IN THE TRADITION OF INTEGRITY
861
ease of earl ier critical generations rather than the posItIves that made
that ease possible. I have heard such a person praise Berenson's
Sket~' h
and revile the "New Critics" (as he called them) in a single conversa–
tion, as if one judgment were deducible from the other. But the intel–
ligence and integrity of mind that is reflected (imperfectly reflected, it
must be confessed) in Berenson's essay confirm the fa ct that being a
sheep ra ther than a goat is not merely a matter of fleece. This, it seems
to me, is th e chief value of the book: it establishes a line of communi–
cation between a happier time when the terms scholar, connoisseur,
critic, and gentl emen were still seen frequently consorting together,
and a grimy time when (whatever a scholar or a connoisseur may be )
a first-rate criti c is one of the last deienders of citadels that appear al–
ready to have surrendered, and one more likely to be insulted than
rewarded by bookish journalists and collaborationists performing in our
weekly literary reviews.
Marius Bewley
REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA
AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN. By Wyndham Lewis. Doubleday
&
Com·
pony. $2.75.
The usual attitude of intellectuals toward America is that it
is a dark (not deep : one never says America is deep in anything)-a
dark pit of capitalism, bureaucracy and other monsters of mechanism; a
slough of vulgar bourgeois values, small town narrowness, big city isola–
tion, and grotesqueries of commercial culture; the feeding-ground of
stupid, piggish politicians; and more. In a sense, of course, all of this is
true. But America in the minds of American highbrows is
very
often little
more than a nightmarish cartoon. There are a number of reasons for this.
First: it is unfortunately true that the present nature of our society oc–
casions a great deal of personal suffering in the lives of intellectuals
(and one naturally feels a debt to one's own suffering, a debt easily paid
with the rpady cash of loathing and hatred) . Second: it is time we freely
admitted that there is something merely about being an intellectual that
makes one vcry unreceptive to the true, raw substance of democratic
living. Third: at best, we view America with European eyes (we are all
Europeans anyway, of course). European ideas are our means of under–
standing America because they are very often the best and very often
the only ideas available. But they can also hinder our perception of what
is essentially a radically new way of life, a fresh departure in the his-
