OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
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tion, may not even be emerging. The nearest thing to one is a kind
of mystical or religious attitude toward America that is perhaps
bound up in the growing emphasis on religion generally. At a moment
when Melville is the most plumbed and "prophetic" of American
writers, and the whole American literary past is again being studious–
ly dug into, this turning inward would in part seem to indicate a
turning away, this moving backward would suggest a search for
repose as well as enlightenment. The spiritual approach (or retreat)
can have the advantage of presenting an America with less glare and
more glow, or of making the America of the moment seem to matter
less under the aspect of eternity.
In any case, there has been on the one hand a certain gain in
values through having our intellectual opinion largely shaped in
academic circles rather than- as in the '20s and '30s- in journalistic
and worldlier ones; yet there has been, too, a real loss in immediacy,
authenticity, breadth. So much in current thought .and opinion seems
speculative rather than sharply first-hand; so little suggests the
skeptical observer and inquirer. Instead of intellectuals who are at
home-or at least on visiting terms-in a variety of milieus, all too
many evoke only the library, the laboratory, the lecture hall. And
their attitude toward America seems often too grandly uttered, their
sense of it too oracularly faraway. We must bring these problems
to more workable levels, into more human focus. A number of our
literary intellectuals, today, are perhaps corrupted by too
little
knowl–
edge of the world, by too little of the give-and-take of a usefully
heterogeneous society. These intellectuals- there are many others,
01
course-are themselves provincials, and tend to become pundits and
prigs. Snobbishness is the great penalty of worldly life, as is priggish–
ness of officialized Plain Living and High Thinking; but where the
prig is constantly excommunicating and excluding, self-righteously
spurning and discounting what he cannot enjoy or absorb, the snob–
by his very nature-is glancing around and moving about, compar–
ing, contrasting, assimilating, revaluating.
As
a snob, Henry James
learned an immense amount, even on the spiritual side; as a prig
Macaulay, for all his prodigious erudition, never learned anything
at all. By an inevitable ambivalence of make-up, the intellectual
worldling tends to be a social moralist; tends (whether Henry James
or Henry Adams, Swift or Dr. Johnson, Proust or even Shaw) to
