2~
GEORGE lICHTHEIM
Like Balfour, Mr. Halle is a gentleman-scholar with a skeptical turn
of mind; also like Balfour, he is an instinctive conservative. Rousseau
figures in his list of heretics immediately before Marx;
J
acobinism ap–
pears as a peril scarcely inferior to Communism. Indeed the two are
linked (as indeed they were, insofar as the Russian Revolution dupli–
cated the French, though this scarcely exhausts the subject of Marx–
ism). There are moments when one suspects that Dr. Toynbee may
have had Mr. Halle in mind when he made his malicious remark
about American conservatives having become pupils of Metternich.
However, there is no need to get annoyed with him. As conserva–
tives go these days, he is a distinctly superior specimen: austere, learned,
and almost excessively civilized. His refinement in fact worries me
a little.
If
Dr. Toynbee is right, America now has an Empire, and
every Empire must have an Establishment. Well and good: ther.e
is much to be said for Establishments. They rarely produce anything
new and striking, but they are supremely competent when it comes
to upholding standards, transmitting civilized values, and in general
playing the part of culture-preservers. I am all for having a genuine
conservative Establishment (if only because it makes an ideal target
for radicals), but I wonder
if
Mr. Halle may not have come on the
scene a bit too early. There is something about his tone--urbane,
patrician, reserved, a trifle disconsolate even-that does not quite fit
the circumstances. He would probably not resent being described as a
spiritual descendant of Henry Adams. Now Adams could afford to
be relatively complacent about the civilization of his time. In the
first place he was an Adams; in the second place the world he lived
in could be interpreted, more or less, in terms of his philosophy. I
am not so sure about Mr. Halle's relationship to
his
world. I suspect
he is not merely out of tune with the present age--in which respect he
must have the sympathy of every civilized person-but at a loss to
account for
its
peculiar behavior. I was going to say that his style has
an Augustan quality, but on reflection his manner strikes me as late–
Roman. Now this is serious.
If
Toynbee is right, and
if
we are wit–
nessing the birth-pangs of the American Empire, there is something
wrong with Mr. Halle's attitude. I confess I find his essay a bit dis–
concerting: it conveys the image of a cultivated gentleman, with private
means and Stoic sympathies, whiling away the time under Caracalla,
rather than an active participant in the Augustan enterprise. In short,
I cannot help feeling that Mr. Halle has somehow strayed into the
wrong epoch.
The thing that particularly disturbs me about him-always as-
