PARTISAN REVIEW
Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and
monuments, we must read or we must barbarize."
Obviously, our history ha:s been too rapid and too expansive
for the American mind to settle down and take stock of itself.
Moreover, the city, as the symbol of modern civilization, did not
fully emerge until after the Civil War, with the result that our
intellectual life, in its formative years, could not escape the atom–
izing influence of ruralism. And, what is perhaps more important,
the lusty pioneer motif running through American letters, with its
strong tinge of hinterland philosophy, exerted a constant regional
pull on the intelligentsia and tended to sanction an individual
rather than a group solution of the cultural problem.
Our early literary expressions were, of course, little more
than British amenities feeling their way through strange, primitive
surroundings. Nor could the Puritan outlook serve as the ground–
work for a tradition. Essentially prohibitive and regional, it was
a kind of frontier Calvinism, destined to be superseded by a more
materialist creed-in keeping with the rough-and-tumble spirit of
aggrandizement that was possessing the country as a whole. Haw–
thorne, of course, whose imagination was tortured by the Puritan
demons of guilt and decay, was the prime literary beneficiary of
the Puritan mind; but, on the whole, it entered into later writing
mainly as a negative factor, a repressed strain, as in Melville,
where it was in a sense a purged element; and through the nine–
teenth century it persisted largely as a characteristic moral whole–
someness.
The Concord school may be said to mark the first appearance,
in full intellectual dress, of an American intelligentsia. Revolting
against the all-absorbing commercialism of the day and against
the bleakness of the Puritan heritage, they set out quite consciously
to form, as Emerson put it, "a learned class," and to assimilate
the culture of Europe into a native tradition. Yet, just as they had
no established past to draw on, so they were unable to transmit a
full-blown literary mentality to succeeding generations. Emerson
was, of course, intoxicated with the pioneer spirit, with the hard–
bitten realism of the plain people, and his bias was strongly agra–
rian in its emphasis on bare hands and the self-reliant mind. He
was essentially a transcendental ·commoner, ·and for all his cul–
tural yearnings, his philosophy was at bottom an affirmation of
individual fulfillment in a boundless American expansion. Thus,
