VAN WYCK BROOKS
73
shorn Samson, led about by a little child, who in the profound
aomnolence of her spirit, was simply going through the motions of
an inherited domestic piety." Nevertheless the "Ordeal" has
presented many difficulties to its readers. It is one thing to muck–
rake a period, as Brooks here so effectively muckrakes the genteel
era, pointing out its stultifying effects on a writer of genius; but it
is
another thing again to assume that in happier conditions your
writer would have been a Tolstoy. For that is more or less what
Brooks does assume, and the result is that the historical Mark
Twain is everywhere dogged by the shadow of an ideal or poten–
tial or Unconscious Mark Twain, a kind of spectral elder brother
whose brooding presence is an eternal reproof to the mere author
of
Huckleberry Finn.
In addition to being highly speculative,
Brooks' approach has the disadvantage of diverting him from what
Mark Twain achieved in a positive sense through
th~
cultivation,
however fragmentary, of his plebeian sensibility. This achievement
it was left to Ernest Hemingway and other practicing artists to
discover for themselves.
3.
But Brooks' habit of using the materials of history and biog–
raphy to construct didactic myths, literary lessons in the shape of
parables, was probably the effect of the period in which he came
to
maturity and of what he was trying to accomplish in that period.
Throughout the years of industrial revolution following the Civil
War, writers in America had been consigned, some of them to a
limbo
of servility, others to virtual oblivion, depending on whether
they accepted or embraced the prevailing
sta~dards
of that iron
age. However, when Brooks' first volume appeared, in 1909, the
old exploitative phalanx of American society had been for some
years
breaking up. There was a great increase of radical conscious·
ness on the part of the masses, and intellectuals had taken advan–
tage of the general ferment to assert once more the claims of the
individual. And thus, for the first time since the Fifties, there came
into
existence a body of professionals sufficiently independent,
militant and cohesive to be called an intelligentsia. This body had
in a sense been the creation of the radical movement; it therefore
applied itself to politics, as well, and evolved a special type in the
shape
of the muckraker. But this was only the first phase in the
