VANWYCK BROOKS
85
American standards, today ends by affirming them. The powerful
critic of the United States has turned into a zealous curator of its
antiquities. And in order finally to accomplish his great purpose of
reconciling the artist with American society he has had recourse to
an already distant past, and a past, moreover, which is largely the
projection of his own fancy. Thus in the end the United States has
become to VanWyck Brooks the fairy-tale it never was to Henry
James: for whatever may have been the attitude of James to
Europe, it is certain that he had no illusions about middle class
America.
In his own career, as formerly in his writings, Brooks has
Jllustrated the difficulty of maintaining a strict intellectual position
in
the welter of American life. And his development has repro–
duced the circular pattern of the entire modern movement in
American letters. Yet his is not strictly speaking a case of literary
frustration nor can it be explained in purely national terms. It is a
case rather of the liberal writer who, in order to avoid meeting on
their own grounds the virulent problems of the epoch, has felt it
necessary to revert, as he used to say of others, "to ancestral atti–
tudes", to permit the spiritual New Englander in him to absorb
the modern critic, the visionary to consume the sceptic.
