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life of the new intelligentsia. Later on, in Brooks' generation, a
reaction set in against reformism, which had so plainly missed its
mark, and writers turned from politics to literature. The "artist"
thereupon supplanted the muckraker as the standard intellectual
type; consciousness of self was cultivated in place of class con–
sciousness; and writers set out to express and assert and fulfill
themselves. Thus the old subjective ethos of romanticism, freshly
implemented by modern psychology, was reborn in America some
sixty years after the decline of Emersonianism.
Perhaps nothing was more remarkable in Brooks than the
flair for assimilation and synthesis which permitted him to bring
to focus in his criticism all the chief tendencies of those decades.
For most people at that time, politics and literature seemed to
constitute a dichotomy, because, for one thing, the radical move–
ment was even more deficient in literary culture than it is today,
and for another the intellectuals lacked any unified theory of
culture and society. For Brooks, too, in the long run, art and
politics were to seem two separate universes; but his early criticism
embodied a notable attempt to bring the two into a better relation
and so to combine the ideals of the muckrakers with those of his
own primarily esthetic generation. The actual political content of
his criticism was vague and shifting; yet whenever he attempted a
definite formulation it became clear that he regarded socialism as
a pre-condition of the "creative life" in America. And in many
respects his early writings provided the United States with its
closest parallel to the social-democratic literatures then flourishing
in Europe.
Nevertheless Brooks was at heart a psychologist and he was
to keep the morality of self-fulfillment squarely in the center of his
work. Nor did his socialist convictions in the long run prevent him
from conceiving art as a process essentially self-contained, com·
manding an area of experience to all purposes special and separate.
He seems to have taken over from Carlyle and Ruskin the
"organic" view of society while rejecting the faith in authoritarian
institutions that usually goes with it; and the mysticism inherent
in
this view conflicted all along the line with the scientific perspectives
of socialism, forcing upon him a kind of unsystematic dualism.
Concerning the relation of politics to literature, then, he tended to
conceive the first as a function of a material world, the second as
