into which they made an instantaneous translation of all that took
its attitude are of course the environment of the performer, but also
place on the stage. The problem of the interplay between the emothe performer and his music make the environment of the audience.
tion and the convention which is available for it, and the reciprocal
In a family the parents are no doubt the chief factors in the eninfluence they exert on each other, is a very difficult one, and I vironment of the child; but also the child is a factor in the environscarcely even state its complexities, let alone pretend to solve them.
ment of the parents and himself conditions the actions of his parents
But the problem with its difficulties should be admitted, and simtoward him.
plicity of solution should always be regarded as a sign of failure,
Corollary to this question of environment is the question of in
A very important step forward in the complication of our sense
fluence, the influence which one writer is said to have had on anof the past was made when Whitehead and after him Lovejoy other. In its historical meaning, from which we take our present
taught us to look not for the expressed but for the assumed ideas
use, influence was a word intended to express a mystery. It means
of an age, what Whitehead describes as the "assumptions which
a flowing-in, but not as a tributary river flows into the main stream
appear so obvious that people do not know that they are assuming
at a certain observable point; historically the image is an astrologithem because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to cal one and the meanings which the Oxford Dictionary gives all
them."
suggest "producing effects by insensible or invisible means"-"the
But a regression was made when Professor Lovejoy, in that ininfusion of any kind of divine, spiritual, moral, immaterial, or secret fluential book of his, assured us that "the ideas in serious reflective
power or principle." Before the idea of influence we ought to be far
literature are, of course, in great part philosophical ideas in dilumore puzzled than we are; if we find it hard to be puzzled enough, tion." To go fully into the error of this common belief would need
we may contrive to induce the proper state of uncertainty by turnmore time than we have now at our disposal. It is part of our susing the word upon ourselves, asking, "What have been the influences piciousness of literature that we understake thus to make it a dethat made me the person I am, and to whom would I entrust the pendent art. Certainly we must question the assumption which gives
task of truly discovering what they were?,, ..
the priority in ideas to the philosopher and sees the movement of
Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient
thought as always from the systematic thinker, who thinks up the
complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to the conditions
ideas in, presumably, a cultural vacuum, to the poet who "uses" the
of their development and in relation to their transmission. Too
ideas "in dilution." We must question this even if it means a reoften we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed construction of what we mean by "ideas."
from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible
And this leads to another matter about which we may not be
thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered
simple, the relation of the poet to his environment. The poet, it is
about in a circle; the point of the game is the amusement that comes
true, is an effect of environment, but we must remember that he
when the last version is compared with the original. As for the
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Sense of the Past
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origin of ideas, we ought to remember that an idea is the formulathe world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intion of a response to a situation; so, too, is the modification of an tellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action.
existing idea. Since the situations in which people or cultures find
In time of war, when two different cultures, or two extreme
themselves are limited in number, and since the possible responses
modifications of the same culture, confront each other with force,
are also limited, ideas certainly do have a tendency to recur, and
this belief in the autonomy of ideas becomes especially strong and
because people think habitually ideas also have a tendency to persist
therefore especially clear. In any modern war there is likely to be
when the situation which called them forth is no longer present;
involved a conflict of ideas which is in part factitious but which is
so that ideas do have a certain limited autonomy, and sometimes
largely genuine. But this conflict of ideas, genuine as it may be,
the appearance of a complete autonomy. From this there has grown
suggests to both sides the necessity of believing in the fixed, imup the belief in the actual perfect autonomy of ideas. It is supposed mutable nature of the ideas to which each side owes allegiance.
that ideas think themselves, create themselves and their descendants,
What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us. Thus, in the
have a life independent of the thinker and the situation. And from
last war, an eminent American professor of philosophy won wide
this we are often led to conclude that ideas, systematic ideas, are
praise for demonstrating that Nazism was to be understood as the
directly responsible for events.
inevitable outcome of the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
A similar feeling is prevalent among our intellectual classes in
while the virtues of American democracy were to be explained by
relation to words. Semantics is not now the lively concern that it
tracing a direct line of descent from Plato and the Athenian polity.
