152
STEPHEN SPENDER
his days: letters are unknown
in
the United States. The American
has replaced intellectual preoccupation with practical activities.
Don't though deduce from his mediocrity in the arts that he is in–
ferior. For it is not to these things that he has paid attention.
Thrown for different reasons on a desert soil, agriculture and busi–
ness have been the objects of his attention; before thinking he must
live.
However Americans are not to be regarded just as emigrant
Europeans who have gone to a new and empty continent - inhabited
only by tribes of wild Indians - and who have become preoccupied
with practical tasks to the exclusion of everything else, because they
are obliged by circumstances to act before they can think. They are
the consummation of a stage of history already arrived at:
These citizens of the New World have taken their place among the
nations at the moment when political ideas entered the ascendancy.
That is why they undergo such rapid transformation.
They are the principle of transformation incarnate.
It
is as though
part of Europe, rapidly changing and revolutionary-political, had
be–
come detached and a separate entity, which developed nothing but
the qualities latent in a perpetually evolving society. Chateaubriand
appears to see America as
La Revolution permanente
in contrast to
fa societe permanente
which is Europe:
it seems impracticable for the permanent society to exist among
them, the Americans, on the one hand because of the extreme bore–
dom
[ennui!]
felt by individuals, on the other, because of that
imp05sibility of staying in one place, and the necessity to move on,
which dominates them. For no one remains fixed if his household
gods are nomads. Situated on the highway of oceans, and in the
avant garde of opinions as new as his country, the American seems
to have inherited from Columbus rather the necessity of discovering
new universes, than of creating them.
III
America embodied the truth that the "permanent society" was
already dying in Europe. But if the world expected that a civiliza–
tion like the European would emerge there, it was wrong. The United
States had arrived too late on the scene to achieve the civilization
of fixed values which would counterbalance the European past. In
