What we need in the Tory line is not such
ice-bound derelicts but men who are passionate about the past
because they find their inspiration there, men and women who
belabor the present not for its existence, but because it might
have been better if it had been wiser.
They must, in short, be Greeks, not barbarians. It is the reverse
of barbarous to defend the old, but the man who can see no need,
no good, no hope in change is a barbarian. He flinches from the
truth physical and the truth spiritual that life is motion. I
particularly refer to the literary person who sneers at novels
because they are not epics, and condemns new poems or plays unread
if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please
him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or
Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle
or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher
who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of
youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid
interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described
Masefield as an unsound and dangerous radical in verse, and in
1921 accepts him as the standard "modern" poet by whom his
degenerate successors are to be measured.
Pages:
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220