82
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Life of Emerson
Hawthorne has become "a reminder as it
were of some vast Cimmerian universe ••. a real Sphinx, with a
subterranean self buried fathoms deep in the desert sand". What
has happened is that Hawthorne has altered not so much in kind
as in scale; he has been blown up to enormous stature in order that
he may play the Prince of Darkness to Emerson's Son of Light
in
a kind of veiled cosmological allegory that runs all through the
"Life". And if Hawthorne, once a little less than a man, is capable
of becoming something only short of a god, we can imagine how it
will be with Emerson. As New England's chief intelligence Emer–
son had always figured to Brooks as the personification of a tradi–
tion shot through with false sublimities and seriously deficient
in
experience of life. And for Emerson, consequently, were reserved
the most brilliant pages in
America's Coming of Age.
"A strange
fine ventriloquism ... a continual falsetto ... abstract at the wrong
times andconcrete at the wrong times ... he could write page after
page about a poet or painter without one intelligibly apt utterance
... he was not interested in human life; he cared nothing for
·emotion, possessing so little himself . . . all the qualities of the
typical baccalaureate sermon." And so on. But compare this por–
trait with the estimate of Emerson's virtues implied (for, as in the
case of Hawthorne, it is only implied) in the "Life" and
The
Flowering of New England.
Here the author of
Representative
Men.
has become a veritable embodiment of the creative spirit, a
Yankee Balder. His prose evokes images of mountain streams, his
passage through the New England world is accompanied by the
springing up of greenery and flowers.
A few reservations are necessary, however, if we are to see
Brooks' two periods in a proper light. Needless to say he was
never a debunker, even in his most militant phase, and the severity
of his judgments on the New England school was plentifully sweet·
ened with qualification. Indeed he was the writer of his generation
who strove hardest to play the mediator between past and present.
And if he stressed the shortcomings of the Yankee tradition it was
because that tradition seemed at best a sectional phenomenon and
because it had come to block the growth of a larger intellectual
consciousness in America. Nor would we be justified in overlook–
ing the very considerable merits of Brooks' latest work. The "Life"
may seem a rather flimsy and Stracheyan performance, but surely
