THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
4.15
more than once. Whitman and James, who form a kind of fatal
antipodes, have repeatedly served as the standard examples of thie
dissociation. There is one sense, however, in which the contrast
between these two arch-typical Americans might be said to have
been overdrawn. There is, after all, a common ground on which
they finally, though perhaps briefly, meet-an essential American–
ism subsuming them both that is best defined by their mutual affir–
mation of experience. True, what one affirmed the other was apt to
negate; still it is not in their attitude to experience as such that the
difference between them becomes crucial but rather in their con–
tradictory conceptions of what constitutes experience. One sought
its ideal manifestations in America, the other in Europe. Whitman,
plunging with characteristic heedlessness into the turbulent, form–
less life of the frontier and of the big cities, accepted experience
in
its total ungraded state, whereas James, insisting on a precise
scrutiny of its origins and conditions, was endlessly discriminatory,
thus carrying forward his ascetic inheritance into the very act of
reaching out for the charms and felicities of the great European
world. But the important thing to keep in mind here is that this
plebeian and patrician are historically associated in the radical
enterprise of subverting, each from his own end, the puritan code
of stark utility in the conduct of life and in releasing the long
compressed springs of experience in the national letters. In this
sense, Whitman and James are the true initiators of the American
line of modernity.
If
a positive approach to experience is the touchstone of the
modern, a negative approach is the touchstone of the classic in
American writing. The literature of early America is a sacred
rather than a profane literature. Immaculately spiritual at the top
and local and anecdotal at the bottom, it is essentially, as the gen–
teel literary historian Barrett Wendell accurately noted, a "record
of the national inexperience" marked by "an instinctive disregard
of actual fact." For this reason it largely left untouched the two
chief experiential media-the novel and the drama. Brockden
Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville were "romancers" rather
than novelists. They were incapable of apprehending the vitally
new principle of realism by virtue of which the art of fiction in
Europe was in their time rapidly evolving toward an hitherto in–
eonceivable condition of objectivity and familiarity with existence.
