162
STEPHEN SPENDER
Roman antiquities of Saint Remy and Arles by a distinguished Amer–
ican lady whom I took to see them.
It
was a hot day and she thought
that Roman antiquity and all works influenced by Roman art had
been badly "oversold"; and she returned to New York on the fol–
lowing day. An "explication" of her thinking would probably run
something like this: "Here am I, an intellectual American of ac–
knowledged taste and sensibility, and I have been told that I
shall
gain a cultural experience which
will
have an improving effect on
me, as a result of my trailing round the Teatro Antico on a hot
summer afternoon. But having done so I do not recognize that the
arches, columns and pediments have 'done' anything to me. I there–
fore conclude that their culturally therapeutic effect has been exag–
gerated." On the assumption that
art
can
be
valued by the develop–
ments which it produces on the sensitized film of the current specta–
tor's sensibility, she was bearing honest and truthful witness, and
if
her answer, together with that of hundreds of other tourists of similar
intelligence in a similar situation were fed into a computer, one
wotrld get a revised, up-to-date, contemporary evaluation of the status
of Roman antiquities in Provence, which could be correlated with
the expense of getting there.
My purpose in recording
this
anecdote is to emphasize that the
lady thought that the objective value of the remains lay entirely in
their contemporary effect on the subjective viewer. She did not think
they might have a significance beyond and outside her, nor that
if
she could not absorb them, make them part of her corporeal-cultural
physiology, this was a criticism of her rather than them.
If
they
were not of contemporary use, they were no use at all. That was
her point of view.
This is also the point of view, finally arrived at after the Second
World War, of the respected and highly civilized American writer
Edmund Wilson, stated in two books in which he "finalizes"
his
at–
titudes towards Europe and America:
Europe Without Baedeker
(1947) and, ten years later,
A Piece of My Mind.
However, before
considering Mr. Wilson's rejection of the European cultural tradition
as having any contemporary significance, I want, by way of contrast,
to take from the early part of the century an example of a European
attitude to the past which takes us back to Baudelaire in condemning
all contemporary life, including that of Europeans. It is by the
Ger-
