Vintage Reading

by Robert Kanigel

  Are these the bilious outpourings of a misanthrope?

  Malthus argues that the lower classes are doomed to bare subsistence. But he leaves open the possibility that future generations might be beneficiaries of more leisure, better education, and “better and more equal laws.”

  He argues against the “poor laws” of the time; he thought that though benevolently conceived, they did more harm than good—that they were, to the very people they were supposed to help, “grating, inconvenient, and tyrannical.”

  Malthus’s seeming acceptance of—and even justification for—human misery comes across as, at worst, tough-minded realism. He is hardly the perpetrator of the “vile, infamous theory, [the] revolting blasphemy against nature and mankind,” that Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels placed at his door.

  To be sure, Malthus was often just plain wrong. He ridiculed, for example, Condorcet’s idea for a system that eerily foreshadows our Social Security. And he pooh-poohed Condorcet’s equally prescient vision of longer lifespans and “the gradual removal of transmissible and contagious disorders by the improvement of physical knowledge.”

  But wrong or not, Malthus advanced his views and countered those of his foes with rare intellectual vigor. Which may explain, even more than those views themselves, why from the beginning they excited such fierce opposition—and why today they are remembered.

  Godwin’s utopia would ultimately lead to a time, Malthus wrote, when “the spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want... The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions, and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence, yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world.”

  A “Malthusian nightmare” if ever there was one.

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

  ____________

  By Edward Gibbon

  First published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788

  “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

  Before the great project was finished 24 years later, it embraced the whole Roman Empire and spanned a period from the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1452.

  The first of Gibbon’s six-volume history, while warmly received by the public, incurred the wrath of clerics and scholars. For Gibbon had dared explain the rise of Christianity paralleling Rome’s decline, largely in human terms. Oh, the correctness of Christian doctrine, Gibbon had dutifully noted, was of course the primary reason for its success. But as “the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart... to execute its purpose,” he had accordingly explored these secondary causes.

  This fiction fooled no one. For the “secondary” causes included the Machiavellian intrigues of popes and bishops, the rapaciousness of the crusaders, the zealotry of monks and martyrs, and the like. Unlikely to endear Gibbon to the church, for example, was his observation that monks capable of inflicting pain upon themselves in pursuit of spiritual purity rarely felt much “lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel, unfeeling temper has distinguished the monks of every age and country: their stern indifference, which is seldom mollified by personal friendship, is inflamed by religious hatred.”

  Plainly, then, Gibbon’s monumental work is no dreary listing of dates, kings, and battles. Despite its great length, it rarely bogs down in tiresome detail; Gibbon has already done the selecting, has plucked from his great reservoir of scholarship only those facts that illuminate his point, relying on the telling detail, not every detail. His is the story of early Western civilization distilled and digested by a clear mind—and a heart alive to history’s victims.

  At one point, while telling how the pure and simple faith of the early Christians ultimately degenerated into worship of saints and relics, Gibbon relates how relics of St. Stephen had been instrumental in the swift conversion of 540 Jews. Of course, he adds, this was achieved “with the help, indeed, of some wholesome severities, such as burning the synagogue, driving the obstinate infidels to starve among the rocks, etc.”

  Gibbon brought to his task vast scholarship, calm reason never twisted by prejudice, and gentle irony. He also brought formidable expository skills. As in his description, for example, of the new city of Constantinople, established by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century A.D. and capital of the eastern, or Byzantine, branch of the Roman Empire for the next thousand years. Gibbon transports us there, where Europe and Asia meet, to see “the winding channel though which the waters of the Euxine flow with a rapid and incessant course towards the Mediterranean.”

  Modern readers will find Gibbon’s insights into human nature as applicable to today’s news as to the fall of Rome. For example, Gibbon tells how the early church tended to attract sinners of every stripe, while those of more moderate temperament stayed away. Writes he: “Those persons who in the world had followed, though in an imperfect manner, the dictates of benevolence and propriety, derived such a calm satisfaction from the opinion of their own rectitude as rendered them much less susceptible of the sudden emotions of shame, of grief, and of terror, which have given birth to so many wonderful conversions.” To those passing from sin into the welcoming embrace of the church, “the desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us with rapid violence over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.”

  By virtue of its length and awesome historical sweep, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has become a metaphor for all those literary works of weight and substance that one sets aside for a time of future leisure but, presumably, never reads. It is, indeed, substantial; the numerous abridgements available make it more manageable. And yet, so tasty is Gibbon that even, say, a 400-page appetizer is apt to leave one hungry for the whole meal.

