As someone who teaches literature for a living, I’m fine with that. So long as you don’t come asking me, or presumably Mr. Martel, to effect miracles, end injustice, offer a place in heaven, or do any of the rest of God’s work. All art offers is the illusion of order, not order itself. But as a citizen, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to say that politics doesn’t matter, that all that matters is thee, the cottage, and Bach on the iPod. God knows, George Stewart — and Hugh MacLennan — deserved what rest he could find after living with his wife’s death. Art should be able to say and do what it wants, to find salvation where it wants. My concern is not with where The Watch ends; it’s with where it suggests its readers should end. That way lie temples for art and streets for the homeless, or pretty much the cities of Canada fifty years on.

Hugh MacLennan shared Galbraith’s misgivings with the affluent society: its addiction to production and consumption, and its retreat behind the picture windows and TV antennas of its new suburban homes. But Galbraith’s solution, to redirect some of that private af-fluence into public goods, would have horrified MacLennan. No fan of the taxman or, by the 1950s, of idealistic politics, MacLennan instead took the route of George Grant, whose Lament for a Nation would soon provide a philosopher’s version of MacLennan’s novel: instead of liberal idealism, conservative nostalgia. Instead of Jerome Martell, George Stewart. It’s no accident that Grant’s elegy for Canada ends exactly where MacLennan’s does, with a grateful deferral to the eternal order of God behind the disorder of politics. The problem, of course, is that even granting that order, in religion or its artistic surrogate, the disorder of this world remains.