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.
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.