VAN WYCK BROOKS
77
son to believe, would be the first to disclaim any super-unity in
the culture supposedly begotten by Montaigne. As for America: its
intractable minorities and far-flurtg regions have offered to the
literary nationalist a problem so stubborn that it refuses to be
solved short of a social reconstruction more profound than any
envisaged by Brooks. But on the critical side his work, attracting
to
it all the severity of a mind divided between poles of scepticism
and faith, was of a trenchancy and cleverness unprecedented in
American writing. Our literature did actually suffer, as he main–
tained, from a split personality which expressed itself in various
idealistic chivalries on the one hand, and on the other in a plebeian
vigor unlighted by consciousness. And surely, considering the
provocation, Brooks was justified in preaching a bold scepticism.
"It is of no use," he told the patriots of his day, "to go off in a
corner with American literature .•. in a sulky, private sort of way,
taking it for granted that if we give up world values we are
entjtled to our own little domestic rights and wrongs, criticism
being out of place by the fireside." Not that Brooks was the only
cosmopolitan critic of American letters; but where the New
Humanists, for example, took as their standard of comparison the
achievements of some remote Periclean or Racinian age, Brooks
had the realism to
fix
upon the European literature of his time.
Moreover, in his account of the Genteel Tradition as "the cuhure
of an age of pioneering, the reflex of the spirit of material enter–
prise", as in a whole range of similar insights, he went far towards
situating the country's cultural problems in a concrete atmosphere
of
social and economic forces. In the long run, however, the value
of
his early work seems mainly to lie in the skill and courage with
which he isolated the data of intellectual maturity in America. In
his
hands the Highbrow-Lowbrow antithesis served rather as a
descriptive than as an analytical tool. And what he really produced
was
a kind of symptomology sprinkled with clues and half-clues,
with partial explanations, with portents adduced as causes and
causes in the guise of portents. The materialist in him was always
coming into conflict with the "organic" visionary, the social his–
torian with the psychologist. Accustomed to conceiving matter and
Bpirit in the shape of an antithesis, he never attained a stable view
of
cultural phenomena; and his lack of clarity on this point caused
his
criticism to veer back and forth between extremes of free will
