Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe I

I.

To the chagrin of one who'd spent practically his entire life in America's sunbelt, that first winter in Ann Arbor was brutal: The sun didn't shine. From my neighbors I learned it hardly ever came out in winter. Between Thanksgiving and Easter, Michiganders might as well have been living in the gray exile of northern Siberia.

But this Saturday morning the sun did shine and, feeling extra energy, I decided to go to the Library Book Sale. Tonsor had told me about this venerated local institution held every Saturday morning in the basement of the downtown Ann Arbor library. He suggested it would be an inexpensive way to build up my professional library. 

I cannot forget the way he intoned: "If you are serious about pursuing history, Mr. Whitney, you must have two things: self-discipline and a personal library."[1] 

It was serious business, the Library Book Sale. Patrons including many grad students lined up before the 9 AM starting bell, grocery bags in hand, quivering, ready to do combat with the other patrons to snatch up $1 hardbacks. The naked displays of bestiality put even my dogs to shame.

Tonsor already had a collection of 10,000 books.[2] He went to the Library Book Sale not to expand his professional holdings but to buy picture books for his grandchildren. That was sweet. And sure enough, on this Saturday morning he and Caroline showed up after the initial throng had charged the basement.

Goethe spent virtually his entire
adult life writing Faust,
from 1769-1832, a span of
more than 60 years.

We hailed each other from a distance but stuck to our work because patrons elbowed their way to the front if you showed any distraction or weakness. After about a half hour of jockeying, I'd managed to fill two grocery bags and queued up to pay. The Tonsors were right behind me. When he saw that I had picked up Goethe's Faust, his eyes lit up through his thick glasses.

"That is a very fine edition, Mr. Whitney. I hope you profit by it as much as I have. Every morning I start my day reading Goethe and the German missal."[3]

Caroline added with a good-natured chuckle: "Yes, Stephen starts his day reading about the Devil in us, then steels himself to do battle with the Devil in us the rest of the day!" 

"That's true," Tonsor said with a quick gust of laughter. "The Devil is part of us all, as is the angelic. As Goethe said, Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten. Where there is much light, there is stronger shadow."[4]

"Goethe -- every morning," I said, making sure not to sound incredulous.

"Every morning," he repeated with barely suppressed pride. "To have spent a long life reading the poet is a beautiful thing. I am reminded of what Goethe himself said to his friend, Eckermann: 'I am like one who in his youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money, which in the course of his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.'"[5]

Goethe's words provided an apt segue to pay the cashier for our books. On the way to the exit, Tonsor lavished more praise on his idol: "Goethe, it has been said, was 'by far our greatest modern man' -- the last great classical writer of European civilization, as Virgil was the last great classical writer of ancient Rome. He grasped the tragedy of the modern age, perceiving that the very civilization we have created is Faustian. That's why Matthew Arnold called Goethe the most helpful thinker of modern times -- the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself."[6]

Whoa! These were superlatives that make you lean into a speaker, especially if he's your dissertation advisor. Here I had been studying European intellectual history yet did not know of Goethe's world-historical importance. How had I missed it? 

Often in conversation with Tonsor, I worried that I did not know enough. Now, on yet another topic -- Goethe -- I was going to have to move out of the shallows and into the depths. It helped that I was discerning a pattern in Tonsor's thinking when it came to the confrontation of modernity: In his head he communed with a circle of the dead dominated by Goethe, Acton, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Parkman -- cosmopolitans and liberal conservatives all. 
  
I couldn't think of anything to say that matched the profundity of Tonsor's observation about Goethe. So I resorted to the cheapest currency of conversation, autobiography: "I had the opportunity to study a bit of Goethe in my German classes back at Colorado State, but I didn't read him at all when I lived in Germany, which I now regret."

"That is to be regretted," Tonsor said disapprovingly. Caroline's sympathetic instinct kicked in and she frowned at him: "Maybe Gleaves had other things he needed to read!"

"When in Germany, one should read Goethe," Tonsor said firmly, determined to win the point.

