PARTISAN REVIEW
363
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England the losing
forces of civilization and the gaining forces of technology moved in
opposite directions, but they did not meet
in
that dialectic of opposites
speaking the same language, which later produced modern art. They
were not on speaking terms. Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism in
his
The Civilization of the United States
is an example of
this
pur–
suit of separate goals along lines that do not really meet. He divides
the English into the aristocrats, who are barbarians, the middle class,
who are philistines, and the populace who are - the populace. The
Americans are, the majority of them, a middle class and therefore,
by English definition, philistines. They are
in
need of being told (and
Matthew Arnold tells them) that what "really dissatisfies in Amer–
ican civilization is the want of the
interesting."
For it is the
interest–
ing
which makes for culture and civilization.
The use of the word
interesting
here is doubly revealing. Firstly,
from the standpoint of the culture of "sweetness and light" of "eleva–
tion" and "nobility" going back to Plato, Arnold is quite right and it
is courageous of
him
to inform his American contemporaries that they
are, like his English middle-class ones, bores. But, secondly, Arnold's
assumption that when America did acquire civilization the "interest–
ing" element in it would be the European past as conveyed in a lec–
ture to his hosts by Matthew Arnold, shows how little consideration
he had given to the proposition that this civilization would have to
be largely the result of the transformation of energies peculiar to the
unprecedented situation of the people of that country. He did not
think this about America because he did not think it about that new
contemporary world which was modern life, totally alien to him, in
England.
In the event, American civilization consists not so much of the
humanization of the society, as in the expression of violent conflicts
between the personal and impersonal elements in it, realized in art
forms or formlessness in which the personal attains a precarious and
often hysterical victory.
It
is revealing that Arnold attributes to the uncivilized forces
in the society qualities of virility, masculinity, energy - barbarism,
philistinism, the populace - whilst to the civilizing forces he attributes
weak and feminine ones.
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