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PARTISAN REVIEW
history does not begin, as symposia like this one seem to imply, in
1870 with a rejection of America and a flight to Europe and end,
in its present phase, in 1952 with a flight from Europe and an
acceptance of America. According to how you look at it, our cul–
tural history begins with Cotton Mather or Benjamin Franklin and
develops in a manner easy to discuss in detail but very difficult to
discern as a whole, apparently changing and proceeding without
much regard for the condition of Europe and promising to end
in some future which will have produced, let us say, a new poet and
a new romancer of whom it will be illuminating to remark that in
them Whitman and Melville are reborn as Shakespeare was reborn
in Keats. Let me add that this is not intended as chauvinism. My
point is that American culture seems to be intractably independent
and unruly and therefore cannot be regarded as a function of
European history.
The question as to whether we "may in the end produce a
higher culture and demonstrate that a political democracy can
nourish great art and thought" asks for a view of our history. It
seems to suggest, for one thing, that we might look forward to an
American version of the Elizabethan Age or of Periclean Athens,
a flowering toward which we may be developing. I do not know
whether anything like this will happen. It is hard to discern a
developmental pattern in our history anywhere except locally, as,
for example, Hawthorne may be said to be an aesthetic culmina–
tion of Puritanism. Weare always talking about America "matur–
ing," as if the child or adolescent might yet become the adult. Yet
America's childhood is rather elusive and on the whole we do right
to regard our country as having sprung full grown from the head of
Europe. And thus if there is to be a "maturity," it will be, on this
showing, the improvement of a somewhat neurotic adult, out of
whose present condition forms of energy and order will emerge.
This implies a view of our history which is different from the
developmental view and which appears to account for many of the
facts. Suppose, then, that in its manifold essence American society
be said to have been finally
given
at some point by the processes
of history and then abandoned by them, as happened to ancient
China. From this point of view our culture changes only by spas–
modic revelation, its literary, intellectual, and institutional manifes-
