The Americanism of
Van Wyck Brooks
F. W. Dupee
N
EW ENGLAND
has
given to the United States its most literate
body of native tradition, and educated Americans, regardless of
their particular backgrounds, are always tending to become spir–
itual New Englanders.
If
the Yankee tradition is no longer very
much alive, so much the worse for educated Americans. Of this
type of native mind VanWyck Brooks is an excellent example. It
is
true that years ago, as the spokesman of a city culture which was
then just emerging in its strength, Brooks made a great eff
~rt
to
master the spiritual New Englander in himself. He did not quite
carry
it off; his Yankee alter ego has since taken entire possession
of him. And it is now clear that he has always owed to the older
tradition a great many of his qualities-the restraint and con–
science that have marked all his work; the taste for arduous schol–
arship; the rather elaborate prose which is the conscious register
of his highly-organized individuality; but above all the air of
unworldliness, of consecration, which comes perhaps from his alle–
giance to the New England principle of intensive cultivation. "The
great thing is to be saturated with something." Henry James, an–
other spiritual New Englander, used to maintain. And Brooks has
saturated himself with the problems of art and society in the
United States. But it was another tendency of the rhapsodic Yan–
kee
strain to tum everybody-novelists,
philosoph~rs,
critics, his–
torians, naturalists-into poets; and Brooks, too, admirable though
he is as a scholar and social critic, has always at bottom worked
and thought in the manner commonly ascribed to poets. Like them
he tends to see all experience in the light of a single overmastering
situation, but in his case the great situation, the
donnee,
is asso–
ciated with the vicissitudes of creative inspiration in the United
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