PARTISAN REVIEW
361
So when America gained that "immense advantage" which
Emerson, in the course of their walk near Stonehenge, prophesied to
Carlyle more than a hundred years ago, the result was not a future
symmetrical with the European past: this in spite of the fact that
there was always in the minds of English lecturers, and of Americans
being lectured to, the idea of such a future; when Americans had
"grown up" and the nation had "caught up," perhaps by means of
transporting in ever larger quantities, impedimenta of European art
and architecture across the Atlantic. The idea lingers on in Edmund
Wilson's
A Piece of My Mind
where Wilson, writing after the Sec–
ond World War, points out that Europeans were no longer in the
position to boast about the superiority of their culture, because most
of its contemporary achievements, together with the thinkers and art–
ists responsible for them, were now in the United States.
The metaphor of a transatlantic weighing-scale with material of
civilization gradually being removed from the Eastern pan into the
Western, until the American tips the balance, does not describe the
ascendancy. The new civilization did not entirely come into its in–
heritance until it had absorbed the European tradition and then
transformed it into something uniquely American in which Europeans
were forced to recognize the achieved transatlantic future that they had
been anticipating for two hundred years. In literature the process of
absorption and transformation began of course early on, but recogni–
tion of it by the English was delayed until the 1920s. The really
spectacular liquefaction of a European tradition into an American
transformation scene was in painting. The American school, or schools,
of painting that emerged in the 1950s had absorbed the influences of
the modern tradition, from Monet to Picasso and the French sur–
realists, and transformed them into a style which has no European
precedent, in works which reflect the scale of American geography,
the excitement of great plains and cities, the technique which com–
petes with the skills and efficiency of Boeing and General Motors, and
which establish "the tradition of the New."
So the "immense advantage" was realized as the confrontation
of the world with a civilization which had absorbed many of the
achievements of the old and transformed them into terms of its own
newness. The "newness" of this civilization lies precisely in rejection
of the past except when this has been abstracted into ideas entering