"Well, I hope to correct my negligence now," I said. "I had a great German professor guide us through The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original. But I'm afraid I'll have to undo some of the instruction I received from the English professor who taught us Faust. One of the last Old Marxists in the academy, Dr. Bates presented Goethe's tragedy as a critique of the admen on Madison Avenue -- the capitalists who manufacture, manipulate, and multiply consumer desires -- desires that can never be satisfied. People are just so many consumers who have the potential to become addicted to shopping. Bourgeois life is the endless desire for never-ending stuff. The Marxist Mephistopheles, it turns out, is a very dapper adman, nothing at all like the horned Devil of medieval folklore." 

Tonsor grunted. "Vulgar Marxists: Johnny-one-notes who bleach all the color out of life! To see Goethe's Devil as a glorified adman makes even the demons howl with scorn. Mephistopheles is not on Madison Avenue. He is on Main Street. He is on the Diag. He is you!"[7]

"Really, Stephen!" protested Caroline, her frown returning. She looked at me sympathetically.

Tonsor dismissed her: "I don't mean my comment to be taken personally. It's the universal message of Goethe's Faust."

"You'll have to tell me what it means," I said with a forgiving grin.

II.

When we walked out into the sun, things had warmed up a bit but none of the snow on William Street was melting. My professor didn't seem to notice the cold. Now that he had the opportunity to talk about Goethe, he started breathing in little puffs as his mind revved to a white heat. I had been around Tonsor enough to know that he saw his confrontation with modernity through the lens of a few great authors: Tocqueville, Acton, Burckhardt, Parkman -- they informed his approach to intellectual history. Now, out on an icy Ann Arbor sidewalk, I was about to learn how to see modernity through Goethe's gimlet eye. 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
Germany's greatest humanist and one of Stephen Tonsor's
most important guides to comprehending,
confronting, sifting, and testing the modern world.

"Goethe," Tonsor said -- and once the name escaped his mouth, Caroline saw a lecture coming and escaped back into the library -- "Goethe is like quicksilver. Just when you think you get him, he slips away. That is the quality of all great poets. As you know, Goethe's Faust was Western civilization's most brilliant poem after Milton's Paradise Lost. Because of his singular achievement, Goethe stands in the same relationship to the modern age as Shakespeare does to the Renaissance, Dante does to the Middle Ages, Virgil does to ancient Rome, and Homer does to ancient Greece. To come to an adequate understanding of modernity, one must retrace the steps along the trail blazed by Germany's greatest poet.

"And what should I look for along that trail?" I asked.

"The prophet who interprets modernity to itself," he said with assurance. "The humanist who challenges the assumptions of the twentieth-century. The tragedian who cautions modern man to tame his civilization's Faustian spirit."

"Goethe" continued Tonsor, "grasped the modern psyche in all its maddening complexity -- its tangle of complementarities and contradictions, its tensions and frustrations, its desires and aspirations. His integral humanism challenges the reductionist that one always encounters in the ideologue -- whether that ideologue is your Marxist professor who sees man only as a materialistic consumer on the make, or the Gnostic who hates man's very flesh.

"Goethe helps modern readers understand that this complexity is both the glory of our humanity and the source of our woe. You see it in Faust, who is ever desiring. Because of his desire to know, he mastered all the branches of knowledge and tried to find the key that would unlock the secrets of nature, without success. His infinite desire clashed with his status as a finite creature, someone who was both an angelic beast and a beastly angel, and therefore limited."

"Faust," I ventured, "seems to be on a quest like that of Aldous Huxley, who also sought self-transcendence beyond the ordinary boundaries of nature. Like all mystics, he wanted to find out what's on the other side of the door."[8]

"That is a very interesting point you bring up," Tonsor responded darkly, and the tone in his voice made me immediately regret my digression. "Despite what his legions of epigones may think, Huxley's hallucinatory escapades did not unlock the secrets of nature -- they were too personal, too subjective, too silly. Recall that on his 'trip' he grew terrified of his own lawn chairs! Huxley learned the hard way what we all must, that it is not for human beings to see what is on the other side of the door, not in any objective, communal, universal sense. The hippies never learned that private revelation, like copulation, should stay in the dark." 

Tonsor's unexpected exclamation mark made me laugh.

Egged on now, he continued: "Huxley's friend, Thomas Mann, wrote a scathing private review of Huxley's book. In it he observed that mystical experience does come to some, for reasons we cannot plumb, and each religion tries to order such experiences. But chemical mysticism? For a middle-aged man to encourage young people to experiment with psychedelic drugs is both scandalous and stupid."[9] 

The digression into Huxley's experiments with mescaline was working Tonsor up into a lather, and he was practically breathless as he spat out one last insult: "It's obvious that Huxley for all his intelligence turned out to be as dumb as Faust. What a pity. Brave New World is such a fine book." 

