VAN WYCK BROOKS
81
think that the "Ordeal", with its stress upon Mark Twain's imma–
ture and unreasoned pessimism, was aimed at the Menckenites, as
the "Pilgrimage", elaborating on the expatriate sensibility, is
directed at Eliot's generation), but he is also intent upon discover–
ing the ideal American writer. And he finds him at last in the man
of old Concord, the "barbaric sage" as W. C. Brownell had called
him.
And from the rediscovery of Emerson there follows a trans–
figuration of Emerson's entire society. Brooks has found the key
to American literature; he begins to write a cultural history in
several volumes, the first of which turns out to be a chronicle,
charming as literature, largely fabulous as history, of the creative
life in New England. The present has failed us, it is evil; doesn't
the past, then, by the law of contraries become good? The modern
world has proven to be sadly incoherent; let us seek the organic
virtues in the little pre-metropolitan half-agrarian universe of
Concord and Boston. It was a Springtime culture and Spring is
always virtuous. And if anyone feels disposed to remind us of
"world values", let us reply that "we are entitled to our own little
domestic rights and wrongs, criticism being out of place by the
fireside".
Prefigured in the closing chapters of the "Pilgrimage" (it was
Brooks much more than James who longed to take passage for
America), his nostalgia begins to affect his style and the very struc–
ture of his work. The pointed, argumentative and analytical man–
ner gives way to a prose of anecdote and local color, a blur of
sensuous matter, a dreamlike pastiche of remembered quotations.
And one feels that Brooks has affixed to his camera a soft-focus
filter.
A comparison of the early and later work reveals, then, an
astonishing reversal of opinion in respect to the achievement of
New England. "An age of rude, vague, boisterous, dyspeptic
causes" was the way he had formerly characterized that time. Its
puritanism he had described as "a noble chivalry to which provin–
ciality was almost a condition". Its Ripleys and Danas and Alcotts
had seemed "a queer miasmatical group of lunar phenomena".
Longfellow had been "an expurgated German student", whom it
was silly to approach critically. And Hawthorne for all his charm
)lad
felt life "rather as a phantom than as a man".* But already in
'1\ete quotations are mostly taken from
AmerictJ'& Cominr of
Are (19i5) .
