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COUNTRY AND OUR CULTUIH
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immediate relatedness to the national environment, a sense of what is
concretely even
if
minimally our own. In these terms one can in–
deed speak of a 'reconciliation' of the intellectuals.
Another factor, relating to the arts proper, is that the passage
of time has considerably blunted the edge of the old Jamesian
complaint as to the barrenness of the native scene. James was surely
right in drawing the moral that "the flower of art blooms only
where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce
a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a
writer in motion." But since 1879, when that severe sentence was
written, much has happened to modify the conditions James deplored.
For one thing, the time is past when "business alone was respect–
able" in America and when many of its artists were therefore forced
into a state of dreary and dreamy isolation. The businessman,
though still a most formidable figure, is no longer looked up to as
the one and only culture-hero of the country: not since the debacle
of 1929, at any rate. Moreover, the national literature has now
accumulated a substantial tradition and the dynamism of our
historical life in this century has brought into existence a social
machinery more than sufficiently complex for literary purposes.
This
is not to say that this machinery works beneficently; there is no
necessary relation between beneficence and literary purpose.
If
anything, the machinery has now become so prodigious, so vast in
operation and prodigal in performance, that the writer is just as likely
to be thrown back as to be set into motion by it.
As
for the Jamesian vision of Europe as the "rich, deep, dark
Old World," its appeal has been markedly reduced by a series of
social upheavals, revolutions, and two world wars. The historical
richness is still there, though what it comes to at present is hardly
more than a combination of decor and recollection; it is the depths
and the darkness of the Old World that are almost intolerably
actual at present, and in that oppressive atmosphere the Jamesian
vision pales and dissolves. It is hard to believe that western Europe
has lost its cultural priority for good, even if for the time
be–
ing the social and political strains are too great to permit the
exercise of leadership. Its past is not in question here, since we
cannot but appropriate it as our past too. What is in question is
the effort of contemporaries, and that effort is of a scale and in-
