January 2011

It is the unhappy fate of some men to stand as symbols of the human being’s natural reluctance to realize that the world has changed. They survive into a day that they cannot understand, and the simple fact that they do not understand it remains beyond their grasp; and since this is the case, the solutions which they attempt for the problems that the changed world brings them are completely inadequate. When these men stand in positions of high authority the results can be tragic.

Since the world has probably seen more sweeping change in the last 50 or 75 years than in any preceding half-dozen centuries, this inability to adjust to change —inability, indeed, to see that any adjustment is necessary—is one of the melancholy hallmarks of our era. An eminent example is the case of that distinguished British soldier, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.

War is the great, dramatic explosion which makes change obvious. There are lesser ones, less terrible, less harrowing to read about, which evoke simple nostalgia rather than horror. It is pleasant, for instance, to turn from a consideration of the incomprehensible agony of Europe to the gaudy tale of the great Alaskan gold rush of the late 1890’s. In its own way the big gold rush was something of a milestone, too. Its overtones were not so grim and the literature it has given rise to is less appalling, but it remains a significant experience that is well worth study.

The Klondike Fever , by Pierre Berton. Alfred A. Knopf. 457 pp. $5.75.

Pierre Berton brings to the study of this event a scholar’s passion for accuracy, a light and graceful touch, and a good deal of personal knowledge of the place where the stirring events happened, and his The Klondike Fever offers a delightful way for stay-at-homes to follow the great trail of ’98.

We still have fragments of the open, useless, untenanted world, and there is an increasing compulsion upon us to preserve these, to set them apart and go and visit them so that we can at least touch the edges of something that is no longer quite within reach. Yet this very drive to preserve and visit the wild spaces may be self-defeating; the mere act of preservation and use robs the wilderness of its virginity; there are perhaps just too many of us nowadays, and it is a serious question whether we can ever again know the grandeur, the loneliness, and the wild, challenging beauty which our continent and our world offered to the adventurous in its youth.

This question bothers Joseph Wood Krutch, and he broods about it thoughtfully in his fine new book, Grand Canyon .

As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes was the living embodiment of law and rectitude. But even he had at least one skeleton in his moral closet. It is revealed in two letters written to his parents during his junior year at Brown University, and reprinted from Merlo J. Pusey’s definitive biography.