Comments on: ‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art https://barelyablog.com/the-magus-by-john-fowles-a-sublime-work-of-art/ by ilana mercer Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:29:09 +0000 hourly 1 By: Chanson de Jests https://barelyablog.com/the-magus-by-john-fowles-a-sublime-work-of-art/comment-page-1/#comment-34339 Sat, 22 Apr 2023 11:32:53 +0000 https://barelyablog.com/?p=163004#comment-34339 True, but while the Marxist/progressive/etc., tendency to judge all works of art and literature by their propagandistic value (or lack thereof), setting on pedestals works it would be a stretch to even call mediocre while trampling into the dirt truly great works (e.g., Cesaire’s A Tempest vs Shakespeare’s The Tempest), is both stupid and immoral, there is dager in the opposite extreme as well: beauty herself, if removed from the company of her sisters goodness and truth, can often seduce men into commiting or excusing acts of unspeakable evil. For example the Gettsburg Address is, as H. L. Menchen pointed out, stunning from a purely literary point of view, but in artistically painting over the unconstitutional nature of Lincoln’s invasion it was and remains an instrument of great evil. Also (and a little more relevant to your review) In Flanders Fields by McCrae is poetically lovely, but it’s beauty only renders it more repulsive when you consider its use for sending more young Europeans into the martial meatgrinder which their leaders where furiously cranking from both sides. (As an aside, all leaders should, like Charles the Bold, personally lead the wars they desire, so that if the wars are as ill chosen and ill led as his were they can share his fate.)

I guess that was part of the purpose of a classical education, to achieve a balance of between those two extremes enough to preserve a civilization; that in contrast with the idea that education should mean creating public schools which act as factories for producing John Dewey’s universal robots–the original Czech word’s derivation from the word for slave being singularly appropriate here–who will unthinkingly work to preserve a state.

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