STEVEN MARCUS
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course of history; every great man is the result of a convergence of
cultura l-histori ca l forces and an express ion of them. Who's on first,
what's on second, and bo th have to be true. X was thought of in hi s
own time as a greatly original mind. Generation II of scholars begins
to learn tha t X was in fact "anticipa ted" in his greatly original
achievements by Y, Z, A and B, pigmies of tal ent to a man . X is as a
consequence dissolved back into these "anticipations." His achieve–
ment it is now understood was to assembl e the original work of others
and present it to the world a t the right moment in culturall y appropri–
ate and marketa bl e form. A salesman, a promoter, no t a genius.
Generation
III
comes along and surveys this mess of mediocrities and
leve ll ed-down indistinction. It's not kosher; it doesn 't smell right; it
looks lousy. They begin to reexamine the anticipations and discover
that not all anti cipa tions anticipa te and some anti cipa te less than
others. It turns out tha t a ll the minor poets who "anti cipated"
Shakespeare and to whose exampl e he owed so much-it turns out tha t
when they are all put together they don ' t add up to a comedy of errors.
It
turns out tha t Pl a to is not reall y a forerunner of either socialism or
Adolph Hitl er. Every hero has a valet and mos t have a mi stress. Valets
and mi stresses tend to have an inflated taste for memo irs and faithful
recoll ections of the great man undressed. He's got a pot and wears a
girdl e; he scratches himself, picks his nose and farts; he can only get it
up when she wears a red wig and makes beli eve she's hi s aunt Sadie. He
weeps when he suffers a loss. He broods over reversals. He would rather
have been Jimmy Durante than the Napoleon of theoreti ca l phys ics
that he is. He is the father of his nation, but what he is rea ll y proud of
is his skill a t rotation pool. All of these a re true. All of them matter and
don't ma tter. All must be made pa rt of the record, taken due account of,
assim il ated, and appropria tely di scounted. And there's no end to it.
Ever.
These embro ilments a re part of our normal biographica l transac–
ti ons with the great. The idealizings and de-idealizings are steady
elements in the continually shifting cultural weather. In this sense even
such nastinesses as Lytton Strachey have a certain value. By exposing
certain falsenesses, pretensions and incon sistencies among the Victori–
ans, he and others like him forced a la ter generation to begin to
rediscover how truly eminent the eminent Victorians were. The accent
and tone of the recovered eminence were in the nature of things not
what they were originall y asserted to be. How could they be? Butth;lt's
one of the processes through which new cultural meanings are created.
The recent publication of Gladstone's diaries, for exampl e, reveal tha t
