78
PARTISAN REVIEW
and determinism, so that while it seemed to him at times that the
single writer might change the world unaided, at other times it
appeared that we were very much at history's mercy. Furthermore,
psychology came to dominate his thought to the extent that he ended
by giving the impression that he wanted to fasten upon American
writers a cultural inferiority complex; and it was probably this
impression rather than simply the severity of his critiques per se
that helped to bring him into partial eclipse in later years. And he
was finally to pay in the unprofitable coin of centrism and compro·
mise the price of his synthetic ambitions. His work would presently
appear to belong neither to the sphere of literary criticism nor to
the sphere of realistic social analysis. When he had finished trying
to reconcile politics and literature, mysticism and science, he was
left with an ideology as diffuse as that of an Emerson or a Whit·
man; and he seemed, like them, to belong to some more primitive
stage of American society, the intellectual disorder of whose
prophets signified a lack of urgent pressures in the age itself. Even
Gide and Mann, accomplished dialecticians and great writers, have
not really achieved universality in our time: they have merely
undergone a series of significant conversions. And Brooks, endeav·
oring to embrace the Whole, ended by losing touch with its parts;
his sensibility acquired a certain abstractness; and in time he was
to seem almost the type of that Liberal critic whom T. S. Eliot from
one angle, and Mencken from another, were to assail with so much
effectiveness.
5.
The fate of Brooks' ideas was to receive a kind of summing·
up, concentrated and dramatic, in the brief career of the
Seven
Arts
review. Appearing in the Fall of 1916,
The Seven Arts
had
Brooks as its chief spokesman, his thell)e being the necessity of a
national literature for an America made acutely conscious of its
individuality by the war in Europe. But a year later, America hav–
ing entered the war,
The Seven Arts
showed a growing distaste for
the struggle and was obliged to cease publication. Meanwhile, how·
ever, Randolph Bourne had all but supplanted Brooks as spokes·
man, and Bourne's theme was, more and more, the social revolu–
tion. What had happened to push
The Seven Arts,
in a single year,
from literary nationalism to literary revolutionism? Had we come
