CORRESPONDENCE
LORD ELDON OR THE
DANGERS OF PARODY
Sirs:
One would like to believe that the ar–
ticle on Lord Eldon, written by John
Clive in your December, 1949 issue,
is indeed a satire on that notorious
gentleman. One thinks of the repeated
lines, "True genius is to madness near
allied/ And thin partitions do their
bonds divide." A thin partition seems
to divide Mr. Clive's argument; on
one side is genius, on the other mad–
ness. Or perhaps we are mad in sus–
pecting the worst (or the best?). This
article is, by the way, the best retort to
Mr. Blackwood and his letter in the
same issue.
If
emotion doesn't enter into
politics at least in some degree to de–
cide the tone (and the issue?), what
i:; to decide?
Victor
Li
pta"
New York City
REPLY
Sirs:
To stand on the borderline between
genius and madness (if only
in
the
mind of a reader) is, at best, rather
embarrassing. To be forced to "ex–
plain" one's irony is even more em–
barrassing. The necessity of explication
has as its corollary the admission of at
least partial failure. But since Mr. Lip–
ton is apparently not the only reader
who was thrown into some confusion
by the eulogy of a diehard Tory
in
the
columns of
PR,
I welcome this oppor–
tunity of stating that "Lord Eldon Re–
visited" was a parody from beginning
to end-for some, alas, a Parody Lost.
It
was a parody directed specifically
at a recent book by Mr. Peter Viereck
entitled
Conservatism Revisited
and,
more generally, at a certain current of
contemporary political thinking.
Mr. Viereck's book, in its search
for "values we can live by
in
the crisis
of
1949"
(one assumes the values hold
for 1950), finds
in
the conservatism of
M etternich challenge and example tor
our day. Assuming that Metternich was
not as rabid a reactionary as he is often
made out to have been, I cannot help
feeling that Mr. Viereck might have
found a more appropriate fragment to
shore against his ruins. Certainly, M et–
ternich's idea of a Concert of Europe
represented internationalism as against
the nationalism of some of the liberal
movements he was so anxious to sup–
press. The important question should be
not whether ideas and
organi~ations
are
international in scope (a good case can
be made for Napoleon, Stalin, and Hit–
ler as internationalists), but what sort
of society is envisaged within the inter–
national framework. Mr. Viereck shows
that he is aware of this problem by dif–
ferentiating between the essentially aris–
tocratic-legitimist character of M eUer–
nich's concept and the present plans
for a union of Western Europe which
do not (or should not) disdain trade
unions and socialists. But, one might
be tempted to ask, why do we need
Metternich for this?
Because, Mr. Viereck replies, Metter–
nich, as well as having been a sort of
premature Marshall Planner, stood for
rationality, order, and stability against
the irrational emotion represented, we
are told, by a type of nationalism which
Mr. Viereck links not only with Navsm
but with Stalinism as well. This link–
age is not quite as astonishing a
tour
d e force
as it may appear to be, since
the book propounds the historically
rather dubious "circular" theory of fas–
cist-bolshevist synthesis. We may all
agree that both Fascism and Stalinism
are "bad," and that some kind of su-