"Now," Tonsor said, mission accomplished with the insult, "all human beings should be able to identify with Faust's existential frustration. We are not totally at home with the beasts because we have too much reason, too much spiritual aspiration, to live like an animal. Yet we are not totally at home with the angels because we have a body with a body's desires -- too much earthiness, too much libido dominandi. So we are neither the one thing nor the other but something in between -- now pulled up toward Heaven, now pulled down to the dust. The conflicts between the two cause us considerable dis-ease and misery, to the point that we feel alienated even from ourselves. 

"Caught in a cobweb of desires, we can never find any peace. We want to love, but are smacked down by selfish desires. We want to be altruistic, but once our motives are unmasked we just play for the crowd's applause. We want to possess the light of knowledge, but at every turn encounter the darkness of unfathomable mystery. It goes the other way, too. We go on a binge of buying at the mall, or of sexual debauchery in the bedroom, and before long we have to stop either because of physical exhaustion or because our conscience pricks us to stop. We are constantly reminded that we are an in-between creature who can never settle, never be satisfied, never be happy.[10]

"Man," I said chiming in, "the biped who walks the Earth not with four legs but with two so that he can look up at the stars. Still, he's an animal. It's reminiscent of Paul's theology in the New Testament where he writes of the never-ending battle between our animal and spiritual selves --"

"What I do, I do not understand" said Tonsor, breaking in. "For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate."[11] 

"And that reminds me," I said, "of a brilliant metaphor that captures man's material and spiritual complexity. I think it was the Catholic humanist E. I. Watkin who pointed out that man's contrary desires are symbolized by the Cross, which is made both of the horizontal crossbeam that points out toward creation as well as the vertical post that points up toward Heaven --"

"And down toward Hell," added Tonsor quickly. 

"And down toward Hell," I duly added. "So, applying Watkin's metaphor, we could say that this in-between creature, man, belongs exclusively to neither the horizontal nor the vertical; that the two principles are hardly ever harmonized; so the resulting tension between them creates constant dissatisfaction, conflict, and misery."

"Yes, Watkin's metaphor captures the reality of the human condition," said Tonsor in his definitive way. "The Christian would point out that the horizontal clash with the vertical is ultimately reconciled by Christ's death and resurrection: the great consummatum est[12] -- It is accomplished -- which gets us back to Faust's striving soul, his Tätigkeit: activity, exertion, movement. One could see Faust as an allegorical figure for modern man, never resting, feverishly chasing down the false remedy, vainly trying to quench unquenchable desires."  

III.

"Yes," continued Tonsor after a brief pause, "Goethe's genius commands our attention still, for he early comprehended the psychological and historical implications of modernity. By that I mean Goethe understood modernity's relationship to man's inner conflict. He observed that modernity has dramatically expanded the possibilities of our horizontal experience but not of our vertical existence. The past five hundred years have seen spectacular developments in the horizontal possibilities of our lives, brought about by a succession of world-historical events -- the Age of Exploration, Commercial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and French Revolution. Each promised man a more satisfying life on the horizontal plane of his animal existence. Each stoked the flames of his desire -- for more territory, more purchasing power, more command over nature, more self-knowledge, more economic growth, and more self-determination. But where during the past five centuries were the corresponding ethical or spiritual advances? The existential gap between monumental material advances on the one hand, and perceived spiritual stupor on the other, perfectly frames the modern problem that so many of our elite thinkers experience. 

"Thus in Faust we see a profoundly important truth: None of the spectacular material advances of the past five centuries really satisfies the longing in the human heart. Not a one. We fulfill one desire only to feel a stronger desire take its place. There's no end to it, only frustration. The only remedy to the addiction to desire comes in the final scene of the play, when Goethe pulls the curtain back and surprises his audience with what is really going on. It is the rather traditional Christian rendering of the Final Judgment. 

