"Consolations of the Conservative" by Agnes Repplier is an essay that articulates and defends the temperamental conservative disposition as a legitimate and necessary mode of engaging with human civilization, politics, art, and social change. Repplier distinguishes carefully between political conservatism as a party platform and what she calls temperamental conservatism, a deep psychological and aesthetic orientation toward the world rooted in appreciation for what human civilization has painfully accumulated over centuries. Repplier opens with an allusion to a Hawthorne story in which humanity, seized by reforming zeal, destroys all the tools and symbols of its perceived vices, only to find that the human heart, with its enduring passions, remains unchanged. This serves as her foundational premise: the belief in human perfectibility drives liberalism and radicalism, while sympathy with humanity and with the beautiful, imperfect things people have made of history is the keynote of conservatism. She insists that the temperamental conservative is neither stupid nor selfish by definition, and that stupidity is no more the preserve of conservatives than folly is the exclusive province of progressives. Repplier quotes Disraeli and Lecky to show that such caricatures cut both ways and illuminate little. The temperamental conservative, as Repplier defines him, is a figure in whom delight and apprehensiveness contend. He takes deep pleasure in color, atmosphere, tradition, and literature, but this very sensitivity makes him wary of untested changes. He is not an optimist, and he is not an idealist. Repplier is particularly sharp in her treatment of idealism, noting that the French Jacobins and the architects of Bolshevist Russia were pure idealists whose noble aspirations translated into ordinary official murder and tyranny. She argues that democracy can be divorced from freedom, and that being tyrannized by a proletariat is no less painful than being tyrannized by a tsar. Oppressive taxation, corrupt deals, and the looting of citizens have been features of regimes across the political spectrum, and sonorous phrases about reconstructing the world's psychology are, she argues, sedative words that mean nothing. Repplier engages thoughtfully with Lord Hugh Cecil's analysis of conservatism, praising his distinction between temperamental and political conservatism while questioning the attempt to ground conservative principles in Christian doctrine. She notes with characteristic precision that the New Testament is equally silent on what the state should and should not do, and that the counsel of Christ is personal and intimate rather than legislative. Chesterton's observation that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting but has been found difficult and not tried is invoked with evident sympathy. A significant portion of the essay examines the paradox by which radicals of one generation become the conservatives of the next. Repplier points to Madame Breshkovskaya, the grandmother of the Russian Revolution, who lived to see the forces she helped unleash crush the freedoms she had sacrificed decades to secure, and who ended her days pleading for order and the welfare of children. She similarly points to Samuel Gompers, whose loyalty to the Allied cause in the First World War earned him the condemnation of international socialists and the unlikely label of conservative. These figures illustrate Repplier's point that the spiral of revolution constantly reshuffles alliances and that the temperamental conservative often finds himself unexpectedly alongside former adversaries. In the realm of art, Repplier traces the same dynamic. The Impressionist painters, once ridiculed by laughing Parisian crowds, became canonical, their innovations absorbed into the tradition that conservatives now defend. She turns this observation against the experimenters in free verse who were ascendant in her own time, arguing that while vivid imagery and keen thought have value regardless of form, unless the form is poetical the result is not poetry. She defends the formal constraints of traditional verse not as arbitrary restrictions but as barriers that perform a necessary function, preventing the merely garrulous from mistaking verbosity for song. Repplier closes by arguing that resistance, the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance. A party of progress and a party of stability are both necessary to civilization, and the patience of the conservative, surviving the repeated disappointments of history, balances the hopefulness of the reformer. Political conservatism may be a losing cause in modern democracy, but temperamental conservatism, she insists, dates from the birth of human reason and will outlast any particular revolution. Those who can look both ways see farther, and those who tread a known track travel the greater distance.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1926 · Genre: Essays, Philosophy, Social Commentary