424
PARTISAN REVIEW
JACQUES BARZUN
It is perfectly true that since the First World War the
feeling of American intellectuals toward their native land has
changed. But the country has changed too, and so has the Europe
which formerly seemed a paradise of culture. To describe these shifts
of feeling and fact and assign likely causes for them would require
an extended study, but it is perhaps possible to recall in a few words
some of the things relevant to the transformation one has witnessed
in the last thirty-five years.
To begin with, the First World War and the Great Depression a
decade later acted together like the expansion and contraction of a
vast heart. It pumped Americans to Europe and then drew them
back, a stream carrying all sorts of foreign matter. Not all of those
who went over in 1917 and the ensuing years were intellectuals; nor
were they rich and retired, but middling and rooted in ordinary
American life, so that the mingling of ideas and ways of life took
ef–
fect not merely in the few centers where artists and patrons congregate
but throughout the country. A kind of cosmopolitan spirit began to
replace the provincial, complacent attitude of which European
critics had complained and from which American artists had felt
obliged to escape. This new open-mindedness expressed itself as a
desire for "sophistication," and the desire was whipped into self-con–
sciousness by the fresh critical literature that the younger generation
was producing.
Main Street
and
Babbitt
put the case against Amer–
ican provincialism with a directness that Henry James had never
attempted, but whereas James was patriotically condemned for his
shaded presentment,
Main Street
and
Babbitt
became best sellers.
This general enthusiasm of the babbitts for their own caricature
was due in part to the previous undermining of pride that James,
Howells, and the pre-war realists of the muck-raking school had
performed upon America and its institutions.
It
was also due to the
tide of disillusion which came out of the trenches. Denouncing the war
led to denouncing its causes, which were found to be identical with
some of the things that had contributed to the earlier babbittish com–
placency-machine industry, international finance, imperialism, and
the morals of the market place.
In this state of mind, many Americans of the younger generation
