THE INTELLECTUALS' TRADITION
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kind of methodological groping for a common denominator of
belief. "The old formulas had failed, and a new one had to be
made.... One sought no ab!lolute truth. One sought only a spool
on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it."
In a sense, this has been our persistent tradition-this
periodic striving for a unified outlook and the inevitable return
to a clean slate all over again-though one hesitates to describe it
as such because it is exactly this discontinuity that is the mark of
our inability to form a complex, intellectual tradition. In this
respect, the American intelligentsia exhibits a kind of ctmbivalent
psyche, torn between the urge toward some degree of autonomy
and an equally strong tendency to self-effacement, for it is largely
its natural inclination to merge with the popular mind that has
prevented any such lasting intellectual differentiation as has been
achieved in European art and thought. Generally, these dual im–
pulses have found expression in the repetitive cycle of our literary
history; but on occasion they have also appeared side by side-in
figures like Emerson and Whitman, and, to some extent, Dreiser,–
as a combination of populist sensibility with some broad cultural
vision. And, is not the predilection for the real, the fatal attraction
for the overwhelming minutiae of every-day life, that characterizes
so much of American writing, but the creative equivalent of the
instability of the intelligentsia?
In the last few decades, we have run the gamut of three im–
portant trends, and we are at present in the midst of one more
movement to stir the embers of the past, to discover once more the
secrets of the national spirit. Yet, except for the natural persistence
of certain states of mind, one cannot discern any organic linkage
between these successive currents. The regional nostalgia that
appeared in such writers as Masters or Frost, which, incidentally,
can hardly be said to be a direct outgrowth of the earlier expansive
naturalism, was literally brushed aside by the great rebellion of
the twenties against provincialism, gentility, and the native bent
for minute self-portraiture. At one pole, were the provocations of
modernism, with their libertarian effects in the social sphere; at
the other stood figures like Mencken and Lewis, attacking the moral
and intellectual proprieties. As for the Marxist school, which held
sway in the following decade, and whose demise was as sudden and
mechanical as its birth, it could scarcely have been expected to
establish a line of continuity, lilince, in addition to the strong resis-
