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become peripheral. The energy of the American civilization results
from its writers and artists having to deal with situations which are
more pressing, more complex than those in England. America is the
country where more contemporary life is happening and where things
are on a larger scale.
When writers regarded the difference between America and Eu–
rope as being qualitative - Europe having the advantage of its past
dimension - they rather overlooked the importance of the fact that
Europe was also the center of world power and wealth. James and
Eliot overlooked this because material strength was a phenomenon
of contemporary noncivilization. Their a ttention was fixed on the past
which made the values of civilization. Contemporary power only con–
cerned them in that it provided the necessary, rather regrettable ma–
chinery by which the past was sustained. In his letters James is al–
ways rueful when he finds evidence of the British neglecting their
imperial interests. This is not because he considers power as civiliza–
tion, but because he thinks the British Empire so much more civilized
than any empire likely to succeed it.
But with the death of the past tradition the center of civilization
becomes simply the country which has the greatest power. For it
contains the greatest complexity of contemporary situations in life
with which the imagination has to deal. This does not mean, of
course, that power becomes moral or civilized. On the contrary, the
greater the power - the active materialist inertia - the greater the
opposition to it of the civilizing energies in the society, which are
those of a counterculture. The two greatest powers in the world today,
America and Russia, have in their contemporary literature the most
significant countercultures, made all the more energetic by the
strength of the materialism to which they are opposed.
In the area of the Anglo-American common language today
the difference between the English and the American civilization is
not that one has the past tradition and the other lacks it, but that
America, being far more powerful, in the most materialist sense, than
Britain has a far more vigorous counterculture. Both countries be–
long to the same situation of exposure to the forces of the contem–
porary world, from which the past no longer provides relief. But the
pressure of these forces is greater in the United States.
The first reaction of the English to this situation was, I have
