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...the delegation of power into this men- -- purely mental field of reasoning and getting the facts. You believe, of course, in this concept; that's the whole world. Instead of -- you know very well that your mother at home is toiling and mending your socks or whatever she does -- and sends you your laundry. And she's not at all Greek. She's your mother, and therefore she has a Christian position in the house -- in your family. And you have the mental position of the Greek at this moment. That is, you do not care how -- who pays, and you do not care who does the work, but you care to get ideas, to think. Whatever the consequences, you have ideas.

Now these ideas, gentlemen, mean, in terms of the whole race, always a relapse, always the hope that somebody will -- the community will say, "We need Greeks," which is a Christian gesture. The love for the Greeks, that is, the love for anything created, is Christian. The Greeks themselves do not love anything nonGreek. They are just curious about it. They have intellectual curiosity, because this tenet of the academic mind is, "I want to know that," but not "I must love it." But "I collect. I am encyclopedic. I write The Encyclopaedia Britannica."

So gentlemen, every admission of Greek activity is a relapse, or -- permittedly -- "relapse" is the wrong word -- is a leeway, a licen- -- a license, a franchise given to a modern man to step back with part of his being, that is with his mind, into pre-Christian living. That is what the academic, the liberal arts college world does, that it invites you to step back, forget about all the -- the problems of modern, crucial living, with your sisters and your brothers of man, and to indulge in ideas.

So in any one time, gentlemen, the son who rebels and becomes secular against his father destroys history, because he's in a way older than his father, who already accepts the whole burden that mankind must be one, that peace must be established between the clever and the stupid, there must be no slavery, that the mind must not be used to enslave other peoples -- which is, you see, not at all the Greek idea, because Aristotles -- and all the Greeks -- believed in slavery, that -- that the educated people should enslave the uneducated people.

The same is true now of Cooper. If he introduces a non-Christian principle of aristocracy, or of caste, he is allowed in his imagination to produce such an artificial world because we allow fiction. We have this nov- -- these novels. We have all these things in which we can play again with the mind. Very Greek. He is indulging in the -- what we call "romantic" literature.

All romantic literature, gentlemen, is not that life which the judge, and your aunt, and the school principal really -- want you to live; but it's as with Hovey -- you know, Richard Hovey here: get drunk. It's like the frescoes in the dining room there. You can't run around with your sister in this costume there, which is no costume, you see. But it's nice to have it painted on the wall. It's fiction. It's obscene. So the alumni wanted to have something that was definitely not artistic, and so they got it. In revenge from Mr. M- -- Orozco.

So we -- we are privileged to have this fictitious picture there on the dining hall, which is given to a modern Christian civi- -- society, the privileges of a pre-Christian world of obscenity, indulging in your -- in your -- in our minds with it. That's Greek.

Cooper -- the whole romantic movement, gentlemen, must be understood in this light. Wordsworth the same. Blake protested it. Blake saw that this -- you see, he's not a romanticist. It's all wrong to place -- Blake. Blake knew exactly what was demanded of a man, you see, who wanted to be of his own time. All the romantic school against Blake -- you -- you know Blake, I -- you see, very much against Blake who had the full responsibility of a man living now, you see. All the others tried to get us into a second {mood}, into a world above the real world, or outside the real world, or below the real world -- it doesn't matter wha- -- how you put it. Byron thought it was below; it was hell which he tried to produce, you see. And Wordsworth thought it was the -- a lark. It was higher. But it doesn't matter. Romanticism creates a second world which is not our world, but a world in supplementing ours, and which is identified with some golden past. It is -- you will always find that the romanticist, whether it's a castle in Walter Scott's novels, or whether it is some natural- -- nature garden, whether it's Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, the Greeks -- take Swinburne, where it was { }, you see -- it is always the second world which is not fully responsible for its {suspicions}, which doesn't interfere with daily politics, for example, which doesn't say what laws we should pass. You see, that isn't discussed. It's just a world of feelings.

Now every romanticist does exactly what the scientist does. He adds to the present-day meditation -- a -- world of fancy which is outside our Christian era, which enriches it by fiction, by images, by conjuring up Dionysus, and Apollo, and Venus, you see. But they aren't quite serious. They are bygone, you see. They are ghosts, which we use for decoration. They are adornments; they are additions. You can say that they are, within the room of our own era, the murals on the wall. You will s- -- admit that if I put the Orozco frescoes on the wall, with the Mexicans marching there, you see, I'm still in 1930, when it was painted, you see; but I have surrounded myself with these people of bygone times as murals.

Now that is what the romantic school has done, and all Renaissance thinking does. It -- it -- it tap- -- it's a tapestry inside of our own historical time. Bringing past times into this room of our time, not changing the date of our own existence really, you see, but only trying to make us forget when we live. If you look at the Orozco frescoes, these people marching there, you may for one time -- moment be taken back there and dream that you also lived 500 B.C., you see. But woe to you if you ever should {think so}. You understand?

