PARTISAN REVIEW
If
the secular intellectuals who came to the fore with the rise
of a bourgeois society in Europe were not bound by any common
creed, still they managed through the years to build what might be
called a tradition of approach or perspective. In the realm of
literature this tradition amounted to a highly elaborate sense of its
achievements and its tasks, thus providing the creative imagination
with a fund of literary experiences-a kind of style of work-to
draw on. For the old.world writer, from about the seventeenth
century on, had to mediate between the great scramble of the new
order and the authority of the past, between the boundless perspec–
tives for the individual personality and the material forces tending
more and more to confine it, between scepticism and faith, between
the city and the country.. ; . And he was able to do so to the extent
that he shared the generalized vision of the intelligentsia as a
whole; or where any great divergence of belief existed, he simply
took his cue from the collective opinion of some dissident group.
The fact is that European literature made little headway in the
smaller, marginal countries-or appeared late in a backward
region like Russia-that, on the contrary, it enjoyed the greatest
success in those nations that set the social and intellectual pace for
the rest of the continent. (It was, after all. in Italy, the original
home of the new mercantilism, that the beginnings of humanist
theory and renaissance art first appeared.) Not only did most of
the problems and crises of European expansion come to a head in
France· and England (and in Germany somewhat later), but, in
addition, these countries were sufficiently prosperous and were
becoming sufficiently urbanized to support a scientific and literary
intelligentsia. Hence they were able to rationalize the general
European predicament and to provide a tentative equilibrium of
opinion for all political and intellectual pursuits. While the lagging
industrial nations had to be content with sporadic cultural expres–
sions, which were largely an adaptation of the more advanced cur–
rents to the local ethos, the great tradition of French and English
art maintained itself at the crest of the upheavals and large-scale
movements that marked the growth of bourgeois society. One can
hardly conceive of a Julien Sorel, balancing himself on the contra–
dictions between ambition and personality, in, say, Warsaw or
Madrid-or the domestic drama of the eighteenth century being
born outside the boom of British trade at the time and the plebian
sentimentality that accompanied it.
