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PARTISAN REVIEW
came to concentrate so exclusively on conditions in a single coun·
try. He appears to have felt that in Europe the evils of capitalism
had been somewhat mitigated by the social-democratic movement,
a movement whose success he was inclined to atQ:ibute to the efforts
of literary critics. The United States, on the other hand, was a full.
blown capitalist nation which possessed only the weak beginnings
of a critical culture; and we must develop such a culture if we were
ever to experience a genuine social transformation. It was on some
such reasoning as this that Brooks tended to justify his exclusive
concerti with the United States, his tendency to idealize Europe, his
habit of ascribing to literary culture the decisive role in reformist
politics.
Proceeding always by the rule of opposites, he thought of the
United States as the antithesis of Europe in respect to the quality,
the unity and the social use-value of its culture. French culture, he
pretended, had at the touch of Montaigne fallen together like a
single organism; but America had lacked a master-spirit, and
here there had always existed, between literature and experience,
theory and practice, a profound cleavage which had affected for
the worse both our intellectual and our daily life, condemning the
first to impotent idealism and the second to stark materialism.
From the beginning the Highbrow and Lowbrow had divided the
country's literature between them; an effective middle tradition had
failed to make its appearance; and in default of the spiritual
checks which such a tradition might have exercised, Big Business
had got firmly into the saddle and the Acquisitive Life had pre–
vailed over the Creative Life. And with the optimism of a latter·
day Whitman-the optimism of a generation pioneering in social
esthetics (they used indeed to declare that social reform constituted
the new American "frontier") as their fathers had pioneered
in
industry-Brooks foresaw a culture which should replace the
obsolete hegemony of New England and represent the country
in
all its racial, class and sectional complexity.
4.
It is true that on the programmatic side Brooks' early writings
were infected with the extravagance that is commonly generated
by the "organic" conception of society. French critics, we have rea·