"Now, this interpretation is controversial -- it goes against the usual glosses on Faust, that it all takes place within the bounds of nature. But if you think about it, the Prologue in Heaven is above and beyond nature. The Final Judgment is above and beyond nature. The paean to the Virgin Mary at the very end is above and beyond nature. The two wagers Mephistopheles makes -- first with God and then with Faust -- only make sense in an afterlife that is above and beyond nature. What is at stake is Faust's eternal soul. If Faust loses the wager, he forfeits his soul and goes to Hell. If he wins the wager, he is assured of salvation and goes to Heaven. I defy anyone to explain the meaning of the play strictly in terms of nature, without reference to the transcendent above and beyond nature. 

"To reinforce this point, look at one of the most telling structural elements of the tragedy: the link between the end of Faust I and the end of Faust II. Both direct our attention to Faust's lover, Gretchen. During the last critical moments of Part I, when we wonder if Gretchen's soul will be damned for drowning her newborn, she is assured of salvation. This corresponds to what happens during the final critical moments of Part II, when Faust's soul is hanging in the balance: Gretchen offers intercessory prayers from Heaven on behalf of Faust's soul. It is at this point that the play pivots -- pivots from being a human tragedy on Earth to a divine comedy in Heaven. 

"With this pivot Goethe is making a profound statement to modern man. Scientific discovery is not enough. Enlightenment rationality is not enough. Romantic desire is not enough. Technological progress is not enough. Utopian dreams are not enough. To cope with tragedy, modern man needs to learn that progress on Earth is chimerical, often illusory. Men pursue their technological wonders and utopian schemes without truly understanding the costs -- because we are limited. With every step forward something good is left behind. Tragedy always stalks progress.  

Mephisto, by Mark Antokolski (1884)

"Given man's complex anthropology and the developments of the last five centuries, we can now better appreciate Goethe's Devil, Mephistopheles. He is not like the medieval Devil who is alien to you and me. Rather, Goethe's Devil reminds us ... of us ... because he is us. Goethe's genius was to pull Mephistopheles out of the breast of his very own readers, that part of ourselves that is lured by the excitement of material possibilities: the physical sensations, recurring pleasures, and unleashed animal desires. And as the representative of the animal in us, Mephistopheles makes a bargain with God. Mephistopheles wagers that he can get Faust to feel so completely satisfied with his earthly nature, that the good doctor will forget his spiritual origin that connects him to God. Mephistopheles wagers that Faust will busy himself so completely on the horizontal plane that he will neglect, abuse, and forget the vertical plane. Mephistopheles wagers, in other words, that Faust will become thoroughly modern -- and dehumanize himself.

"Now you see why Goethe's Faust is so prophetic: Modern man has been seduced by his growing material power to dehumanize himself.

"You will note that the nature of this wager is quite different from that found in the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, Job must lose all things on the horizontal plane in order to gain what is necessary on the vertical plane. By contrast, in Goethe's Faust the protagonist will gain everything he wants materially but lose it all spiritually -- until the very end. At the end it is clear that Faust cannot save himself. Despite all he does, he cannot save himself. It is only God's mercy that saves him." Tonsor paused, looked me straight in the eye, and enunciated each word slowly: "Is this not a very spiritual message for post-Enlightenment Europe?

"Mephistopheles represents something else that would resonate in the husk of a Christian culture. When called upon to explain who he is, he declares, Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint -- I am the everlasting 'No,' the spirit who always denies. My purpose is to undo the work of creation. 

"But, as we see at the end of the drama, Mephisto is the one who is denied. He fails because he does not fully understand what a man is. No matter how intense are the earthly, sensual desires of a man; no matter how tempting the wealth and power and worldly successes he might achieve; they can never leave a man entirely satisfied. There is always the desire for more. And perhaps that is what makes Faust always raise up the earthly thing to the heavenly plane. It's because man, in his maddening in-betweenness, nevertheless has conscience, imagination, and the spark of the divine. He has the capacity to combine his contradictions and make something better of them. So, for instance, Faust cannot just have sex with Gretchen and be content with the physical satisfaction of the act; he has to raise the experience to a higher level and fall in love with her!

"For all these reasons, one can with justification say that Faust defines the modern human being.[13] And the word "Faustian" defines the civilization we call Western. It was Oswald Spengler who, reading Goethe, discerned the distinctive character of Western culture: It was Faustian because of the way it inspired the striving soul to engage in unceasing efforts to conquer nature -- including human nature. But it's a roll of the dice. For when the godly myth of love is displaced by the demonic myth of power, there is a near certainty that the consequences will be disastrous. And yet that precisely is the mythic displacement which characterizes the modern world."[14]

Tonsor's words hit me like a blast of wind. But there was no time to linger. Caroline, who had checked out a book, was emerging from the library. 

