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PARTISAN REVIEW
and their translation into human conduct, respectively, cannot be mis–
taken for any other creative urge; neither can the intention of Henry
James in writing
The American, The Bostonians,
or
The Europeans,
or
that of Dreiser in
An American Tragedy.
By Dreiser's time, however, another tragedy was about to happen in
America: the abdication of literary talent from the intellectual's respon–
sibility and the arrogation of that crucially important social role by a
group singularly ill-equipped to perform it. I do not imply that literary
artists gave up on the name of "intellectuals" in its explicit definition as
a social category; of course, they viewed themselves as belonging to that
category. However, they no longer aspired to be the articulators of their
culture and thus gave up the title of "intellectuals" in the implicit mean–
ing of the term. They never held this title very firmly, for Americans
never looked up to their writers. The writers who assumed the intellec–
tual role in France, Britain, and the United States did not constitute a
group, were not seen as a group by their respective societies, and were
not believed to be particularly qualified to interpret their national cul–
tures. Even in France, where the position and its authority belonged to
the wider group of literati, to which the authors of the "modern novel"
belonged, the situation was vastly different from Russia, where litera–
ture had the dignity of the Holy Writ, for Russian culture was believed
to speak through the authors of fiction. In the United States, in particu–
lar, literati as literati had no recognized social vocation and were in fact
superfluous. They were extremely unhappy about this and bitterly com–
plained about their lot. Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Henry James were
among the complainers. But the great majority of writers, who opted for
"the life of the mind" because they could afford it and had no liking for
law, politics, or business, suffered grievously from the lack of prestige
their style of life implied by comparison both to these other choices and
to that of European literati.
The examples of English, French, and Russian intellectuals carried a
certain weight, but it was the German arrangement, the most clearly
structured and the least dependent on individual talent, that appealed to
them the most, and so the German university professor, specifically the
faculty of philosophy broadly defined, became the ideal of the American
educated class. As it happened, the prodigious generosity of the great
industrial magnates of the Gilded Age, whose crass materialism
offended the literati, enabled them to import this ideal and institution–
alize it in the framework of American research universities. The estab–
lishment of the universities coincided with the sharp rise in the prestige
of science following the publication of Darwin's
Origin of the Species,