  Gibbon elsewhere records that he composed in whole paragraphs, often staying his pen from the page while his thoughts percolated, forming and reforming in his mind. What emerged were elegant sentences promenading up and down the page that leave you wanting more—more of his delicious irony, more of his gentlemanly calm, more of the stately grandeur of his prose.

  The Origin of Species

  By Means of Natural Selection,

  Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life

  ____________

  By Charles Darwin

  First published in 1859

  When H. L. Mencken went south to Tennessee in 1925 to attend the circus that was the “monkey trial,” it was Charles Darwin up on the stand as much as the schoolteacher John Scopes. Scopes had dared teach evolution, Darwin’s theory that higher forms of life were descended from lower forms, and the whole weight of southern fundamentalism was arrayed against him.

  Today, the trial of Darwin’s ideas continues. His name still crops up often in debates of social policy and scientific theory. Schoolbook controversies in several states have pitted a new, and more sophisticated, crop of “creationist” thinkers against today’s prevailing view that evolution is more than theory, but sure and certain scientific fact.

  And it all began here, with The Origin of Species. Here are all the catch phrases that have pulled at the public imagination for a century: Survival of the fittest, the struggle for existence, natural selection. All that’s missing is the famous monkey to which man is presumably tied by common ancestry. (He makes his appe
arance in Darwin’s sequel, The Descent of Man.)

  The idea of evolution wasn’t all that new in 1859; Europe had flirted with it for a century. “Survival of the fittest” was not Darwin’s phrase but Herbert Spencer’s. And another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was around the same time reaching conclusions almost identical to his. And yet, in large part thanks to the massive proof he offered, the product of 20 years of study, it is Darwin we remember today.

  All organisms, wrote Darwin, are locked in a struggle for scarce food, water, and safety—for life itself. Any slight hereditary variation giving one individual a better shot at survival may be passed on to its progeny. A longer-legged gazelle, to use a classic example of Darwin’s popularizers, is better fitted to outrun the lion, reproduce itself, and so pass on its genetic superiority; its shorter-legged cousins, meanwhile, are more apt to die out. Thus, a new species may arise through what Darwin called “natural selection.”

  Darwin’s readers, we should recall, were abundantly familiar with human selection. If man could create new and specialized breeds of roses or pigeons in the space of a few generations, how many more could Nature create, over the eons? So went one of the book’s key lines of argument.

  Darwin himself softened his emphasis on natural selection in later editions of the book. And scientists to come, in particular De Vries, would offer “mutations”—large abrupt changes rather than slight, successive ones—to account for the origin of new species. Still, the core of Darwin’s idea remains compelling— and influential beyond measure—to the present day.

  Darwin called his work “one long argument,” which it is, marching inexorably onward, tackling objections, assembling new proof at every turn. Throughout, one is reminded of how great scientific leaps lie grounded in the masses of routine observation that precede them: Darwin everywhere credits—A. de Chandolle’s study of oak trees, B.D. Walsh’s entomological studies— unremembered scientists with leading him to the raw data on which his conclusions are based.

  Unlike most of today’s scientific works, The Origin of Species leaves scant distance between the theory being advanced and the man advancing it. Chapter 6 begins: “Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.” Most, he insists, are “only apparent,” and the rest are “not fatal to the theory.” In any case, we are left with a vision of Darwin himself, as if a too-small boy, beset by detractors and enemies, “staggering” under the weight of his argument.

  Many readers, it should be said, will find Darwin tough going, and may turn to more popular recapitulations of his ideas. (Jacques Barzun has termed The Origin of Species “one of those ideal books, like Marx’s Capital, that need not be read to be talked about.”) Though occasionally reaching for dramatic flourishes, his style is convoluted, and the book’s scientific base will make it hard slogging for many.

  On the other hand, Darwin is never cold to the natural world he aims to describe. Midst all the recital of fact and marshaling of argument shines something of the mystic’s sense of wonder at the sheer diversity of the universe. And nowhere is it more evident than in the book’s concluding paragraphs:

  “It is interesting,” writes Darwin, “to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  The Histories

  ____________

  By Herodotus

  Written in the fifth century B.C.

  Astyages, king of Scythia in the 6th century B.C., dreams of a vine that grows from his daughter’s genitals and spreads over Asia. His pregnant daughter’s son will usurp the throne, he’s warned. So he orders a trusted lieutenant, Harpagus, to kill the infant.

  Harpagus can’t do it himself, but gives the child to a herdsman, instructing him to leave the infant exposed in the wild, mountainous country he inhabits. But the herdsman’s wife convinces her husband to show Harpagus her own child’s body, just delivered stillborn, as evidence of their compliance with his orders—and to bring up the king’s grandson as their own.

