A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things
VII. The Smallholding
What is the impoverished traditionalist to do? The field of action for this tiny minority is greatly limited. No British television network is commissioning arts programmes headed by Catholic experts on the Old Masters; no neo-Puritan brimstone-breathers are called to do Thought for the Day; the Internet provides a promising frontier, with its proliferation of respectable new platforms, but it lacks precisely the concentration and centrifugal force that traditional societies require. Now, if one had great personal wealth or powerful friends, something might be done – but notwithstanding the excellent Jonathan Ruffer, and keenly aware that Sir Roger Scruton has now gone to meet his Maker, there are precious few traditionalists holding the cultural high ground.
What is to be done? You must start from where you are. That
means, in the first case, cultivating virtue in the soul – become a balanced
and integral man or woman, lay foundations for a purposeful life, be a good
neighbour. But after that, it means assessing the prospects of your home
situation. Even the vagrant has a home of this sort – it travels with him.
There may be no hope of traditional society “out there”, but perhaps some little
traditional society can be built in here.
I can only look to my own prospects. Renting on a low-cost
long-term tenure under unusual circumstances, free to convert and repair and
redecorate as desired. A terrace house, formerly owned by some miner or cartman;
added to and accreted over the years, including by us. We use it as two
bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, an upstairs snug sitting
room, a sewing room/spare bedroom, a large office and games room, and two
bathrooms. There is a compact but promising garden, and we rent a very small
allotment plot.
These are all works in progress, half in chaos, the result
of children and workload and ill-health and every other factor that plays into
these situations. They are a beginning, though. They can be a citadel. A
citadel for what? As the title says, a citadel of the Permanent Things – those
irreplaceable and quintessential features of humanity through all ages, those
features which separate us from the beasts, which connect us to eternal values
and purpose.
The citadel is a place for defence and for training – that is
how Russell Kirk saw his own “citadel” at Piety Hill. It is also a statement –
an aesthetic declaration about stability and control. The citadel stakes out
the claim for the forces of order in a chaotic Wasteland.
My own citadel must be different to yours – not merely by
circumstance of property, but also differences in temperament and variety in
vocation. Some are called to raise a great brood of children into allegiance to
Permanence, forsaking many of their own comforts; others, through disappointments
or privation, have an equally high calling as a rover or a hostess or an urban
hermit, dedicating all their time to the wider stratagems of our Cause. Yet
perhaps my literally domestic aspirations can serve as some inspiration to
yours. Concrete examples are better than poetic generalities – you build
citadels from stone, not vapour. The arid abstractions of the dreamful young
reactionary will not survive the solid shot of our neighbours in Philistia.
Let us talk about physical space, first. There ought to be
as many usable rooms as possible, number dependent upon space. Let there be a
dining room with a fine old table, under which little boys might hunker down
and pretend to be cavemen; let there be different places to sit and relax, with
different aspects, levels of light, and furnishing – a different hideaway for
each mood. There need to be different places coveys may gather – a yard where cronies
may drink good wine at dusk, a secluded armchair upstairs for quiet reading, a
parlour where the needy might come to be hosted and blessed. A multifunctional
citadel, this – not a vast mock-Scandi waste of open plan minimalism, but a
warren, fit to withstand a siege. There will be a place for the ensigns to rest,
and a maproom for the castellan, and a storehouse for our pikes and arquebuses.
For decoration, my taste runs to the old-fashioned, though
not exclusively. Darker colours suit dining rooms, those Great Halls of evening
conversation, where the light must reflect upon rich, absorbing colours;
lighter colours suit dayrooms where you ask the sun to amberly light your way
as you pore over a book or pass the tea ceremony with a comrade. Little boys
and girls, of course, must have bright colours for their bright hearts.
My own idea for paintings is aided by a rich inheritance of objets from a painter uncle. The Verows
decorate our family room; once the dining room is finished, more will go up there,
accompanied by a variety of Machins, and some Ravilious prints. Where those dreamy
pictures of Deep England pass to the downstairs landing, a change will be
effected – Chagall’s “I and the Village”, a stranger Deep France. Up the stairs
and to a Kandinsky, and then on the upstairs landing a variety of stylish
modern media artifacts – a Studio Ghibli promo poster, for instance. Our
bedroom has ukiyo-e prints and a
painting of the woodland where my grandparents are buried. All these paintings
aim to suit their surroundings and carry coherent themes across walls, but also
individually declare the Creed of Permanence. I have the unearned blessing of
family paintings, and display them in allegiance, both to their diverting beauty
but also the echo they are of former times and the names of my kin now translated
to pure Permanence.
