The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions By Georye F. Will Simon and Schuster, 397 pp., $16.50 George Will is more than a columnist; he is a presence. He alters the field of forces as no other pundit does, because he steps outside the rut of partisan debate to make serious affirmations of his own.
Anyone can quibble; Will can quibble hilariously, witheringly. But on his best days (they are frequent) he shows the larger gift of knowing what needs to he said, of summoning up a truth whose absence others hadn’t even felt. He supplies a missing piece that turns out to be a centerpiece: the reflection that might have occurred to one of his Victorian heroes—Newman, say, or Disraeli. “Carter’s foreign policy reduces to the idea—simple and a priori—that we shall prevail because (or if) we are just. Reagan says, with Raymond Aron, that the tribunal of history is not a tribunal of justice. Rather, it tests a nation’s capacity for action.” We may not have realized that, but something down in us should have known. It took Will to say it, and to have said such a thing is the mark of an imagination nourished by learning. He is not a man to pluck his phrases from the font of journalistic cliché.
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