 
                         20060302.00

     Just came back from the library, where I had deposited a
DVD of the Merchant of Venice, having had it out for only one
day. Because looking at and listening to the Pirates and
Iolanthe had been so satisfactory, I thought I would try the
Merchant of Venice, which I perceive to be a play of
extraordinary humanity. In this recording, however, Hollywood
played Shakespeare and Shakespeare lost.

     I also put aside Michael Mason's book, The Making of
Victorian Sexuality, in which I read briefly, but long enough
to understand that the author has the ideological agenda of
rehabilitating Victorian culture, a purpose which imperils
the candor and the truthfulness of his account. His
disjointed literary style reflects his inability to think
clearly; and in the end the chief value of the book for me
would be its references as pointers to the very large body of
historically significant literature that is reposing on
library shelves, waiting to controvert any off the cuff
conclusions at which I might be bold enough to arrive.

     Reading Mason's book in conjunction with Collingwood's
"Idea of History", I venture the hypothesis that any meaning
that we attach to history reflects primarily on contemporary
experience and intentions. Just as there are those who deny
the Holocaust because history stands in the way of their
yearning to repeat it, so Mason's denial of Victorian
repression has the purpose of justifying and promoting
analogous if not identical repression on the contemporary
political scene.

     History appears as myth which determines existence and
controls action.  In the examples cited, how many facts may
or may not be marshalled to support the historical "truth" of
the Nazi holocaust and Victorian repression respectively, is
of much less consequence than the effect that belief in this
truth is an determinant of what is to be done here and now.
Whatever value the composition of scientific history may
have, that value is irretrievably lost when history is
compiled for purposes of political or cultural propaganda.


                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
