‘Miniver Cheevy’: When Nostalgia Runs Amok

Miniver Cheevy lacks the will to reinvigorate the present with the virtues of the past. "Duel of Knights" by an unknown 19th-century artist. Public Domain

“What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare’s Juliet from her balcony. She then answers her own question: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In other words, it’s the person who counts, not the name. But is that always the case?

In "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet poses the question: If a rose was called by another name, would it still have its trait: a sweet smell? "The Time of Roses," 1916, by John William Godward. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Public Domain

Change Abraham Lincoln to Jimmy Lincoln, and you strip that name of its Old Testament lightning. Make Taylor Swift a Barbara, and as any poet will tell you, a bit of the Swiftie magic disappears. Hollywood actors have long recognized the power of a name—Marion Morrison became John Wayne for that very reason—and writers of fiction and poetry are usually careful to select a name that fits and enhances a character’s nature. Had Dickens ticketed Ebenezer Scrooge as Davy Adams, he would have altered the entire dynamic of “A Christmas Carol.”

That brings us to Miniver Cheevy.

That’s the protagonist in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s 1910 poem “Miniver Cheevy.” Repeating that name a few times—Miniver Cheevy, Miniver Cheevy—might bring a smile or a laugh. A John Cheevy might do for an attorney, a Miniver Smith for a professor of history, but what sort of man is Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy?

‘Miniver Cheevy’         

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici, Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the mediæval grace Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.

Fancies and Fallacies

Here’s a man whose predicament begs for hoots of laughter. Reread his take on the Medici and how though “he had never seen one/ He would have sinned incessantly” had he joined those Florentine aristocrats and bankers. Consider the ironic juxtaposition of “mediæval grace” with “iron clothing.” That scratching of the head in the final quatrain calls to mind some bumpkin declaring, “Well, I’m just plain bumfuzzled how I got here.”

Portraits of the Medicis, 16th century, by Agnolo di Cosimo (Bronzino). Clockwise from top left: Lorenzo the Elder, Pierfrancesco the Elder, Giovanni di Pietro de' Medici, Giovanni de’ Medici the Younger. University of Bologna/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED

Yet here too is Miniver the Romantic. He is tragic for his addiction to nostalgia and the escape he seeks at the bottom of a bottle. If only he’d carried that bright sword while astride a prancing horse in the days of Lancelot and Arthur, or stormed Troy alongside Achilles, he might have drawn the breath of life as a hero rather than as a foundling in a world he scorns.

Miniver idealizes that lost world of his fantasies. He dreams of a time when he might have kissed the hand of a Guinevere, while failing to acknowledge that filth, lice, and disease were as ubiquitous in that age as today’s cellphones and tattoos. A trip by time machine into one of those cities “of ripe renown” might soon send him scuttling back to the modern world.

"Duel of Knights" by an unknown 19th-century artist. Pen and bistre over red chalk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

Moreover, his obsession with the past, though admirable in its idealism, is misdirected in another way. A different man might have absorbed the valor and virtues of the ancient Greeks and Romans, fitted them to the modern world, and become heroic by that transformation. He might have taken as his own the knightly code of a Galahad or Gawain as expressed in legend, protecting women, defending the poor and the helpless, practicing generosity, and demonstrating loyalty to the deserving. Miniver has the opportunities to do so, as evidenced by the fact that he is resting from his labors, meaning that he must have interactions with others.

Cervantes’s Don Quixote has amused readers for four centuries with his attempts to mimic the noble deeds and chivalric ideals he’s read about in books. In Miniver we find only a pathetic, self-pitying shadow of that mad knight errant, a “child of scorn,” who lacks the courage and the will to reinvigorate the present with the virtues of the past, a critic rather than an actor.

Living in the Moment

Miniver is tragic for his addiction to nostalgia and the escape he seeks at the bottom of a bottle. "Drinking Men," 1920, by Ivar Kamke. Public Domain

In his 2018 book “Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World,” Anthony Esolen devotes a few pages to “Miniver Cheevy.” At one point, he favorably compares Miniver with today’s left-wing radicals. “If we think about it,” Mr. Esolen writes, “we can see a strange family resemblance between Miniver Cheevy, dreaming of an airy past that never existed while hating the ordinary things in front of him, and the self-styled ‘progressive,’ dreaming of a future that shall never exist, if he has a visionary goal at all, while hating the ordinary things in front of him, too.”

Esolen’s point is valid. Miniver fails to enrich the present with gifts from the past, indulging himself instead in a faux nostalgia cobbled together from romances and ancient poems. Those seeking today to cancel our culture by destroying statues of renowned men and women, bowdlerizing  books, and eradicating customs and holidays, also despise the age in which they live, though they blame the past rather than idolize it.

Here I would add a third group of people whose unhappiness prevents them from fully engaging the present with energy and love. Like Miniver Cheevy, these men and women, many of them of a conservative bent, admire the “days of old,” whether it’s the deeds of America’s Founders, ancestors who fought in the Civil War, or The Greatest Generation who endured a Great Depression and won a world war. These are the people who, having determined that the place and time they inhabit are beyond redemption, can find nothing worthy of their love in our present age. Miniver Cheevy drinks from a bottle of alcohol, and they drink from a bottle of despair. Like Esolen’s progressives and like Miniver, they curse the commonplace, seeing the evils of the present but turning a blind eye to its goodness and virtues.

We needn’t end like Miniver Cheevy, a self-proclaimed victim of fate. If instead we hope to reinvigorate our culture, return virtue to our public square, and live meaningful lives, we must work to restore the past’s treasures, blend them into the present, and bring greater meaning and depth to ourselves and to our culture.

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