My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to take
the most readily understandable instance, was beginning to absorb large
tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the
experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish
and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that
all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting
upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen, and
eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative
minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half consciously and
half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of each separate
chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and fusing their
conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in artistic crucibles of
their own devising.
Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular
meaning in each case more or less escaped him. And then I ventured to
suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the
present stage than for Europeans, because American minds would grasp
readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously
escaped them in their experience, and so begin to formulate from these
books new intuitive laws.
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