AMERICAN
ODYSSEY
445
ters of a
national
culture as did, say, Athens or Rome, Paris or London,
Weimar or Vienna. Nor did they, or any other region, produce a
dominant figure like Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Racine, Goethe,
Pushkin, or Tolstoy who became a
personal
symbol for a national litera–
ture. "So long as Shakespeare is performed and read in England," writes
an English critic and novelist, "his influence on the novel will continue,
simply because for us his work is the final standard of imaginative
writing." It is altogether fitting that there be Stratford festivals in
Canada and Connecticut, because Shakespeare remains the ultimate
standard for the American imagination as well. Cooper was right: "It
is quite idle to say that the American has not just as good a right to
claim
Milton, and Shakespeare, and all the old masters of the language,
for his countrymen, as an Englishman." Nor has there been any change
in the case of the "new" masters during the last hundred years. The
textbook division of literature into "American" and "English" is com–
pletely arbitrary and meaningless. Where do we put Dickens or Henry
James, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden, and why?
The fusion of a national and cultural consciousness in the regions
of Europe was well under way and, for the most part, completed by
the time the United States declared their political independence.
2
In
every case, the European experience antedates the most important phase
of the American experience, the westward movement and the coming
of the industrial age--historically symbolized in the victory of Northern
industry over Southern chivalry. Both developments defeated the old
regional centers of culture. In our times, New England and the South
are "backward" areas; New Bedford and New Orleans are quaint relics,
of interest to tourists only, or historians, as charming and dead as Bruges
or Avignon. Nor did the wave of the future, in the name of which the
opening of the West and the industrial conquest were waged, fulfill
the American dream, secretly shared and nourished by all the worn and
weary masses cast upon these shores-the dream of a new life and a
new world, "the dream of a new human relationship," as D.
H.
Lawrence
called it.
The journey into this distant, unknown future never reached home.
The birth of a nation did not give birth to a "new human relationship."
The New World did not redeem the failure of the Old; it did not sus–
tain the hope for a new life on earth. The American Odyssey has been
a long day's journey into the night-from Captain Ahab to Jay Gatsby.
"We are the pioneers of the world," Melville exclaimed, "the advance-
2 Of. the great age of English literature at the time of the first Elizabeth
or the classical age of French culture at the time of the Sun King.
