Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing. Letters 1928—1946, Chatto & Windus, London, 2004, s. 124.
I ett brev till Stephen Spender den 19 maj 1935 diskuterar Berlin Stefan George och avslutar med denna anmärkning:
I daresay it is part of romanticism to be able to be illuded by bogus things, only they are sometimes so obviously artificial or so obviously degraded that it seems strange to more prosaic but more self-critical persons that such creative gifts & sensitive feeling can be combined with this total blindness which mistakes a tortured thirst for certain states of mind with the states of mind. Is this all nonsense? I can’t see otherwise how to understand the Germans. I think heroic qualities always go with terrible stupidity & what seems frightful nonsense: which the enormous and careful seriousness of the French has always avoided, at the expense of a specially German sublimity.
(Not: Jfr första stycket i detta inlägg.)
Björn Östbring 