Thinking about The Secret History again…
In Chapter 2, Charles and Richard discuss what they are going to do after Hampden College, and Charles suggests that Francis and Henry by Francis’ Aunt’s property.
Richard is ‘surprised by this pragmatic answer.’
And it just made me think about how Richard is a Romantic at heart, his self described hamartia being a ‘morbid longing for the picturesque’ at all costs, which is why he’s so shocked to hear a ‘pragmatic answer’ because his thinking is just not wired that way.
This made me think about the conversation Julian and Richard have in Chapter 1, where they disagree on whether or not the Romantics are good classicists … Julian explicitly says ‘the greatest Romantics are often failed classicists.’
Is this ultimately the reason why Richard fails to keep the Greek class together? Blinded by his morbid longing for the picturesque, he blatantly misses the tensions in the dynamics of the Greek Class. Blinded for his aesthetic obsession over Camilla (not as a yearner, but in the way that he wants to possess her) - he fails to see what her brother does to her, the hints Francis drops and how to prevent Julian from getting Bunny’s letter - which directly leads to Henry’s suicide, Charles’ running away and Julian’s disappearance.
It is because Richard is a Romantic, that he fails to keep the Greek class together - because ‘the greatest romantics are often failed classicists.’
