THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
423
machinery of social and political power.* What this means is that
insofar as it has been deprived of certain opportunities, it has also
been sheltered and pampered. There was no occasion or necessity
for the intervention of the intellectuals-it was not mentality that
society needed most in order to keep its affairs in order. On the
whole the intellectuals were left free to cultivate private interests,
and, once the moral and esthetic ban on certain types of exertion
had been removed, uninterruptedly to solicit individual experience.
It is this lack of a sense of extremity and many-sided involvement
which explains the peculiar shallowness of a good deal of Ameri–
can literary expression.
If
some conditions of insecurity have
been known to retard and disarm the mind, so have some condi–
tions of security. The question is not whether Americans have suf–
fered less than Europeans, but of the quality of whatever suffering
and happiness have fallen to their lot.
The consequence of all this has been that American literature
has tended to make too much of private life, to impose on it, to
scour it for meanings that it cannot always- legitimately yield.
Henry James was the first to make a cause, if not a fetish, of per–
sonal relations; and the justice of his case, despite his vaunted
divergence from the pioneer type; is that of a pioneer too, for while
Americans generally were still engaged in "gathering
in
the prep·
arations and necessities" he resolved to seek out the "amenities
and consummations." Furthermore, by exploiting in a fashion
altogether his own the contingencies of private life that fell within
his scope, he was able to dramatize the relation of the new world
to the old, thus driving the wedge of historical consciousness into
the very heart of the theme of experience. Later not a few attempts
were made to combine experience with consciousness, to achieve
the balance of thought and being characteristic of the great tradi–
tions of European art. But except for certain narratives of James,
I know of very little American fiction which can unqualifiedly be
said to have attained this end.
Since the decline of the regime of gentility many admirable
works have been produced, but in the main it is the quantity of
*The situation in this respect has changed considerably during the last decade.
The New Deal government is the first administration since the early days of the Repub–
lic that baa shown any disposition to avail itself of the particular gifts of the
intelligentsia.
