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STEPHEN SPENDER
that cathedrals "with their distant domes, their long aisles and their
high groinings, do add stature to human strivings; their chapels do
give privacy for prayer." But on the whole he prefers the American
bathroom, which "prepares one to face the world, fortified, firm on
one's feet, serene and with a mind like a diamond."
Coming from a scholar and critic who, more perhaps than any
living American, has upheld civilized values, and who customarily
(though not in this passage) writes in a style of eighteenth-century
elegance and clarity, this is candid, amusing, leg-pulling: the last
word in Edmund Wilson's long polemic against European snobbery.
All the same in dismissing the European snobs he seetns finaUy to
have dismissed the objects which they are snobbish about. Unless he
is subtly parodying the point of view he expresses (and the use of
words like "uplifting" and "inspirational" make one suspect he might
be doing this), he is, in effect, testifying to the bankruptcy of the old
world as a past still acting on contemporary life. Presumably he par–
ticularly dislikes cathedrals because, with their columns and arches,
they form a background against which Europeans strike their poses
and stake their claims of superiority over visiting Americans. In the
long drawn out dialectic of Anglo-American literary relations, it was
a ploy of visiting Americans - already used by Emerson and Haw–
thorne - to winkle their European contemporaries out of their ruin–
ous classical architectural shells, throw them contemptuously aside,
and express their admiration only for those ruins. Mr. Wilson goes
further; he rejects the cathedrals and the classical background as
well. This means coming down heavily on the side of the contem–
porary, the temporary, the transitory, the Americanized, in the form
of the water sluicing through American taps and showers. The rejec–
tion
is
all the more piquant because Mr. Wilson must know better
than anyone that the Romans had steam baths.
Writing after 1945 Mr. Wilson is probably right in saying that
the architectural and static surviving Europe is no longer even a
background. Other parts of his two books suggest that what is move–
able from Europe - the literary dramatic works, the music and the
artists - has already been taken to America, which adds to the ab–
surdity of those Europeans who still claim the superiority of the phys–
ical geographic grounds they literally stand on.
As
a European, I feel
that the only thing one might possibly quarrel with him about is his
