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PARTISAN REVIEW
ter of irresponsible satirists. And among the exiles there was an
atmosphere of "fashionable pedantry", reactionary metaphysics,
symbolist mystification-and Brooks had never cared much for
symbolism. The age of prophets and special missions had largely
passed. The present age demanded of its artists and critics above
all a concrete literary consciousness. And Brooks was in no posi·
tion either to sympathize with its aims or to fulfill its demands. The
papers he wrote for the
Freeman
in the early Twenties, and
in
a
less direct way the biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James,
were an index to his opinion of the times. As for the opinion that
came generally to be held of him: it was not long before people
began to complain that "for all his apparent enthusiasm for the
artist, he does not seem vitally interested in art when it appears."
He fails to criticize, they said, he merely exhorts. And "the devel·
opment of young artists is not achieved through exhortation." These
strictures were made by Paul Rosenfeld in the mid-Twenties. They
reveal the strongly experimental cast of the decade on which
Brooks, with his theoretical temper, had had the misfortune to fall.
6.
In
The Pilgrimage of Henry ]ames
he remarked that to the
author of
The Ambassadors
Europe had remained "a fairy-tale to
the end". This was scarcely just to James but it showed the high
value which Brooks himself, in 1925, still placed on the critical
spirit. But the years that followed were to witness his rapid retreat
from this position.
In 1920 he had published
The Ordeal of Mark Twain,
which
was followed some years later by the "Pilgrimage", and then after a
long interval by
The Life of Emerson.
These books, which, together
with the
Freeman
papers, constitute a transition between the earlier
and later work, show Brooks in the process of trying to thrash his
way out of the isolation in which he has landed. Someone has
compared the three biographies to the phases of the Hegelian
dialectic, Mark Twain figuring as the "thesis", Henry James as the
"antithesis" and Emerson as the "synthesis". But note that this is
a dialectic that opens out towards the past. Brooks is intent not
only upon making studies in literary frustration, nor only upon
furnishing the Twenties with didactic parables (there is reason to