  The ruse works. The boy lives. But at about age 10, circumstances bring him to the attention of Astyages, who guesses the boy’s identity, and resolves to punish his lieutenant. “Since things have taken this lucky turn,” he tells Harpagus, “I want you to send your own son to visit the young newcomer, and come to dinner with me yourself.”

  That evening they feast. Assured that Harpagus has had his fill, Astyages orders his men to serve him a final covered platter—the head, hands and feet of Harpagus’ son, whom Astyages has had butchered and on whom Harpagus has just dined. Thus does the king exact his revenge.

  The story is vintage Herodotus, all the ingredients in place: blood and gore, dreams and oracles, scheming and intrigue and sheer human drama.

  Herodotus was born in what is now Turkey in the 5th century B.C. In The Histories, the one work for which he is known 2,500 years later, his subject is the struggle between the emerging Greek city-states and the mighty Persian Empire. But interwoven in the chronological account are endless digressions. We learn about the flooding of the Nile and its effects on agriculture, about the construction of the pyramids, about the nomadic ways of the Scythian tribes, about the crystal coffins of the Ethiopians. We hear political options discussed, plots hatched, dreams interpreted, battles fought.

  Of course, not all of it is strictly true; that Herodotus has heard a story is, by his lights, reason enough to tell it. He records that when certain Indians mined gold, they had to do so quickly, lest they be caught by ants bigger than foxes. And that Arabs stole cinnamon from the large birds who used it for their nests. How? By feeding them dead oxen and donkeys in chunks so large their nests crumbled from the weight, scattering the cinnamon to the ground.

  In Herodotus’s time, the boundaries between myth, superstition, legend, prophesy and what we today too confidently term “fact” were blurrier than they are now. But even then, it’s plain, Herodotus knew he was telling some tall ones. Sometimes, he’d let a whopper slip by without any disclaimer—a failing that has contributed to his being known as the Father of Lies as well as the Father of History. More typically, he’d tell the story, then add that he couldn’t swear it was true. Or even admit its unlikelihood. But let the story’s seeming lack of veracity bar its telling? Never.

  For that we can be grateful on several counts. First, had Herodotus too scrupulously clung to sure and certain fact, our insight into the mind of the 5th century B.C. would be immeasurably poorer. Second, his narrative wouldn’t have been such fun to read. Third, some stories Herodotus dismissed as impossible—for example, that the Nile has its source in melting snows— proved true.

  Herodotus tells how among the Scythians, a nomadic race inhabiting what is today’s Ukraine, it was the custom among the men to drink the blood of the first man they killed in battle; and that bringing a head to the king entitled them to a share of the loot. There’s lots more in The Histories like that; it was a bloody and brutal time. In Herodotus’ telling, it was nothing for 2,000 soldiers, deliberately under-armed by their king, to be sacrificed just to enhance the credibility of a spy in the enemy camp. The Issedones scooped out skulls, gi
lded them, and used them as ceremonial cups. Death seemed ever-present. Blood flowed freely.

  And what lesson to draw? That the West has come a long way, with warring tribes giving way to Volvos and democratic parliaments?

  Or, on the other hand, that little has changed, when the same part of the world about which Herodotus writes is still—in its Iraqis and Iranians, Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Turks—a collection of warring tribes?

  The Federalist Papers

  ____________

  By Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay

  First appeared in 1787

  The American Constitution was designed in frank acknowledgement that some men and women are bad, that they don’t always do as they should, that they are easy prey to corrupt influences, that passion dictates their opinions more reliably than reason, and that a government, to be stable, secure and just, must accommodate to these human shortcomings. “What is government itself,” asks James Madison in The Federalist Papers, the name given to 85 essays written in support of the new Constitution by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

  A cursory reading of the Constitution does not instantly reveal its virtues and strengths. And they were no more self-evident 200 years ago; in fact, the Constitution’s adoption by the states, replacing the Articles of Confederation—under which the nation was governed, weakly, in the years just after independence—was no foregone conclusion.

  In New York state, in particular, the issue was in doubt. So, in defense of the Constitution they’d helped frame at the Philadelphia convention, Hamilton, Madison and Jay wrote a series of newspaper essays, each of which appeared under the pseudonym “Publius,” published in book form soon after. Theirs were among a host of parry-and-thrust pronunciamentos appearing in the popular press of the day. But while the others are now forgotten, these still afford an ideal way to understand our Constitution.