448
PARTISAN REVIEW
and which has fashioned us
was self-destructive ... and must
be
destroyed."
No responsible critic can dispel the curse which has isolated and
alienated the creative imagination in America from the social reality.
If
he points out, as Cooper and Hawthorne did a long time ago, that
the characteristic form of the novel in America has been the "romance,"
this is only another way of saying that the writer found reality
self–
destructive and unbearable. Thus Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and even
Washington Irving, sought both refuge and relief in a ghostly, spectral
world of fantasy, horror, and mystery. Romance, as a literary genre,
is
a child of romanticism. Thus another way of characterizing the classic
American novel of the nineteenth century is to say that it explored the
aesthetic possibilities of romanticism to its limits; conversely, it did not
work its passage home, as did Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, or
Flaubert, from romanticism to some kind of social realism. The creative
imagination did not find a "home" in America.
S
The grandeur and pathos of classic American literature lies
in
this
sense of homelessness, in the spirit of refusal to come to terms with
reality, at the price of isolation and alienation. For the romantic re–
jection of reality was an implicit affirmation of human hopes and aspir–
ations at a time when the social and historical conditions in the United
States not only were incompatible with, but actually ran counter to,
the attainment of these ideals. What did the aesthetic sensibilities of
American writers suffer from in anger, horror, and revulsion? Not only
from the sins of their Puritan ancestors, or the guilt of a feudal caste;
they also suffered from a sense of failure
in
America. More concretely,
they also suffered from the success of the economic, industrial, and tech–
nological transformation by which the United States consolidated their
national identity and achieved their international power. This was the
rock on which the American ideal foundered, the dream of pursuing
life, liberty, and happiness toward a "new human relationship," beyond
the blessings of the ballot box and the comforts of a prosperous, afflu–
ent, and expanding economy.
The industrial age is often
cited~by
Americans themselves-as
their greatest achievement; it is just as often attacked by critics of the
American way of life, not only in Henry Adams's vision of "The Virgin
3 Only Henry James joined the company of the great masters of the novel
in England, France and Russia; and he left the United States. Realism, or
naturalism, at the beginning of this century is a kind of postcript to the classic,
romantic tradition in American literature, and a relatively brief interlude.
With
O'Neill, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Tennessee
Williams we are back in the "romantic" tradition.