As the game clock ran down to zero, Tonsor wasted no time wrapping up: "Make no mistake: Goethe was no orthodox believer -- he did not give a full act of faith to the God of the Christians. But his Faust teaches us what the loss of Everyman's faith in the transcendent would mean to the Western spirit, much as Nietzsche would do, even more forcefully, several decades later. With the arrival of the modern age -- which supplanted the Age of Faith and along with it medieval scholasticism and Renaissance Platonism -- Western man crossed a threshold that has given him abundance on the horizontal plane of his bestiality, yet poverty on the vertical plane of his spirituality. Grasp this existential fact, and you have the key that unlocks so much that has vexed man during the last five centuries. As the years pass, the distance between modern man's seduction by the horizontal and his memory of the vertical only widens. It is that existential gap that goes far to explain why modern man in his dissatisfaction chooses to be distracted by his newfound Promethean capabilities -- whether to use the state to extend his power, or to use violence to eliminate the other, or to use ideology to justify his exquisitely refined hypocrisy."

IV.

At this final thought Tonsor offered Caroline his physical support so that she would not slip on the ice -- just as he'd offered me his intellectual support so that I would not slip on ideology. 

As the couple said goodbye, I hurried down William Street toward the bus stop, aware of the cold wind on my face and feeling that Goethe might have correctly diagnosed my poverty and misery. 


_____________________

Notes

[1] This advice parallels that of Fr. James V. Schall, at URL https://home.isi.org/students-guide-liberal-learning?utm_source=Intercollegiate+Studies+Institute+Subscribers&utm_campaign=5e15c982d3-IR+Weekly+August+24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3ab42370fb-5e15c982d3-93104597&mc_cid=5e15c982d3&mc_eid=dc3cbdd0a3.  

[2] Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversation with GW, East Grand Rapids, MI, June 17, 2017.

[3] Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017.

[4] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen, Act 1, 1773.

[5] Eckermann was to Goethe as Boswell was to Johnson. See Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, December 6, 1829, trans. John Oxenford, Kindle ebook ed., loc. 6636.

[6] Matthew Arnold, "A French Critic on Goethe," Mixed Essays, quoted by Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," PMLA, vol. 6, no. 3 (September 1921): 438.

[7] Paul A. Bates, ed. Faust: Sources, Works, Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).

[8] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954.)

[9] Thomas Mann letter to Ida Herz, March 21, 1954; from Mann's Letters, 1948-1955 (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1955), p. 332; in Donald Watt, ed., Aldous Huxley (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 394.

[10] Reminiscent of Tonsor's interpretation of Faust is Rüdiger Safranski, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, trans. David Dollenmayer (New York: W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2017), ch. 33.

[11] Paul, Romans 7:15, New American Bible translation.

[12] John 19:30, Latin Vulgate translation.

[13] Cf. A. N. Wilson, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: They Gave Us Goethe and Bach," Independent, July 12, 2008, at URL http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/a-n-wilson-dont-lets-be-beastly-to-the-germans-they-gave-us-goethe-and-bach-866386.html. 

[14] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Use and Abuse of Myth," Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 184.

Tonsor: Intellectual History: The Romantic Garden II

I.

After Tonsor finished his lecture on Romantic gardens and landscapes, he packed his satchel with the notes and books he had brought to class. I remained in my seat -- motionless, ruminating, processing all that I had just heard. It felt as though my mind had been stung by the proverbial torpedo fish, likened to Socrates because he paralyzed his interlocutors with probing questions and dazzling intellect.[1]

As my professor left the lectern and approached and asked, knowing he was being ironic, "Did the lecture convey anything of interest to you, Mr. Whitney?"

"It certainly did," I said. "It was the best lecture I've heard you give. I'm still taking in what you said during the last 90 minutes. I've read a good deal about landscape architecture but have never heard the things you taught us today. Landscapes will never look the same."

"Landscapes frame our lives, do they not? As you know, with paintings it behooves us to pay attention to the frame because the frame interprets the picture. It's the same with a man. You cannot understand all the dimensions of a man until you know the landscape he grew up in." 

