70
PARTISAN REVIEW
States, with the difficulty of realizing oneself, not only as an artist
in America, but as an American artist. The effort to reconcile art
and society in terms of our national experience has accordingly
dominated all his work, both the early and the late, and has given
an otherwise episodic career an urgent inner consistency.
2.
By working very hard a single important piece of territory a
.writer may earn, at the very least, the reputation of being a
"phenomenon". This has been the case with Brooks, yet it has
always been hard to say just what kind of phenomenon he is. Dur–
ing the years when estheticism was the prevailing literary creed,
he used to be called, rather invidiously, a sociologist. But as sociol–
ogy came to seem to us less alien and less of a mystery, it was
decided that Brooks' social insights were the by-products of a tem–
perament primarily ethical. And people pointed to his
Freeman
essays, which showed that when hard-pressed by disappointments,
', as he appears to have been during the post-war years, he was
·capable of taking up a position of reproachful righteousness barely
__...J)
distinguishable from that of the New Humanists, whom he had
always assailed. Let us see to what extent these various distinc–
t-ions were justified. Morality, it is true, is the socialism of the
individualist, who seeks to extend to society at large the codes that
have come to govern people in their individual relationships. And
Brooks has been as consistently an individualist as he has been
consistently preoccupied with the larger questions of society. But
in deriving his ethical ideas from the new psychology of the Uncon–
scious, he broke in part with the philosophy of traditional moral
individualists. Like them he continued to conceive society
in
terms
of an analogy with the structure of the human personality, but
instead of picturing personality as a complex of higher and lower
selves, as a Plato or an Arnold-moralists even in their psychology
-normally pictured it, Brooks saw in it the Freudian pattern of
repression and sublimation. And this pattern, modified as much by
vestiges in him of the old ethical severity as by elements of modem
materialism, he extended to social experience; so that the United
States often appeared to him as a case of "atrophied personality",
a "prodigious welter of unconscious life" which it was the task of
