Arts and Letters

When Walter Lippmann was admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1932, and then—two years later—to the Academy, he was admitted, of course, as a literary person; and it was again as a literary person that he was given the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism in 1965. For this reason my first thought, when it was suggested that I should speak about him here today, was to address myself simply to the literary qualities of his great body of published writings. These qualities were there, of course, in abundance: the scrupulous clarity and lucidity of statement; the exceptional mastery of the resources of the English language; the unfailing grace and distinction of style. But then I realized that to speak of these literary qualities alone would not be to do him justice; because never, surely, have style and content been more intimately fused—never have they been more a part of each other—than in Lippmann's writings. The dignity and rigor of the style was only another expression of the restrained, disciplined quality of the content—of the unfailing austerity and severity of the intellectual effort. One cannot think of the one without the other.

What Lippmann wrote about were the great problems and dilemmas of politics and political philosophy. He disdained trivia, just as he disdained dealing in personalities, and did so only by way of exception. He stuck, unfailingly, to the high road of political and social thought.

In the early period of his creative life, it was, of course, in part by his excellent articles in The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly that he was known, but even more by his books—and above all by two outstanding ones, Preface to Morals and The Good Society. These were formidable books: formidable in the magnitude of the tasks to which, respectively, they were addressed—formidable in the seriousness and exhaustiveness with which he applied himself to these tasks. He chose for his subjects what were, I suppose, the two greatest dilemmas of our time: first, how to fill the vacuum left by the deterioration of religious faith among the intellectuals of the West—a philosophic problem of immense profundity; and then, secondly, the perennial question of the uses of democracy versus those of dictatorship and paternalism—the question to which Dostoyevski's great chapter on the Grand Inquisitor was addressed—the question by which Western opinion was then being racked in the face of the rise of Russian communism and Western fascism. And nowhere, surely, except possibly in the later works of Niebuhr, have these two problems ever been the subject of more searching and enlightened analysis by an American mind.

Lippmann came, in the end, to moderately affirmative and hopeful conclusions, in the liberal tradition, with relation to both these problems. The disappearing inherited faith could be replaced, and the moral confusion of the age disentangled, he thought, by bold and serious confrontation with the facts—by the spirit, that is, of enlightened and disinterested inquiry. And as for dictatorship and democracy: he found comfort in the conclusion that the immensely complex machinery of the modern industrialized and urbanized state could never be effectively directed from a single political center—individual men were simply not that great. Freedom, he concluded, was therefore not a luxury but a necessity of the age. And from this conclusion he went on to develop his own concept of the good society—a concept which left deep and lasting traces on American liberal thought.

One may suspect that these two conclusions were at bottom ones of temperament rather than reason—ones to which Lippmann was driven because of the utter inacceptability, to anyone of his moral fastidiousness and instinctive affirmation of life, of the only visible alternatives. Be that as it may, the points were argued with the relentless logic and persuasiveness that were peculiarly his own; and to those who could not accept them on faith they were offered by the force of reason.

These two great books, and others, constituted for Lippmann, one senses, a form of self-instruction—a clarifying of his own mind on certain fundamental issues of personal and public philosophy. Having written them, he was ready to turn to the great task of public education to which, in the main, the rest of his life was devoted: to the thousands of columns and articles, that is, not to mention one or two further books, that poured forth in the postwar period. The columns and articles were not marked by the same rigorous logical development, by the same relentless pursuit of a subject to its bitter end, that had marked the earlier books. The medium did not lend itself to that. The later writing represented simply the play of a superbly informed and refined intelligence on an endlessly moving chain of passing events. The columns not only permitted, but indeed required, a greater flexibility and fluidity of judgment than the books had allowed. As a man of contemplative temperament, with a mind always open to new evidence, Lippmann was sensitive, as were few others, to the ironies of contradiction in human affairs. He did not fear those ironies. He endeavored to learn from them, and to teach others to do so, rather than denying them or ignoring them. He had no compunction in revising earlier opinion where the developing pattern of the facts appeared to demand it. He was sometimes accused, for this reason, of going around in circles—of letting the Lippmann of today refute the Lippmann of yesterday. And the proper answer was: "Why not?" "Truth," John Donne observed,

stands on a huge hill,
Cragged and steep…; and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, winne so.

Lippmann, too, was obliged to go round and round this hill; about and again about, as Donne put it; and he did so in his own immensely useful way. No more than the rest of us did he have, as the complexities of the postwar era began to take shape, the perfect answers to the questions they raised. There were forces and problems now loose among us—the atom, over-population, famine, and the cloud of environmental danger now so obviously advancing upon everyone—which had not been visible in those years of the thirties when he was wrestling with the dilemmas of faith and the meaning of liberalism.

But upon all these troubling new developments he continued, throughout the final years of his life, to play the search-light of his penetrating, reasonable, and intensely civilized intelligence, never permitting himself the histrionics of panic or despair. He never lost confidence in the powers of disinterested reason. When he could not teach others what to think, he taught them how to think; and this, given the bewilderingly dizzy pace of change by which our world was now being overtaken, was perhaps the most useful thing he could do.

To the lines quoted above, Donne had added the injunction to his readers:

Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.

If anyone had the right to feel that he had obeyed this advice, and that he was entitled to a rest of the soul, it was Walter Lippmann. He had no need to reproach himself with his inability to work in what Donne had termed, so marvelously, "that night." He had done all that one could do, all that anyone could have been expected to do, in the day that preceded it.