VAN WYCK BROOKS
83
the "Flowering" has notable qualities considered as a literary exer–
cise
and a piece of scholarly investigation. The opening chapters,
dealing with the· birth of the artistic spirit in a young nation, and
the closing pages, describing Lowell and Holmes as characters of
the Yankee twilight, cause the hook to be enclosed in a frame of
excellent criticism. But in the absence of any such criticism in the
case of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the rest, the frame only
aerves to set off a certain sponginess in the picture itself. Here,
then, is a New England crowded with creative spirits but virtually
bare of masterpieces, for Brooks has given up almost entirely the
practice of correlating biography with literature. And here, above
all,
is a New England purged of conflict and contradiction, pre–
aented as an idyll of single-hearted effort; for Brooks has like–
wise
given up the habit of correlating literary enterprise with social
history. His perspective as a man of the twentieth century, his
nlues as a socialist and an historian, both have gone by the hoard
in
the interests of an impressionistic
immediacy;
and we are invited
to
survey the New England renaissance through the eyes of some
actual participant, some breathless Lyceum ticket-holder of the
period.
A<'cordingly the "Flowering" represents not so much, an ex–
plicit revision of Brooks' earlier judgments as a shift to a sphere
where critical judgment operates only by implication. The Yankee
eulture has been lifted from the plane of "world values", where it
mows as very small and incomplete, into an historical void where
it
becomes as great as you please. Indeed it is symptomatic of
Brooks'
present tendency that he nowhere tries to come to terms
with
his earlier work or to offer a reasonable explanation of the
apparent disjunction between his two periods. The most he has
done along these lines has been to remark, in the preface to a re–
ilsue
of three early essays, that the judgments of his first period
were
the indiscretions of a youth bent on following an iconoclastic
fashion. A fashion! So much then for the ardors, the sincerities,
the
hopes that went into
America's Coming of Age.
In dispensing
with
a
rational view of American history it seems that he has lost
the
desire to make sense of his own history.
And it is difficult to guess what course he will follow in the
forthcoming installments of his chronicle. The "Flowering" was
founded on a sharp distinction between past and present, and in the
