THE SENSE OF THE PAST
239
the romantic movement upon our time. He concludes that the
romantic movement failed. Well, we have all heard that before
and perhaps it is true, though
'I
for one know less and less what it
means. Indeed, I know less and less what the failure of any move–
ment in literature means: all movements fail and perhaps the
romantic movement failed more than most because it attempted
to effect more than most, possibly it attempted to effect too much.
To say that a literary movement failed seems to suggest that litera–
ture ought to settle something for good and all, and that life ought
to be progressively completed and restful. But see what the result
of the romantic ideas is, according to Mr. Quennell:
Nationalism was essentially a Romantic movement, and
from nationalism springs the half-baked racial theorist with his
romantic belief in the superiority of "Aryan" blood and his
romantic distrust of the use of reason. So far-reaching were the
effects of the Romantic Revival that they still persist in shapes
under which they are no longer recoe;nized.... For Romantic
literature appeals to that strain of anarchism which inhabits a
dark corner of every human mind and is continually advancing
the charms of extinction against the claims of life-the beauty
of all that is fragmentary and youthful and half-formed as
opposed to the compact achievement of adult genius.
I suppose a little passage could contain no more errors of fact
and of logic than this one does. Had it not been for Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Kant and Goethe we should never have had the
iron rigidity, the desperate centralization which the New Order
involves, nor the concentration camps and all the calculated
cruelty:
From Shelley to Schickelgruber
must clearly be the next
dissertation.
It is easy enough, of course, to reduce the argument to
absurdity. We have only to ask whether we would: not have been
spared the Japanese aggression if Lafcadio Hearn had never lec–
tured on the English poets in Japan. Or to ask why Germany and
not ourselves responded so fiercely to the romantic ideas. Andre
Gide uses the
reductio
more seriously when he replies to those in
France who blame the defeat on the ideas of
th~
French writers; as
reported in
PARTISAN REVIEW,
he says that it would be as absurd
to blame French literature for the present defeat as it would be
to congratulate it on the victory of 1918.
It is easy enough to dispose of Mr. Quennell's conclusion, but
