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Brother Babbitt. Thus have the winds of doctrine blown, each attracting its own set of followers. But for a large number of intellectuals, the outstanding basis of faith, the one standard with a truly universal appeal, is not any school of thought, but America herself. "An avowed aloof ness from national feeling," Lionel Trilling says, "is no longer the first ceremonial step into the life of thought . . . For the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world."
Indeed, says Historian Crane Brinton, the alienation of intellectuals may be a thing of the past. "They really share, at bottom, the faith of their fellows . . . Some of these intellectuals despair—though by no means quietly—simply because they have heard talk of despair. Many of them, if you catch them unawares, look as if they were enjoying themselves, and not merely enjoying their unhappiness. In fact ... it begins to look nowadays in our perspective as if Sinclair Lewis and George F. Babbitt were brothers, under the skin."
This change, says Biographer Newton (Herman Melville] Arvin, was probably inevitable. "The culture we so fondly cherish is now disastrously threatened from without, and the truer this becomes, the intenser becomes the awareness of our necessary identification with it." In any case, says Jacques Barzun, by the end of World War 11 "it was no disgrace, no provincialism, to accept America and admire it ... America . . . was quite simply the world power, which means: the center of world awareness: it was Europe that was provincial."
The Seedbed. Few men have been more eloquent on the subject of America than Jacques Barzun, and he got to his present position by his own intellectual route. The son of the literary scholar, Henri Martin Barzun, he spent his boyhood among some of the foremost artists around Paris. Novelists Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel were constant visitors, so were Artists Fernand Leger, Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp. "It was," says Barzun, "a seedbed of modernism. Apollinaire dandled me on his knee. Marie Laurencin did a sketch of me."
Coming from such a home, young Barzun seemed destined for a scholar's career. He was allowed to read whatever books he could reach in his father's library, and when his school decided to try to solve the World War 1 teacher shortage by using the famous Lancaster system (employing older pupils to teach the younger ones), nine-year-old Jacques got a crack at his first class. "All I remember about it," says he, "is that it had to do with arithmetic and that the room seemed filled with thousands of very small children in black aprons ... It served, however, to apprentice me to my trade."