Gentlemen, you must get hold of what fiction is. You cannot afford to allow yourself the acceptance of fiction. You -- history and fiction must be completely clear to you as two different things. Fiction is a creation of a second world. And that's a dangerous thing if you don't know wha- -- that this is a toy, a plaything. And Cooper is, in American tradition therefore, an important person. James brings in the Greeks -- the Greek science, which could lead to Darwinianism. And when it is taken seriously, it leads to a war of everybody against everybody else. It leads to exploitation, to slavery, to all these things.

Now William James -- had enough of his father in himself to wake up, and to see the consequences. Cooper didn't. In Cooper, fiction has been declared not omnipotent, but sovereign, independent. And ever since, the American- -- allow their fiction writers to run riot. And I think you have very unhealthy minds in Greenwich Village. That is, that American literature still to- -- today has to -- bears the signs of -- of Mr. Cooper. And you see it from Hemingway. This adoration of the civil war in Spain is -- it was -- just his way of saying, "Now we all go Communist." And you see what the country has come to. With McCarthy, I am a contemporary, my dear gen- -- people. I want to shoot your mind back into reality. He shoots your bodies back into fear, intimidation. But gentlemen, I have to tell you that from Cooper to Hemingway, this country has allowed its fiction writers to take you everywhere except into your own political responsibility, into the hour in which you really live. And certainly anybody who could say that you had to fight in Spain with the -- which was the brigade? Wie?

(International brigade.)

No, there's another name. Roose- -- not Roosevelt. It was -- wie?

(Lincoln.)

Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, you see -- hasn't rendered you a service. He is the last Natty Bumpo. That's what he is, you see.

Does anybody read the Sunday Literary Times? Here in this country -- I mean, the New York Times literary magazine? There was such a terrible article

about Mr. Camus, Albert Camus, the leading article of the -- this Sunday. The poor man. -- The only thing he knows is: you have to be a rebel in literature. Why one has to be a rebel, I do not know. So Hemingway thought. So Cooper thought, who had also to rebel against civilization, against the, you see -- had to have a romantic world in which people were better, and freer, and so on -- so on. The second-world idea. It is obsessive. The French are perishing under this. Mr. Camus never asked the question: Couldn't he be a good son who has received good things? No. Every word in this -- have you read the article? He begins life; life begins with him. Everything before is just muck. Then he is, of course, at a loss to find any good company and any comradeship. And -- tragic.

You know, he's the -- one of the leading existentialists in France. If you want to study what fiction has done to the disintegration of the educated classes in the western world, you can read him, or you can read Hemingway. It is tragic, not that he couldn't come out for Communism, but he would have to know that this is a choice, that obviously other people could come from something else, you see, or -- stand for something else. But as it was in the '30s in this country, you only had to move forward to -- to -- to a nonexisting world. "Go left, my dear man, go left." Which is very parallel with the whole movement, you see, of the romanticism: "Get outside the framework of your real society."

Have I made my point, that the secular mind, gentlemen -- in reality lives before Jesus Christ? Just as this lady who writes of the nature of tragedy. I -- the -- once you see this, you -- you -- surrounded by this artificial world in which people who actually live -- must live in 1953, where we have no human sacrifices, we have no slavery, we have woman's equality, we have the belief that all men are created equal -- that is, white and black makes no difference, then you see these sports, these -- these aberrations of the mind plunging into zoology, into Darwinianism, into Mendelism; that is, attempting to dream up a pre-Christian world of the mind in which all these things we already have to enact in our lives are not valid, but are tempted, so to speak, and held up to ridicule even. Because that's the gospel now, you see, among the scientists, you s- -- that you -- that you should use euthanasia, and that you should use eugenics, you see, and should forbid -- you should regulate -- prop- -- propagation, and so; you see these Mendelians, the geneticists. They tell us all this. And we know it's wrong. We know that the -- only the human heart can decide marriage, and no -- oh, no laws of these -- of these damned -- damned botanists.

But this is a cleavage. In -- always at every moment, gentlemen, this must be the last word today -- every moment the relapse into pre-Christian tenets through the temptation of the mind is a real danger. It is every moment perfectly possible that a part of the human society does erect gas chambers as in Nineveh, because -- in antiquity all the captives were just slaves. You see, nobody would

say anything against it.

And so, gentlemen, the relapse of the second generation, when it -- leaves history, is -- has happened under your noses. And you don't believe it. You think, because you are later, you must be progressive. Gentlemen, because you think that you are later, you must go wrong. You can only uphold the achievements of the human race, if -- it makes no difference whether it's your father or yourself. You are all shot through with the same tenets. As soon as you say, "Since I live in 1953, I must be advanced, compared to a man in 1900," you already have lost the problem of history, you see. You have then erected the dream world of your own generation, because you are no longer asking, "What do I have to continue? How do I bear fruit?" But you only ask, "What do I want?" you see. And then you will get it. You will get what you want, sure. But that will be all. An -- a man who does get what he wants is punished by God for that, you see. Any man, St. Francis has -- has said, you see, who does get what he wants, is cursed. A man is blessed if he never gets what he wants, but if he gets what is coming to him.

Yes, Sir. You don't know what you want, you see. That's the first thing a man in history knows. We don't know what we want.