Mr. Brooks's New England
Alfred Kazin
AT TWENTY-TWO VAN WYCK BROOKS
adopted with all the ardor of
his characteristically spiritual intelligence the conviction that if a writer
is not a citizen, if he does not belong or find happiness in his belonging,
he is nothing. "A man's work is more the product of his race than of his
art," he wrote in
The Wine of the Puritans,
"for a man may supremely
express his race without being an artist, while he cannot he a supreme
artist without expressing his ·race." Thirty-two years later, crowning that
career with
New England: Indian Summer,*
that conviction remains
Brooks's central, all-pervading idea, and represents the sum of his philo–
sophic resources, which for him have
~lways
been spiritual insights.
Brooks has never expressed that conviction so well as D. H. Lawrence
expressed it for him in
The Flowering of New England
("Men are free
when they are in a living homeland ... free when they are obeying some
deep, inward voice of religious belief . . . free when they belong to a
living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled,
perhaps unrealized purpose'') or explored it deeply; he misapplied it to
Henry James, let it carry him too far on Mark Twain, and worked it so
hard that he helped to inculcate that sentimental-pathetic view of the
Gilded Age which lies at the heart of so much of the sentimental-pathetic
criticism of the twenties, including his own.
Yet the significance of
New England: Indian Summer
is precisely that
it makes impossible henceforth any glib, lachrymose generalities on the
via
dolorosa
of the American writer in
th~
seventies, eighties, and nineties. It
constitutes, on a plane of extraordinary and always unceremonious schol–
arship, the first serious and detailed effort made, after Mumford's
T'M
Brown Decades,
to examine some important segment of American letters
between, say, Appomattox and the emergence of naturalism, in terms of
the actual complex of manners and culture, rather than in terms of some
convenient thesis. It is true that there is something disquieting in
Brooks's prevailing sweetness, the unceasing effort to charm, the vague
radiance of his prose, for they lead him into errors as mawkish and even
dangerous as his misleading portrait of John Quincy Adams in the
Flower–
ing
and the palpable effort of that hook to persuade that Concord was a
Brook Farm where no Hawthorne ever worked on a dung-hill; where,
perhaps, there was no dung-hill? There is an astounding passage on
p. 58, for example, where Brooks defends (or, rather, celebrates) Emer–
son's criticism of Goethe on the ground that Goethe was
lm
old peacock
an~
liked to wear too many medals anyway, while Emerson, speaking "by
the oldest book in the world," measured Goethe by "the wisdom of Egypt
and India." Emerson's honey-bee Egypt and India! Or another, p. 59,
where Brooks states that the secret of Emerson's power was that
he
spoke
*E. P. DuHc!l and Company. $3.75.
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