.95 cloth; $6.95 paper), edited and with an introduction and notes by Russell Kirk, though I cannot for the moment think what this could be. Suffice it to say that the volume is excellently done, and that while the British-American tradition of constitutional government and society has proven not readily exportable, it is now, thanks to Viking and Mr. Kirk . . . well, portable.

Kirk has no doubt wisely eschewed conservative writers b.b. (Before Burke) and, with the exception of Tocqueville and Joseph Conrad, those outside the perimeters of Anglo-Americanism. As one would guess from the inclusion of Conrad, however, he has also chosen to wander beyond the purlieus of politics and the Dismal Science to include excerpts from belles-lettres: Coleridge, Southey, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, C. S. Lewis, and others. Whether these inclusions are wisely made is perhaps a matter for debate: Kirk specifically had excluded certain “conservative” writers (e.g., John Lukacs, F. A. Hayek, Hilaire Belioc) from consideration for the reason that they object(ed) to being labeled “Conservative”; yet the same could probably be said of Nathaniel Hawthorne (who also finds a place -ere) and Stevenson. Anyhow, Kirk has included all the old fait-fuls (such as Oakeshott’s “On Being Conservative”; Burke’s “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly”; Muggeridge’s “The Great Liberal Death Wish”; Walter Bagehot’s “Intellectual Conservatism”; George Saintsbury’s “Toryism”), plus lesser-known plums like E. L. Godkin’s “Who Will Pay the Bills of Socialism?” Enviable the liberal reader, as the virgin bride on her marriage night!

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Alexis de Tocqueville

There must be distinction of some sort in being incorporated into the welt-known and well-edited Viking Portable Library, which at least to my knowledge has hitherto confined itself almost exclusively to readings culled from the works of a particular author, generally a poet or a novelist. There must be too some cultural message to be read in the publication of The Portable Conservative Reader (Viking, $17.95 cloth; $6.95 paper), edited and with an introduction and notes by Russell Kirk, though I cannot for the moment think what this could be. Suffice it to say that the volume is excellently done, and that while the British-American tradition of constitutional government and society has proven not readily exportable, it is now, thanks to Viking and Mr. Kirk . . . well, portable.

Kirk has no doubt wisely eschewed conservative writers b.b. (Before Burke) and, with the exception of Tocqueville and Joseph Conrad, those outside the perimeters of Anglo-Americanism. As one would guess from the inclusion of Conrad, however, he has also chosen to wander beyond the purlieus of politics and the Dismal Science to include excerpts from belles-lettres: Coleridge, Southey, Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, C. S. Lewis, and others. Whether these inclusions are wisely made is perhaps a matter for debate: Kirk specifically had excluded certain “conservative” writers (e.g., John Lukacs, F. A. Hayek, Hilaire Belioc) from consideration for the reason that they object(ed) to being labeled “Conservative”; yet the same could probably be said of Nathaniel Hawthorne (who also finds a place -ere) and Stevenson. Anyhow, Kirk has included all the old fait-fuls (such as Oakeshott’s “On Being Conservative”; Burke’s “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly”; Muggeridge’s “The Great Liberal Death Wish”; Walter Bagehot’s “Intellectual Conservatism”; George Saintsbury’s “Toryism”), plus lesser-known plums like E. L. Godkin’s “Who Will Pay the Bills of Socialism?” Enviable the liberal reader, as the virgin bride on her marriage night!