HARRY LEVIN

OCCASION to see ourselves, not merely as others see us, but as
they reflect our own reflection of ourselves, through whatever
glass, however darkly--such is the hall of mirrors our subject
opens before us. To traverse it, to glance in passing at its multi-
plied and refracted images, is not a proud but a chastening ex-
perience. Possibly it may lead us, via those corridors which our
publicists are now contriving, into the midst of the American
Century. Perhaps we can best comprehend the present vogue of
American letters in Europe by remembering three brusque words
used by Thomas Hobbes to account for the authority of the
classics: "Colonies and Conquests." For, though we may well
disclaim imperialistic or even commercial motives, we cannot
disavow the situation that ties Western Europe to our country
as no two continents have ever been tied before. Along with the
Marshall Plan go jeeps and juke-boxes, CARE packages and
foreign-language editions of the Reader's Digest; along with our
products we export our culture--"culture" not in Matthew
Arnold's terms but in Ruth Benedict's patterns. All this helps to
explain what European critics can justify no better than we
could: why the world's best seller, second only to the Bible,
should be Gone with the Wind.

But this is the sort of tribute we cannot accept with much com-
placency. Culturally, even more than ideologically, we are un-
prepared for the role of hegemony that fortune seems determined
to thrust upon us. Though we believe in our great literary tradi-

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