72
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion, he has never made it very clear just what transcendentalism,
considered as a philosophy, really was. And surely it is a paradox
of his career that he should have been so warm in his championship
of the artist, yet so cold to the work of art, so ready to proclaim
America's intellectual poverty, yet in practice so indifferent to
ideas.
There have been many instances, of course, where Brooks'
critical methods involved no particular difficulties. The literary
portraits in "Our Poets" were certainly not lacking in a vivid
esthetic concreteness, nor were they demonstrably inconsistent with
the actual work of the authors concerned. But other books, notably
the "Pilgrimage" and the "Ordeal", have given rise to criticism on
the grounds that the accomplishment of James and Mark Twain
was ignored or distorted. Let us consider these charges, taking
up first
The Pilgrimage of Henry ]ames.
This book, which seems
to
me somewhat better than its reputation, testifies to Brooks'
ability to say things of value and to raise important issues even
when in his main argument he appears most mistaken. For on the
whole the picture of James that emerged from the "Pilgrimage"
seemed to he a deduction rather from Brooks' general theory of
literary nationalism than from the novels themselves, the latter
having a complex irony which Brooks failed to take into account
and which
in
the end seriously undermines his thesis. Yet it is
curious that in this case Brooks
did
examine the novels, and one
concludes, not that his method is necessarily faulty
in
itself, but
that he possesses in any case a strongly metaphysical cast of mind.
To the sober scholar
in
him there is yoked a visionary and the two
have some trouble pulling together in harmony. A myth-maker on
one side of his nature, he sometimes strikes us as being himself
that very poet-prophet, that reincarnated Whitman, which he once
had the habit of invoking; hut on the other side he is a sceptic, a
critic and an historian. Of the conflict generated in him by this
ambivalence there is further evidence in
The Ordeal of Mark
Twain.
The general thesis here appears to me considerably sounder
than that of the "Pilgrimage"; and in addition to having been a
pioneer in the attempt to fuse the historical and Freudian perspec·
tives, the "Ordeal" was a splendid example of closely-textured
argument, analytical wit and the restrained use of local color; and
it would he hard indeed to forget its picture of Mark Twain, "that
