PARTISAN REVIEW
149
Americanism, 4mericanize, Americanization.
These words mean
different things to Americans and to Europeans. In fact, if one
is
English, one only has to read them to have the impression of obverse
and reverse - the two sides of a common-language-medal- the
same words meaning opposites to opposite peoples. In English, an
"Americanism"
is
not an ideal goal for Americans but an American
usage threatening the integrity of the English language. "American–
ization," the process of "Americanizing," is the shadow of a future
in
which the world becomes America. For Europeans, the deepest
fear
is
of the dissolution of European methods and ways of thinking,
and of the European past, into the American present.
This
undefined fear haunts books like
American Notes
and
Martin Chuzziewit.
It
is
not confined to the English, in fact it has
been more lucidly propounded by certain French writers. For the
English retain a stubborn hope that they can fight back. The English
have won many a battle against Americanism on the playing fields
of the common language.
II
It was a Frenchman, Paul Valery, who observed, after the First
World War, that it was the ambition of Europe to
be
governed by
an American committee. But long before this, in the early eighteen–
fifties, Baudelaire, in his journal entitled
Fusees,
characterized Amer–
icanization as a symptom of the approaching end of the civilized
world (by which he means France) :
The world
is
coming
to
an end. The only reason for its survival is
that it exists. What a feeble reason compared with those that argue
the opposite, particularly this one: "What, under Heaven, does the
world have, from now on, to do?" Even supposing that it continued
to exist materially, would this existence
be
worthy of the name and
of the Historical Dictionary? I don't mean that the world will be
reduced to the comic-opera disorders of South American Republics,
or that we shall perhaps revert to the condition of savages and roam
across the grassy ruins of our civilization, gun in hand, looking for
food.
No; for such adventures would imply a certain vital energy
still, echo of earlier ages. A new example, and new victims of inex–
orable moral laws, we shall perish as a consequence of the means
by
which we have sought to live. Mechanization
will
have Amer-
