As we look around the cultural landscape today, we find few causes for celebration. The sad fact is that cultural life in America has been dumbed-down, politicized, and coarsened to a degree almost unimaginable even a few decades ago. Wherever one turns, it seems, the rebarbative competes with the deadeningly simple-minded for one’s attention. There is all the more reason, then, to pay tribute to those few oases of civilization that flourish here and there in the encroaching desert of triviality and degradation. Since the spring of 1948, when its first issue appeared, The Hudson Review has been a welcome voice of urbanity and sophistication in the world of American arts and letters. Founded by the poet Frederick Morgan with the late Joseph Bennett and the late critic and translator William Arrowsmith, this distinguished quarterly has consistently provided a refuge for intelligent, unacademic criticism of literature and the arts, as well as some of the most thoughtful contemporary poetry and short fiction. Indeed, a look at the early years of The Hudson Review reveals a dazzling roster of contributors, including Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Joseph Kerman, W. H. Auden, Eudora Welty, and T. S. Eliot.
Fifty years is a very long time in the world of serious intellectual journals.
Fifty years is a very long time in the world of serious intellectual journals. One can think of only a few with longer runs than The Hudson Review, and no journal has been more distinguished in its literary ambitions. To commemorate this milestone, Frederick Morgan and Paula Dietz, the co-editors of the magazine, have just published a special issue featuring—in addition to their usual array of poems, stories, and criticism—eight essays on “American Themes.”
The lead essay of this special issue, by Joseph Epstein, reviews the political and moral significance of the first and greatest of the American Founding Fathers, George Washington. At a time when at least one American high school has repudiated the name “George Washington” because of the slavery issue, it is refreshing to read a percipient and heartfelt celebration of this duty-bound lover of liberty. Noting that after the American Revolution Washington wished more than anything to return to his farm and family in Virginia, Mr. Epstein asks what could have moved him to accept “the most arduous service his nation offered.” In brief, the answer is duty—what Mr. Epstein describes as a “profound sense of duty that derived from his, Washington’s, moral character.” This of course is a theme that has particular resonance at the present moment, for, as Mr. Epstein observes at the end of his essay,
moral character is what we continue to ask of all our politicians, and it is of course what they almost always refuse to supply. . . .
Behind Washington’s rigid sense of honor . . . was really a concern that he show proper disinterest and never take advantage of his influence. . . . He believed that honorable conduct was crucial to public life. . . . He believed that good character meant more than anything else—than special interest, than idealism, than any theoretical concerns—and worked to develop a character of the kind in himself that proved the point.
Mr. Epstein’s essay is called “George Washington, An Amateur’s View,” a particularly appropriate title, we thought, with which to begin the fiftieth-anniversary issue of The Hudson Review. Today, the word “amateur” is sometimes used to mean “inexpert.” Mr. Epstein uses “amateur” in an older, more abundant sense, to signify (as the word’s etymology suggests) something done out of devotion or even love. In this sense, Mr. Epstein’s essay is an amateur effort, as indeed is The Hudson Review generally. We can think of no higher praise.
Readers interested in acquainting themselves with The Hudson Review may write to the editors at 684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021.