"What was the landscape like where you grew up?"

Saul Steinberg's famous cover,
"View of the World from Ninth Avenue"

"It was the landscape of central Illinois, in the Great River country. Of course, Saul Steinberg and the East Coast cognoscenti would laugh at my saying there's anything remarkable about it. They disparagingly call it 'flyover country.' But for people who have eyes to see, it's the very heart of America's heartland. And it's not just flat cornfields either. Interspersed with the cornfields are upland woods of oak and hickory; bottomland forests of silver maple and sycamores; and the topographic transitions between them that separate the glaciated tableland on top from the riparian floodplains below. There is even the occasional island of tall-grass prairie that makes one marvel at how hardscrabble pioneers ever tilled the soil. What pulls the entire scene together is the panoramic vastness of the Illinois prairie peninsula. The sense of space is liberating!

"This past July, when Caroline and I were driving back to my hometown of Jerseyville, I started looking at the different kinds of lines in the heartland landscape. The most dominant lines reflect the checkerboard pattern of township-and-range surveys bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson. His vision for the Old Northwest gives us those long, straight roads that follow the original survey lines. Other lines are sinuous, usually where roads follow the meandering of rivers or the curve of lakes. Still other lines characterize the way farmers grow things to conserve the soil. Most apparent are the lines of trees, windbreaks to shelter the farmhouse and barns and fields from blizzards. More subtle than the windbreaks are the lines among the crops. There are the furrows made by the plough, of course, like a Rembrandt etching that follows the contours of the land. Then there are lines separating the ocher-green of ripening corn from the dusk-green of maturing soybeans from the yellow-green of flowering milo; lines separating crop from the spring-green of grass in the creases of the hills; lines separating crop from stubble; lines separating crop from the fallow earth. I suppose only someone who grew up on a farm cares about such things, but it's the frame that interprets me."

"I'm no farmer," I said, "but on my road trips I try and understand the landscapes I drive through. There's no such thing as a boring road trip, even across the Great Plains --"

Tonsor's eyes smiled and he interrupted: "You mean where the earth ends? Once, when my family was driving across the Great Plains, my son asked if we were going to the end of the earth. I said, 'No, it's not the end of the earth, but it's what the end of the earth would look like!'"

He laughed in little puffs and I with him, saying I'd experienced the same thing with my family. "They think I'm weird because I love driving across Kansas. When I studied geography, one of the things I most enjoyed was analyzing landscapes not just for their utility but also for their beauty and sublimity. One of my favorite Willa Cather passages, from My Antonia, captures the feeling: 'I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh easy blowing wind; and in the earth itself as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide; and underneath it herds of buffalo were galloping, galloping --'"[2]

"Yes," said Tonsor in laconic affirmation. "I'd add Walt Whitman to your collection of favorite passages. He was quite smitten with the prairie lands of the Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas country. After visiting the Colorado Rockies he told a reporter that 'much as the grandeur of the mountains impressed him, the impression of the plains will remain longest with him.'[3] In Specimen Days, which is his travel log out West, he wrote: 'As to scenery ... while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but that the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.'"[4]

"Whitman got it right!" I said. "Just about anything west of the Hundredth Meridian is magical. As for Kansas country, especially in a place like the Flint Hills, both landscape and sky are sublime. Who cannot feel overwhelmed by those towering cumulonimbus clouds on a hot summer afternoon during the monsoon season. I always carry a 35 mm. camera in the car to try and capture the sublimity of those moments. Speaking of which, where did you learn about Romantic landscapes and English gardens?"

"My earliest experience of the romantic landscape, believe it or not, was also in the Illinois country. West of Champaign, along the Sangamon River, is a remarkable park on the old Allerton estate. Nowadays it's managed by the University of Illinois. But around the turn of the century, an eccentric artist and philanthropist named Robert Allerton transformed acres of prairie outside his mansion into gardens and forests. There's not only the requisite herb patch and bowling lawn, but also a parterre garden and various flower plots, all surrounded by woods and meadows that overlook the Sangamon River -- the same Sangamon River that Abraham Lincoln knew.