Furniture is really a different category to decoration.
Tasteful furniture, either inherited or picked up on the cheap by careful
hunting. The family room has monochrome fabric armchairs and sofa and footstool,
a marble-topped side-table, and a sturdy inherited carpet in the middle (and an
unobtrusive IKEA shelving unit for the toys and electronic apparel; the mock
Scandi aesthetic has its happy accidents). The dining room has a table
inherited from a friend, and old barley-twist chairs from my Grandma; there is
a giant dark-wood century old sideboard and mighty bookcase, its bottom shelf filled with my Great-Grandfather’s bound Strand
magazines. There is a lacquered bureau beyond the table. The nursery has white,
cheerful furniture, colourful train table, and a chair-bed. You get the idea;
restraint in colour scheme, solidity over ease, comfortable, always
transporting the past into the present to frame the future for the children
raised here in this little citadel.
But what shall we do to make this one of – God willing! –
thousands of Last Homely Houses scattered across England, a refuge in the
Trollshaws of postmodernity? We amateurishly grow veg in the allotment and
yard, with our eldest a key farmhand, and have grand plans for the bumpy garden
(including a wicker hideout under the leylandii). We now try (sometimes failing!) to eschew
electronic entertainment except on the Sabbath – which is time for cartoons and
documentaries – and instead provide solid, hard-wearing toys, train sets,
teddies, and acres of books. There is almost nothing more heartening than
seeing your one-year-old gallop to find a book to read (upside-down, and
missing every other page as he paws through!). Let them grow up, on the whole,
secured in the unperjurable realm of real, physical things. We are reading
Longfellow after dinner now, and for some time we have had family worship between
dinner and bedtime. It is a revelation to discover your toddlers can learn
literally dozens of old hymns by heart, and will listen to the difficult
diction of Puritan preachers, and will ask questions about hoary old Bible
texts. I want to give them the weapons for their own defence of the Permanent
Things, and it so often happens around the wax-clothed dining table, where they
learn to paint with Mama, and build Lego, and hear dead voices speak Permanent
truths –
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
We’ve taken – very recently – to reading Chaucer together
nightly after chores and work and the boys’ bedtime. That will occupy us for
some time. What next? Why not some long and encouraging missionary biography,
or Runciman’s Crusades, or the novels
of Lewis?
I want there to be a magazine rack – now surely the deadest
dinosaur! – with respectable magazines for guests and children and evenings – Apollo, The New Criterion, the LRB.
Well – and perhaps some vetted comic anthologies from the old dead past, safely
offensive, because I don’t think the toddlers are yet at the point of hmming
along as they read a review of a biography of Henry James written by a Lecturer
in English at some minor suburban polytechnic.
One day perhaps we will tear out the gas fire – as respectable
as it is – and put in a wood-burner. Is that too boho? But there is something
inescapably connected about sitting in front of the fireplace, watching logs
burn. You can see it, can’t you? The boys pushing trains on the beloved pass-down
carpet; the house guest with his fashionable novel on the sofa; single malt on
the side table, beside whisky glasses reflecting swaying firelight; a great-uncle’s
paintings of landscapes and town squares conjuring scenes he saw and loved, and
so we see and love.
I am missing, of course, one of the great ingredients of
this citadel, one of the great fruits of all these plantings – there should be
serious conversation, and spiritual growth, and appreciation of sublime art –
but the perennial sound, aside from respectable radio channels, should be
laughter. Rich, healthy, fulsome laughter, laughter at no obscenity but for
sheer joy, for silliness, echoing the laughter that fills the feasting halls of
Heaven. Laughter in face of despair, knowing, truly, that the Permanent Things
to which we are allegiant in this house will stand unshaken at the very End.
"Ere the sad gods that
made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.
"Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
"For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What
spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow."
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