PARTISAN REVIEW
people have m some form or another an inferiority complex with
regard to the American way of life and manners and American
power. (This is a small yet indicative point, and it is worth com–
paring with the Anglomania which the French and other Continental
Europeans developed after the revolutionary wars and the overthrow
of Napoleon.) In the machine world we live in now America is
more "metropolitan" than England, and it is possible that as the
years pass the metropolitan center of the whole English-speaking
world, to which all the rest is "provincial," may shift decisively to
American cities--probably to New York-toward which English
and perhaps other "artists" and "technicians" may be attracted as
Greek philosophers and teachers were once drawn to Rome.
As
language and society are so interrelated, this also leads one
on to noting that the old stable and rooted society which formed
an essential background to the journalism, say, of Addison, and of
many Englishmen before him and after him, no longer exists. Or
rather, it still exists
in
the colleges
~f
Oxford and Cambridge or in
country rectories, but it has become "provincial" to the mainsprings
and centers of English life: it
h.as
become a lost cause, merely sur–
viving like the New England of Emerson and Thoreau in the surge
of American power centered on New York and the Middle West.
The new surge is barbarous and quantitative, it is a "revolt of the
masses," a revolt of Berdyaev's barbarians "stinking of machinery,"
but it makes the old qualitative civilization seem like a kind of
pedantry.
In this kind of dynamic society, language seems no longer litur–
gical, no longer symbolic: instead it has become functional and alge–
braic. That is to say that at best it is a kind of shorthand or a
series of formulae which express scientific and mechanical relation–
ships. It is thus suited to and in harmony with the things we com–
monly want to express. It is a vehicle primarily for
science
and not
for
art.
And science is now in fact very largely succeeding in making
art
precious and provincial and driving it out of the central current
of our daily life.
Of course language does not only perform algebraic functions
at present, even if the colorless algebraic language of the best criticism
is
in
some ways a more satisfactory use of words for us now than
any other. The always growing snowball of industrial and technical
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