PARTISAN REVIEW
163
man poet and aesthete Stefan George, in a magnificent and highly
evocative poem, written in
his
most lapidary style, entitled
Porta
Nigra,
about the Roman triumphal arch at the city of Treves. It opens
grandiloquently:
Dass ich zu eurer zeit erwachen musste
Der Ich die pracht der Treverstadt gekannt
Da sie den ruhm der schwester Roma teilte
"That I am compelled to be awake in your time, / I who knew
the wonder of the city of Treves / Which shared the fame of its sister
city of Rome." The speaker is the unworthiest of the unworthy - a
boy prostitute who stood at the gate and offered his perfumed body
to Caesar's soldiers. But such a wretched ghost has nevertheless seen
the glory that was the city of Treves, sister of Rome, and can protest
to the twentieth-century visitor: "Was gelten alIe dinge die ihr rueh–
met"-What are the things worth that you honour?
One does not have to share the contempt of George's ghostly
nancy boy Manlius (it is an attitude that leads eventually to Fascism)
to see that this poem expresses a European sense of the past as over–
whelming, inexplicable, withdrawn into its own time apart from the
contemporary world (unrelated, and yet nevertheless continuous with
it),
which is very different from what is, surely, the prevailing Amer–
ican attitude - that the past is useful only as an asset which can
be realized within the present,
Porta Nigra
only as good as the good
it does to visiting tourists.
That the tradition as embodied in Europe is now of very little
significance, even as a utility, to Americans is the view stated un–
equivocally by Edmund Wilson in his comments on Europe in
A Piece
of
My Mind.
Following on the remarks I have already quoted here
about Europeans who overrate their cultural tradition, he goes on
to record that he has "derived a good deal more benefit of the civi–
lizing as well as of the inspirational kind from the admirable American
bathroom than I have from the cathedrals of Europe." He admits
the impressive "and varied beauties" of the European monuments
but still he has had "more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive
visions" "while soaking in comfortable baths" than in the cathedrals.
Body and spirit purge themselves, he claims, in a hot bath, leaving
the mind "free to ruminate," "to plan ambitious projects." He admits
