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STEPHEN SPENDER
is that the West has become split into the Americanized, who live
in the present, and the Europeanized, who belong to the past without
relating
it
to the present: though sometimes, as
in
the case of cer–
tain of the Italian Fascists, they show a strong desire to tum the
present into the past.
W. B. Yeats believed that European civilization was divided
into periods characterized by the opposites of objectivity - dominat–
ed by impersonal forces - and of subjectivity - dominated by
in–
dividual men of genius. Thus the end of the Roman and the
begin–
ning of the Christian era was one in which there were few people
with a strong sense of their own individuality. Yeats thought that five
hundred years after the dazzlingly subjectivist Renaissance era we
were moving into a similar dark end-of-civilization period dominated
by impersonal forces. At the same time, exceptional people living
in
one historic era could belong spiritually to a quite different one.
Thus in the 1890s men like Walter Pater and Lionel Johnson did not
belong to their time. They were men of the Renaissance imprisoned
in the present.
These are very European attitudes, even though there are cer–
tain tall, lean, lantern-jawed New Englanders who reincarnate an
American past: but they are only ghosts in a society of machines.
As
one of them once remarked to me in a spectral accent a billion times
more English than my own : "You have no idea how lonely one
feels in this country
if
he arrived here in 1697."
But certain English, and certain Europeanized Americans (like
Henry Adams, Henry James, Bernard Berenson or T. S. Eliot), can
only be described as having an illness which derives from total root–
edness in the European past and total rejection of the American
present. They are convinced that they cannot be happy, or virtuous,
or achieve greatness within the civilization whose values are entirely
contemporary. This is the illness of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in
Pound's poem of that name, a hero who represents both English
decadence and the Europeanized American. He is born
"in
a half
savage country," "out of key with his time," because he "ob–
served the elegance of Circe's hair" - that is the tradition of Homer–
ic
antiquity "rather than the mottoes on sun-dials" -
tempus fugit
in
the era of perpetual transformation.
The illness of a Mauberley is incurable, because to be cured
