VANWYCK BROOKS
75
an enterprise connected with a world of the spirit. But Brooks did
not exploit the music of antinomies to the extent that it has been
exploited by a Thomas Mann, and in practice his dualism merely
meant that in his opinion intellectuals ought properly to keep clear
of politics. They had, Brooks assured them, a special mission,
which was to "articulate the whole life of the people" by supplying
the United States with new myths and new values; and to this he
advised them to apply themselves with the fervor of a consecrated
minority, a priesthood, as he said, or a hierarchy. In America as
elsewhere it was an age that made much of seers and cosmic voca·
tions. Writers were looking for prophets-particularly among
themselves. And every nation, every social group, considered itself
to
have a "special mission". And if, in respect to his essential
philosophy, Brooks was very similar to Ruskin and Arnold, he was
a Ruskin or an Arnold brought up to date: the
culture
which they
had advocated as social medecine, he endeavored to implement in
terms of an
organized intelligentsia.
For it was an age, too, of
heightened crisis and organized struggle in the field of social
relations.
It is true, as Marxists have maintained, that Brooks' idea of
specialization had the effect of isolating intellectuals from the
masses and of retarding the development among them of a mate·
rialist view of the politico-literary relationship. But in his pre–
occupation with the intelligentsia there was at the same time a
value which ought not to be overlooked. More than anyone else,
unless it was Randolph Bourne, he grasped the importance to
America of the emergence of such a body. He understood what it
could mean to the labor movement, and he knew, too, that the
absence of such a phenomenon had for half a century inflicted great
hardship on American artists, leaving them solitary and exposed
in
the arena of a hostile society. It was on the new intelligentsia,
then, that Brooks set his hopes for the country's future, to them that
he addressed his case histories in literary frustration, his essays in
diagnosis and prescription, in short the whole of that prodigious
anatomy of the creative life which took shape in his early writings.
And it is not without significance that when, eventually, he ceased
to enlighten, admonish and inspire the intellectuals, he lost at the
same time a good share of his intellectual vitality.
In view of his socialist professions it is curious that Brooks