was a few years ago, but the mythology of what we may call politi
Or consider a few sentences from a biography of Byron, written
cal semantics has become established in our intellectual life, the
when, not so long ago, the culture of Nazism was at its height.
belief that we are betrayed by words, that words push us around
The author, a truly admirable English biographer, is making an
against our will. "The tyranny of words" became a popular phrase
estimate of the effect of the Romantic Movement upon our time.
and is still in use, and the semanticists offer us an easier world and
He concludes that the Romantic Movement failed. Well, we have
freedom from war if only we assert our independence from words.
all heard that before, and perhaps it is true, although I for one
But nearly a century ago Dickens said that he was tired of hearing
know less and less what it means. Indeed, I know less and less what
about "the tyranny of words" (he used that phrase); he was, he
is meant by the ascription of failure to any movement in literature.
said, less concerned with the way words abuse us than with the way
All movements fail, and perhaps the Romantic Movement failed
we abuse words. It is not words
that make our troubles, but our
more than most because it attempted more than most; possibly it
own wills. Words cannot control us unless we desire to be controlled
attempted too much. To say that a literary movement failed seems
by them. And the same is true of the control of systematic ideas.
to suggest a peculiar view of both literature and history; it implies
We have come to believe that some ideas can betray us, others save
that literature ought to settle something for good and all, that life
us. The educated classes are learning to blame ideas for our troubles,
ought to be progressively completed. And according to our author,
rather than blaming what is a very different thing-our own bad
not only did the Romantic Movement fail-it left a terrible legacy:
thinking. This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned
Nationalism was ·essentially a Romantic movement, and from nationwith ideas rather than with thinking, and nowadays the errors of alism springs the half-baked racial theorist with his romantic belief in
academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into
the superiority of "Aryan" blood and his romantic distrust of the use
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Sense of the Past
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of reason. So far-reaching were the effects of the Romantic Revival that
which has had the effect of leading young students of literature,
they still persist in shapes under which they are no longer recognized.
particularly the more gifted ones, to incline more and more to resist
... For Romantic literature appeals to that strain of anarchism which
historical considerations, justifying themselves, as it is natural they
inhabits a dark corner of every human mind and is continually advancing the charms of extinction against the claims of life-the beauty of should, by pointing to the dullness and deadness and falsifications
all that is fragmentary and youthful and half-formed as opposed to the
which have resulted from the historical study of literature. Our recompact achievement of adult genius.
sistance to history is no doubt ultimately to be acounted for by noth
It is of course easy enough to reduce the argument to absurdity
ing less than the whole nature of our life today. It was said by
-we have only to ask why Germany and not ourselves responded
Nietzsche-the real one, not the lay figure of cultural propagandaso fiercely to the romantic ideas which, if they be indeed the rothat the historical sense was an actual faculty of the mind, "a sixth mantic ideas, were certainly available to everybody. The failure of
sense," and that the credit for the recognition of its status must go
logic is not however what concerns us, but rather what the logic is
to the nineteenth century. What was uniquely esteemed by the
intended to serve: the belief that ideas generate events, that they
nineteenth century is not likely to stand in high favor with us: our
have an autonomous existence, and that they can seize upon the
coldness to historical thought may in part be explained by our
minds of some men and control their actions independently of cirfeeling that it is precisely the past that caused all our troubles, the cumstance and will.
ni.neteenth century being the most blameworthy of all the culpable
Needless to say, these violations of historical principle require a
centuries. Karl Marx, for whom history was indeed a sixth sense,
violation of historical fact. The Schopenhauer and the Nietzsche of
expressed what has come to be the secret hope of our time, that
the first explanation have no real reference to two nineteenth-century
man's life in politics, which is to say, man's life in history, shall
philosophers of the same names; the Plato is imaginary, the Athens
come to an end. History, as we now understand it, envisions its own
out of a storybook, and no attempt is made to reconcile this fanciful
extinction-that is really what we nowadays mean by "progress"
Athens with the opinion of the real Athens held by the real Plato.
