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that is not important: what is important is the effect which so dull
a sense of the past can have upon our thought. For Mr. Quennell
the past has no true reality; he cannot see Romanticism in its rela–
tion to its own present. His historical insensibility is not unique;
it is being matched by the insensibility of other liberal minds. For
example, W. T. Stace has written a widely praised book which lays
the rlame for Nazism on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Professor
Stace had the will to lay the blame somewhere in the realm of
systematic ideas because he wanted to identify our cause with
another set of systematic ideas. To satisfy this wilf he misread
Nietzsche, that good European, missed all his irony, all his delib–
erate ambiguity, forgot the historical context in which Nietzsche
wrote, and found-What? Nietzsche's ideas? I think not. And
not Schopenhauer's ideas, for the treatment of Schopenhauer is
much the same. He has succeeded only in giving us a false sense
of ourselves, in flattering us into the foolish belief that we descend
in the line of perfect goodness from an imagined Plato and a story–
book Athens.
A true sense of the past, a vivid hearing of the tone of time,
a properly complex notion of history and a decent awareness of
the difficulty of human life would have prevented this result. Ulti–
mately the view I am describing is a dangerous one; it is obscur–
antist and demagogic. And such a view, I am sorry to say, has
gained ground in this country. The pronouncements of Mr. Van
Wyck Brooks and others are based on this false sense of the past
which seems to justify putting the blame for present troubles on
past ideas. In England it has gained even greater ground. I refer
you to Mr. Eliot's comments (in PARTISAN REVIEW) on the
London "Times" leading editorial called "The Eclipse of the
Highbrow" and to Mr. Tom Harrison's survey (in
Hori~on)
of all
the English war books with their tendency to put the blame upon
"advanced" ideas. It would be pitiful indeed if, by ineptly
involving ideas of the past in our defense of liberal democracy, by
attacking all ideas of the past which did not seem to serve the
present moment, or which in some tortuous way can be seen as
possibly making us question the exigencies of the present moment,
we should ourselves be accomplishing the end we are trying to
prevent.
I am conscious that in what I have said I myself have over-
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