In his last book, America Alone, Mr. Steyn certified the death of Europe, with America as the last bastion of Western civilization; in his latest book, he certifies the death of America, and hence of Western civilization altogether. The game is not so much afoot as already up and lost…

Sometimes one senses that Steyn is a little too keen on the end of the world, for no Jeremiah wants to warn his fellows that the future will be so-so rather than absolutely appalling.

The playwright’s clinical observations are astonishingly accurate, especially when compared with those of his son-in-law, Dr John Hall, who saw his patients through the misleading lens of the humoral theory that he had been taught. His only book… is of antiquarian interest only, its prescriptions hardly distinguishable from the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth.

By contrast, there is barely a Shakespeare play that cannot arrest a doctor’s attention. It is not just that he describes things accurately from a physiological point of view; he seems to know what it is like to feel them as well, and how to make us feel them, too.

Wherever you look, the outlook is bad. The national debt is actually larger than it seems at first… The government has undertaken immense and totally unfunded pension obligations towards public sector workers, who have been granted a tremendous privilege by comparison with net-tax-payers who have to fund their own pensions. The public service workers will almost certainly fight tooth and nail to preserve these privileges, if necessary at the expense of the services they are supposed to provide (in fact it is already happening, with strikes looming), and so the seeds of civil unrest, discord and even war have been sown. At the very least we are returning to the pre-Thatcher days.

Even the greatest penological liberal has at least one type of crime that he wishes to punish severely and with exemplary zeal, however much he may decry the principle of punishment as retribution or deterrence. In the case of the Guardian newspaper, the crime that it most deprecates is that against favoured minorities, as if it were the minority status, and not the crime, that mattered most.

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Why some murders are selected for publicity and others are not is an interesting question; no doubt everyone uses dramatic and unusual events for his own moral purposes, to illustrate what he thinks needs illustrating (I have certainly done it). But many of the reports of murders nowadays are sure to include the “tributes” paid to the victim, as if the wickedness of murder depended upon the personal qualities of the victim, and to kill a person who had, say, a pleasant smile or who was handsome was far worse than to kill someone with a perpetual frown or who was ugly. The “tributes” to the victim often consist of a list of the most banal qualities that one would hope to find in many, if not most, people; but the very word “tribute” suggests something approaching a willing death or sacrifice for a cause by someone of more than usual worth.

Sixteen years before Karl Jaspers described primary delusions in his textbook, General Psychopathology, first published in 1913, the writer and doctor Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) gave an account of such a delusion in “Ward No 6.”…One of the patients in ward 6 is Ivan Dmitritch Gromov.

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Chekhov captures here the preservation, even the sharpening, of the paranoid person’s intellect and powers of reflection. Every small event is infused with sinister meaning: “A policeman walking slowly passed by the windows: that was not for nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near the house. Why were they silent?” Eventually, Ivan Dmitritch flees the house in the belief that the men who have come to repair the stove are policemen, and he is admitted to ward 6.

Jaspers, who was both psychiatrist and philosopher, gives examples of delusional mood in his General Psychopathology: “Suddenly things seem to mean something quite different. The patient sees people in uniform in the street; they are Spanish soldiers. A patient noticed the waiter in the coffee-house; he skipped past him so quickly and uncannily. A passer-by gave such a penetrating glance, he could be a detective.” Jaspers made no mention of Ivan Dmitritch, however: surely a suspicious circumstance? What can it mean?

If the artistic muse rewarded effort and devotion alone, Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) would have been the greatest artist who ever lived. Often, and for years, he worked 16 hours or more a day at his art; he suffered every kind of deprivation for it. Alas, try as he might, he could rarely get things right. After his tragic death aged 60 (he cut his own throat after failing to kill himself with a gun), Dickens wrote with obvious regret, “All his life [Haydon] had utterly mistaken his vocation. No amount of sympathy with him and sorrow for him in his manly pursuit of a wrong idea for so many years . . . ought to prevent one from saying that he most unquestionably was a very bad painter.”

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Haydon, who must have been a remarkable man because he was the friend of many of the geniuses of his time, is now known more for his writings than his paintings. His autobiography contains a graphic and deeply moving description of the death of his mother: “Incessant anxiety and trouble gradually generated that dreadful disease angina pectoris. The least excitement brought on an agonising struggle of blood through the great vessel of the heart, and nothing could procrastinate her fate but entire rest of mind and body. Her doom was sealed, and death held her as his own whenever it should please him to take her.”

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Haydon also wrote 26 volumes of diaries; many of the entries recorded the money worries that finally overwhelmed him. The last entry is possibly the most poignant in all literature: “God forgive me. Amen. Finis of B. R. Haydon. ‘Stretch me no longer on this rough world.’– Lear. End of Twenty-sixth Volume.”

…Henry G Bohn, one of the giants of 19th century publishing and bookselling…invented cheap and commercial editions of the classics. Emerson said of him that he had done for books what railways had done for travel. But he also compiled a Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, with 8000 citations from 450 poets; surely a sign of the most diligent, if not necessarily judicious, reading.

The quotations in his dictionary are arranged by subject matter, and it is sad to relate that those about doctors are not only few but overwhelmingly derogatory. For example, there is a quotation from Charles Churchill (1732-1764), a prolific but now forgotten poet whose short life was full of scandal: “The surest way to health, say what they will, / Is never to suppose we shall be ill. / Most of those evils we poor mortals know, / From doctors and imagination flow.”

It is easier to counsel the avoidance of illness than to follow that advice, however. Churchill died in France at an early age, having fled there to escape prosecution for an assault on his printer; in France he caught a chill and took James’s fever powders…. 

Forty years after Churchill’s aspersions about doctors, the playwright George Colman (the Younger) made one of his characters say, in a similar vein (quoted by Bohn): “Will kick’d out the doctor:—but when ill indeed, / E’en dismissing the doctor don’t always succeed.” In other words, doctors are not the sole cause of death, because illness can sometimes do it too: a most generous concession.

Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs rather than as an existential limit to our brief earthly sojourn. For many, death has become anomalous rather than inevitable, something to protest against rather than accept. For them, the concept of a good death is entirely alien or antipathetic.

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If neither formal religious belief nor secular religions like Marxism gives meaning to Horowitz’s life, what does? In large measure, it is his work: a lifetime spent in the crucible of political thought and struggle, first on the left, and then, over the last quarter century or so, as a devout conservative. It is vain to suppose, of course, that any human achievement, even the highest, could possibly be of a duration that would entitle it to the word “eternal.” No literary fame, for example, has so far lasted longer than 3,000 years—not even the blinking of the universe’s eyelid. But we humans must live on a human scale and measure things accordingly. The journalist, while he writes his latest article, thinks it of the greatest significance, though he knows perfectly well that it will be forgotten the day after tomorrow, if indeed it is read or noticed at all. Often I have thought to myself, as I write articles, “If only I can be spared until I have finished it,” though I am aware that even I will have forgotten its content by the week after next.

Significance and importance, however, are not natural qualities found inhering in objects or events. Only the appraising mind can impart such meaning.