"Given your interest in landscape architecture, you will want to make the trek to Allerton not just for its natural beauty but also for the remarkable sculptures it contains. Perhaps in your art classes you have seen a photograph of Emil-Antoine Bourdelle's 'Death of the Last Centaur' or of Carl Milles's 'Sun Singer.' Experiencing the vistas in person leaves one alternately feeling the satisfaction of classical beauty and the awe of romantic grandeur. I'm sure this morning's lecture had its origins in the many happy hours I spent exploring the park."

"Death of the Last Centaur," by Emil-Antoine Bourdelle, Allerton Park, Monticello, IL
Photo at URL http://www.iloveallertonpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Centaure-5-8-2012.jpg

II.

Later that week I was having lunch with Tonsor and Caroline and the subject of Allerton Park came up.

"Oh, the old Allerton estate!" said Caroline, delighted by the very name. "When Stephen and I were in college we used to bicycle in the park. There was something special about leaving the cornfields behind and making your way through the dark brooding forests to 'The Sun Singer.' Stephen was quite taken by the drama of the setting."

"On one of my road trips back to Colorado, maybe I'll stop at Allerton," I said to be polite, doubtful that I would ever really get around to visiting such an out-of-the-way place.

"You should," said Tonsor authoritatively. 

III.

"The Sun Singer," mixed media, by Caroline Tonsor.
From the title page of a chapbook that Caroline Tonsor
made for Stephen Tonsor (2009)

It would be three decades before I would finally make the trek to Allerton Park and experience the work of Bourdelle and Milles in surroundings of haunting beauty.

__________

[1] For the original reference to Socrates as a torpedo fish, see Plato's dialogue Meno.

[2] Willa Cather, My Antonia.

[3] For Whitman's observation see Robert R. Hubach, "Walt Whitman in Kansas," (Topeka: Kansas Historical Society, May 1941), pp. 150-54; at URL https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-walt-whitman-in-kansas/12865. 

[4] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1879).

Tonsor #8 -- 1505 Morton Ave.

She was standing at the front door with a warm smile and an extended hand. Already at hello, it was apparent that Caroline Tonsor was diametrically different from her husband. In physical appearance they were not at all like the cartoon of the married couple that aged alongside each other until they looked exactly alike. Quite the contrary. He was stocky; she was slender. He had short gray-white hair; she, long dark brown hair. His eyes were lighter, impatient, and discerning;[1] her eyes, darker, approachable, and kind.

I would soon learn that their personalities were as different as their looks. Where he came off as forceful and judgmental, she was soft-spoken and accepting. Where he was the know-it-all, she asked questions. Where he liked to sprinkle his conversation with something that surprised, even outraged, she was happy with quiet displays of wit. The differences between the two is perhaps best summed up by the fact that students, among themselves, always referred to him as "Tonsor," to her as "Caroline."

What with her down-home likability, I soon cottoned to Caroline. She looked to be about the age my mother would have been had she been alive. And because my parents had divorced, I couldn't help but wonder if the Tonsors' marriage were like so many between two diametrically different people who nevertheless made the union work.

Their two-story house was modest, with a living room and dining room that seemed typical of a wood-frame dwelling built around 1920. Caroline playfully called it their "summer cottage."[2] Whatever the main floor lacked in size it made up in warmth, owing to three things that worked in concert to give the space an outsized coziness. First were the wingback chairs on either side of the hearth. Great stacks of books and papers formed columns around the left chair. There was no question who sat upon that throne! Second was a Bach fugue playing in the background, which perfectly suited the home of a humanities professor. Third were the delightful sprays of flowers by the fireplace, at the front window, and on the dining room table. They spread sweet fragrance throughout the downstairs.

Caroline noticed me looking closely at a bouquet. "Gardening," she said, "is Stephen's magnificent obsession."

"No," Tonsor protested, "it's a maddening obsession. The weather quite literally almost killed us. It was an extraordinary summer of extreme heat and drought that did not break until mid August, when the blessed rains returned.[3] Up to that point we and the flowers were all wilting together."

Flowers filled the house.

