Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination Essays On Literature

http://archive.org/details/liberalimaginati012982mbp
The Liberal Imagination Essays On Literature And Society (1950)

It is not, as I gather, that Tacitus lacks veracity. What he lacks is what in the Thirties used to be called "the long view" of history.  But to minds of a certain sensitivity "the long view" is the falsest historical view of all, and indeed the insistence on the length of perspective is intended precisely to overcome sensitivity—seen from sufficient distance, it says, the corpse and the hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and eventually they even begin to compose themselves into a "meaningful pattern."