VANWYCK BROOKS
79
of age in
a
world already too far advanced
in
decay? Had the
United States, in attaining to the level of the great powers, likewise
fallen heir to a condition of crisis common to the entire capitalist
world? This was more or less what had happened, as we can see in
retrospect. Nationalism, having simply turned into a sordid
imperialism, could no longer inspire a literature. Nor could the
idea of the organic society survive the violent manifestations of a
period of general revolution.
The Seven Arts,
in its rapid transi–
tion, was a fair register of the fact that ideas could appear viable
at one moment, only to be swept the next into obsolescence.
The war had witnessed Ame.dca's maturing as a world
power: would we by the same token "catch up" with the elder
nations in a cultural sense? To Brooks, at least, it began very
shortly to appear that we would not. In America as elsewhere
literature's response to war and crisis was both violent and imme–
diate. And the centrifugal tendencies which it developed were the
reverse of what Brooks had preached and anticipated. Writers who,
like Bourne and Reed, shared his social idealism, were steered by
its logic towards socialist theory and politics. There remained the
literary majority which, in the main hostile to all politics, was split
between two groups. First there was the expatriate generation who,
in
addressing themselves to their aristocratic cult
o~
poetry and
form, pretty much ignored America. And second, there were the
"Titans" who were presently to found the
Mercury
and who stayed
in
this country, as Mencken boldly confessed, solely in order to
make merry at the spectacle of its foolishness. In the United States
itself the aftermath of the war witnessed the definitive triumph of
Bohemia over the universities and other centers of genteel culture.
Instead of merging with the Highbrow to produce a middle tradi–
tion, the Lowbrow staged a coup d'etat. Debunking replaced the
respectable profession of muckraking. The common man, whom
Brooks had respected as an element in his proposed national syn–
thesis, was now to be widely scorned as a simple moron. And
if
Brooks had taken issue with Dreiser on the grounds that his deter–
minism prevented his fiction from qualifying as healthy social
realism, he was now to be faced with a whole generation of Dreis–
ers. In America, in short, there was none of the philosophical
scepticism which Brooks had advocated but only the "fashionable
pessimism" (as he said) of parvenu plebeians, the virulent laugh-