Recalling the mention of grandchildren during the walk, I asked Caroline whether they got to see their children and grandchildren often. She told me that her oldest daughter had been visiting recently with her two children. One of them went to football camp; the other to band camp, at Interlochen.[4]

Tonsor added, "During the summer and on holidays our house is often full of children and grandchildren. They love the fireplace. I am certain that it creates part of the mystique of grandmother's house. Two things are my special province: the garden and the fireplace. To quote a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.'"[5]

"Yes," said Caroline, "and the fireplace always smokes. I suppose it does look mysterious!"[6]

Perhaps wanting me to feel at home, Caroline added that it had long been her husband's custom to invite students over for lunch.[7]

"Yes," said Tonsor. "Back in the sixties, Tom Hayden sat on that couch. He was improbably named, he told me, after St. Thomas Aquinas!" Tonsor waved off the thought as if he did not care one whit that Tom Hayden had sat on his couch.[8]

I followed Tonsor into the dining room. He moved a fat novel off the table to a nearby bookcase and motioned me to sit down. "I've been reading Trollope," he said. "His women are boring. He does an excellent job at depicting them but they are dull and trivial people. The only interesting ones, Lizzy Eustace and the Countess Neroni, are petty criminal types. Come to think of it, most of his men are dull and trivial, too."[9]

"Caroline, it looks as if you've cooked up a storm in the kitchen!" Tonsor exclaimed with much pleasure. We sat down to a hearty lunch, as he had promised: pot roast, potatoes, carrots. The surprise came when Tonsor poured me a glass of sherry. In a professor's house, that was a first.

*     *     *

After our fill of lunch and spirited conversation, Tonsor and I walked back to campus mostly in silence. Although the clouds seemed to lift a little, the air remained warm and humid.

Retracing our steps through Burns Park, I reflected on the fast start of my academic career at Michigan. On this first day of classes, it was not yet 2 p.m., and already I'd had the privilege of spending more than four hours with my graduate advisor and meeting his gracious wife who welcomed me to their home. I was eager to report their hospitality to my circle of family and friends. But as an introvert with two glasses of sherry in me, I was starting to flag. It was time to retreat into the labyrinth of Harlan Hatcher Library, where I could jot down insights from my conversation with Tonsor, prepare for my other classes, and tackle Cassirer in light of everything I had learned that morning.

Once back on the Diag, Tonsor broke the spell of our self-enclosed hike. He made an observation that revealed more about who he was. "I have been reading a doctoral dissertation written by one of your colleagues, Mr. Winnie."[10]

I wondered if Tonsor had drunk too much sherry: Winnie? My name is Whit-ney.

He didn't pause, and I wasn't about to interrupt. "At first I did not want to read it. It's long, it's the sixth dissertation from this past year, and I was supposedly on leave. But I must say it is quite fascinating. It is a history of the Cochin family, one of the great French Catholic families of the high bourgeoisie. The dissertation is based on the family archives made available by the present Baron Cochin. They were liberal conservatives, and the historian Augustin Cochin, who died in World War I, could probably best be called a reactionary. They are my kind of people."[11] With that arresting thought, Tonsor faded into the reflections of Haven Hall's glass doors.

So Tonsor was a "liberal conservative" who was happy to be called a "reactionary."[12] Confused? So was I. I knew that I'd eventually have to sort it all out during my study at U of M. But that would come in due course. For now I enjoyed feeling the warmth of the lunch.

__________________

[1] One of Tonsor's former students, who later became a close friend, said that the unsettling effect of Tonsor's thick lenses was to make him peer at you with "the two glass eyes of a fish."
[2] "Summer cottage" is from Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 3; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery. "1920" is from Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 1; Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, pp. 2-3; and Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1; all three letters are in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.
[4] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1.
[5] Tonsor to Regnery, November 17, 1980, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.
[6] Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[7] During these same years, another great European intellectual historian was hosting weekly lunches for his graduate students. At Yale University, Frank M. Turner (1944-2010) took his teaching assistants to Yorkside Pizza near campus. See Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche, ed. Richard A. Lofthouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), Kindle edition, "Editor's Preface," loc. 132.
[8] Tom Hayden died just weeks after I composed this conversation. See URL http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/tom-hayden-dead.html?emc=edit_na_20161024&nlid=30564708&ref=cta&_r=0, accessed October 24, 2016.
[9] Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, p. 3.
[10] Lawrence Hutchinson Winnie, "Aegis of the Bourgeoisie: The Cochin of Paris, 1750-1922," 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1988.
[11] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2.
[12] Gregory L. Schneider, "Tonsor, Stephen J.," American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, eds. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 862.