AMERICAN ABROAD
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fictions or presumed factual accounts, created myths of the two worlds
and their relationship; from Washington Irving and James Fenimore
Cooper, through Poe and Hawthorne and Melville to James and Heming–
way, Eliot and Pound, scarcely any of our major authors has failed to
face up to this task. Those few who have rejected it-Thoreau and
Whitman come first to mind-have felt their refusal in itself as some–
how heroic, and if not quite a sufficient
raison d'etre,
at least a satis–
factory
raison d'ecrire.
For a long time, however, the general American
obligation to accommodate to each other the myths of Europ'eans and
~-Europeans
was oddly parochialized by being entrusted to the small
group of highly educated White Anglo-Saxon Protestants from a few
Atlantic seaboard cities, who remained for decades the sole public spokes–
men of the United States.
It was that group, in any case, who first undertook the archetypal
voyage to Europe (Dr. Franklin, in his disguise as a good, grey Quaker,
being the mythological forerunner of them all), defining it
in
letters,
articles and books as simultaneously a Descent into Hell and an Ascent
to Olympus. The inferno into which the earlier travelers thought of
themselves as descending was the Hell of surviving Medievalism, which
is to say, of oppression, class distinction, "immorality" (belated vestiges
of Courtly Love) and, especially, Roman Catholicism; while the Olym–
pian heights they fanded themselves as scaling were represented by the
preserved monuments of antiquity, the reconstructed cathedrals of the
Middle Ages and the artistic achievements of the Renaissance as dis–
played in museums. Unfortunately for their peace of mind, the works of
art which such WASP travelers admired to the point almost of worship
were hopelessly involved with the values, religious and political, which
such travelers most despised. The benign culture-religion into which the
faith of their mothers was, by slow and imperceptible degrees, lapsing
came into inescapable conflict with the violent anti-Catholicism to
which the fiercer faith of their fathers had, just as gradually, shrunk. And
though they did not often confess the dis-ease bred by that conflict, they
were surely troubled by it.
A little later, their direct descendants, Henry James and Henry
Adams, were to suggest a solution, fully achieved only later still by their
remoter heirs, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (in whom anti-Semitism
tended anyhow to replace anti-Catholicism) : the total abandonment
of the negative vestiges of Protestantism
in
favor of the culture-religion
and whatever fashionable cults were best adapted to it. But so drastic
an accommodation was achieved only at the risk of expatriation and
apostasy, which is to say, the surrender of essential "Americanism," as
d'efined in the WASP tradition. How different the Old World was to
