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gence has been repeated in waves of forward-moving and receding
energy.
It should be noted in passing that although we see in Words–
worth and Coleridge and later in Keats, Shelley and Byron two
phases of cultural insurgence, the dialectics of English culture are
somewhat misleading when the attempt is made to apply them to
American culture. This analogy is always made by middlebrow writers
in their effort to cut the ground out from under the vanguard. They
tell us that sometimes there is no need for a dissident intelligentsia,
and in support of this argument they point to the Victorian age, when
not only inferior writers but the great writers of the time won more or
less immediate public esteem and authority. It is true that this hap–
pened in England, but it did not happen in America, where the great
writers were not the popular ones. The great writers, like Melville,
Whitman, and James, had to content themselves with a fugitive
notoriety and long neglect. By comparison with America England is
an organic and continuous culture. What has not been sufficiently
seen is that American culture shows far more enduring contradictions
and discontinuities than does English culture-or
if
this has been
seen, its consequences have not yet been understood. American civiliza–
tion, happily similar to English in many ways and particularly in its
political character, tends, in the quality of its cultural movements,
to resemble French and Russian civilization, at least in the sense
that it shows very disparate extremes of taste and opinion. The state–
ment that French culture is a long dialectical argument between
Pascal and Montaigne is an inevitable and significant truth. Van
Wyck Brooks' idea that American culture is similarly typified by the
difference between Jonathan Edwards (the "highbrow") and Ben–
jamin Franklin (the "lowbrow") is also a far-reaching truth. But
English cultural history offers no such clear-cut polarities. At certain
periods of its history England has evolved an admirable middle cul–
ture, a main body of taste and opinion, into which the avant-garde,
never radically alienated in the first place, could be temporarily ab–
sorbed, without detriment to the cultural life of the nation. This has
never happened in America, where all the great things have been
done by lowbrows or by highbrows and where the middle culture,
beginning with Howells, has been mediocre, has too easily found its
motives in commercialism and academic conformity, has incongru-
