Envying the Dead

“Just so. Mr. Forster was not a Philistine, but he was a stunted man, spiritually, emotionally, and professionally. He was one of those said creatures of the twentieth century who define themselves in terms of their own insufficiencies, and it was his tragedy-and ours, some may think-that he let his unhappiness and his self-reproach lead him to bitterness and weakness, rather [than] to greatness and strength. The key phrase in his chilling celebration of envy is the one about great men being ‘unmanageable.’ They are, of course. But the perverted social democracy that would deprive itself of great souls in order that smaller souls might strut is a democracy that would banish splendor from the earth on the grounds that the warmth from that splendor cannot be felt by all. It is a gospel of death. The novelist Mary Renault recently traced the true outline of the snake beneath the glib justifications: ‘There are always men who take their own measure against greatness, and hate it not for what it is, but for what they are. They can envy even the dead.’” [Bryan F. Griffin, Panic Among the Philistines (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983), p. 127-128.]