and with all the passion of a desire kept secret even from ourselves,
As for the second explanation, how are we to connect anarchism,
we yearn to elect a way of life which shall be satisfactory once and
and hostility to the claims of life, and the fragmentary, and the
for all, world without end, and we do not want to be reminded by
immature, and the half-formed, with Kant, or Goethe, or Wordsthe past of the considerable possibility that our present is but perpetworth, or Beethoven, or Berlioz, or Delacroix? And how from these uating mistakes and failures and instituting new troubles.
men, who are Romanticism, dare we derive the iron rigidity and
And yet, when we come to think about it, the chances are all in
the desperate centralization which the New Order of the Nazis
favor of our having to go on making our choices and so of makinvolved, or the systematic cruelty or the elaborate scientism with ing our mistakes. History, in its meaning of a continuum of events,
which the racial doctrine was implicated?
is not really likely to come to an end. There may therefore be
The two books to which I refer are of course in themselves harmsome value in bringing explicitly to mind what part in culture is less and I don't wish to put upon them a weight which they should
played by history in its other meaning of an ordering and undernot properly be made to bear. But they do suggest something of the standing of the continuum of events. There is no one who is better
low estate into which history has fallen among our educated classes,
�ble to inf�rm us on this point than Nietzsche. We can perhaps
and they are of a piece with the depreciation of the claims of history
listen to him with the more patience because he himself would
which a good many literary people nowadays make, a depreciation
have had considerable sympathy for our impatience with history,
186
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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for although he thought that the historical sense brought certain
virtues, making men "unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation," he also thought that it prevented them from having the ability to respond to the very high
Tacitus Now
est and noblest developments of culture, making them suspicious of
what is wholly completed and fully matured. This ambivalent view
of the historical sense gives him a certain authority when he defines
what the historical sense is and does. It is, he said, "the capacity for
divining quickly the order of rank of the valuations according
to which a people, a community, or an individual has lived." In the
case of a people or of a community, the valuations are those which
are expressed not only by the gross institutional facts of their life,
what Nietzsche called "the operating forces," but also and more
THE histories of Tacitus have been put to strange uses. The
princelings of Renaissance Italy consulted the Annals on
significantly by their morals and manners, by their philosophy and
how
to behave with the duplicity of Tiberius. The Gerart. And the historical sense, he goes on to say, is "the 'divining inman racists overlooked all the disagreeable things which Tacitus stinct' for the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of
observed of their ancestors, took note only of his praise of the ancient
the valuations to the operating forces." The historical sense, that is,
chastity and independence, and thus made of the Germania their
is to be understood as the critical sense, as the sense which life uses
anthropological primer. But these are the aberrations; the influence
to test itself. And since there riever was a time when the instinct for
of Tacitus in Europe has been mainly in the service of liberty, as he
divining-and "quickly"!-the order of rank of cultural expressions
intended it to be. Perhaps this influence has been most fully felt in
was so much needed, our growing estrangement from history must
France, where, under the dictatorships both of the Jacobins and of
be understood as the sign of our desperation.
Napoleon, Tacitus was regarded as a dangerously subversive writer.
Nietzsche's own capacity for quickly divining the order of rank of
In America, however, he has never meant a great deal. James Fenicultural things was, when he was at his best, more acute than that of more Cooper is an impressive exception to our general indifference,
any other man of his time or since. If we look for the explanation of
but Cooper was temperamentally attracted by the very one of all the
his acuity, we find it in the fact that it never occurred to him to
qualities of Tacitus which is likely to alienate most American libseparate his historical sense from his sense of art. They were not two erals, the aristocratic color of his libertarian ideas. Another reason
senses but one. And the merit of his definition of the historical sense,
for our coolness to Tacitus is that, until recently, our political experiespecially when it is taken in conjunction with the example of himence gave us no ground to understand what he is talking about.
self, is that it speaks to the historian and to the student of art as if
Dictatorship and repression, spies and political informers, blood
they were one person. To that person Nietzsche's definition prepurges and treacherous dissension have not been part of our political scribes that culture be studied and judged as life's continuous evaluatradition as they have been of Europe's. But Europe has now come tion of itself, the evaluation being understood as never finding full
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