THE INTELLECTUALS' TRADITION
485
It is plain that we have here more than a coincidence of
geographical and social factors. Indeed, the major impulses of
European art can be traced in practically every instance to the
existence of an active intelligentsia, crucially involved in its con–
temporary history, and sufficiently self-conscious to be able to
assimilate some new experience to the norms of its past. One might
almost put down as an esthetic law that continuity is the condition
for creative invention. Thus the dream of fulfillment released by
the French revolution lingered on in the modern mind: disengaged
from its social frame and turned inward, it served, at one pole, as
a basis for the series of movements dedicated to the primacy of
art; while at the other extreme, stripped of its critical and tenden–
cious spirit, it lay behind the celebrations of progress that appeared
toward the end of the last century. In fact, the increasing com–
plexity of contemporary literature is at least partially to be ac–
counted for by the .variety of traditional memories and associa–
tions that fill the consciousness of the writer today. And in such
works as
The Wastelr.aul
and
Finnegans Wake,
where this natural
.tendency has been converted into a deliberate method, both Joyce
and, to a less extent, Eliot have actually
set
out to dissolve their
immediate perceptions in the timeless reality of the past.
3.
Now, in the case of American literature, unlike that of the
old world, we have a kind of negative illustration of the relation of
the intelligentsia to art. For the outstanding features-not to
speak of the failures-of our national culture can be largely
explained by the inability of our native intelligentsia to achieve
a detached and self-sufficient group existence that would permit it
to sustain its traditions through succeeding epochs, and to keep
abreast of European intellectual production. One need hardly
stress such symptoms in American writing as shallowness, paucity
of values, a statistical approach to reality, and the compensatory
qualities of forthrightness, plebianism, and a kind of matter-of–
fact humanism: they have been noted in a number of historical
studies; and, to be sure, our cultural innocence has been practically
a standing complaint of American criticism. As Howells had
Bromfield Corey remark in
The Rise of Silas Lapham:
"A Greek
got his civilization by talking and looking, and jn some measure a
