VAN WYCK BROOKS
71
the new intelligentsia to bring to consciousness.
If
Brooks was a
sociologist he was first of all an individualist, and if he was some·
thing of a moralist he was primarily a psychologist.
In America where the middle class, filling the whole picture,
had made life as precarious for specialized types of individuality
as it had made it safe for the more standard varieties, it was natu·
ral that a critic like Brooks should seize upon the new psychology,
apply its insights to American writers of the past, and preach its
ethic of self-fulfillment to the writers of the present. His criticism
had therefore its intimate connection with his time and place, and
that connection we shall presently consider
in
detail. But let us first
look at Brooks' work in its more technical aspects. His generation
was making a great point of the importance of being "creative", a
slogan which Brooks translated into his own medium, deveioping
acriticism that had many of the qualities of imaginative literature.
In
form it was eloquent, concentrated, boldly thematic; and it car–
ried the biographical method to a higher point of development than
it had yet reached in American criticism. In a sense Brooks'
approach is merely a variant of methods employed by · Sainte–
Beuve and Taine, but it acquired a special character through the
intensity both of his individualism and of his preoccupation with
psychology. The questions of culture at large he approaches in
terms of leading individuals; the work of single writers he con·
siders in the light of their biography. Thus
The Ordeal of Mark
Twain, The Pilgrimage of Henry /ames
and
The Life of Emerson
are all attempts to characterize entire cultural periods through the
experience of leading individuals; and even
The Flowering of
New England,
as someone has said, is not so much a history as a
composite biography. The biographical method is commonly used
to
cast light on the work of literature. With Brooks, however, this
procedure is usually reversed. When he appeals to the work it is in
order to confirm some theory about the man; the real object of his
criticism is something which might be described as a psycho-lit·
erary superpersonality; and at this he arrives by dissolving litera–
ture into biography in such a way that the concrete literary product,
the work itself with its four walls and established furniture as
given by its author, is often lost to view. And this is true concerning
his
treatment of the intellectual as well as the structural properties
of literature. For all his vital interest in the New England tradi-
