NEW ENGLAND
403
for the timeless things, while the greatest geniuses spoke for their time.
Brooks evidently will not see Emerson in time or in his once human dimen·
sions: the shrill ventriloquist of
America's Coming of Age
has become the
Voice. Brooks is so ardently the analyst of sensibility that intellectual
differences are always less important to him than personal ones, or the
evocation-at which he is supremely good-of a common background of
culture and aspiration. Hence his mediocre and, in a sense, fallacious
portrait of Godkin, 115/J., for the assumption an uniformed reader must
make, on the basis of Brooks's desire to align Godkin and Wendell Phil·
lips as critics of capitalism who wished "to restore ideals of the old
republic," is that Godkin and Phillips were somehow alike. In fact, of
course, no two individuals in the age had greater differences, while it is
doubtful that the Tory Godkin comprehended the "ideals of the old Repub·
lic," which for Brooks are always so plain, sweet, and sure. Hence, too,
the occasional things Brooks omits. As an intellectual Socialist for thirty
years he might have pointed out in his chapter on "Aesthetic Boston" that
one of the conditions of Henry Lee Higginson's endowment of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra was that no member of it was ever to join a union.
There are wasps and weeds even in Indian Summer.
And Brooks is aware of them, despite the inference one occasionally
draws from a passage over-sweet, that he would like not to be. In the
Flowering
(which will some day seem less true) he was the acolyte before
the vernal glories of the Concord mind; in
Indian Summer
he is the
patient, loving, but fundamentally scrupulous historian of the decline of
the New England mind. The difference between the young Brooks who
taught an older generation to look squarely at the impact of post-bellum
capitalism on the nineteenth-century American writer and the Brooks of
today represents a gain in ripeness and subtlety, though it has cost him
the fine Arnoldian edge. For the success of
Indian Summer
lies in its
transcription of the whole life of a region and an epoch, which for New
England in those bleak but not always barren days signified the first
American realism, a tradition of eccentricity, exhaustive scholarship, and
revolt, a revolution in education, and the slow, reluctant, profoundly sig·
nificant diminution of hope. More than any historian of American litera·
ture, Brooks has seen, at the pitch of a Michelet and far better than
Brandes, that literature does not reflect the life of a particular milieu so
much as it is embedded in it-a point directly applicable to American
letters after the Civil War, as it could be to the Progressive era and the
1930's, and one Brooks is brilliantly, often movingly, able to prove, to
place, to affirm. He is, in fact, one of the very few historians of literature
who have taken Taine's positivist rhetoric of the place and the moment
so seriously, worked himself into it so deeply, that he has made it live.
It
is "cultural history, not criticism," yes; but criticism is always seeking
to be something other than itself, and it is criticism of the first order that
one finds in the greatest single achievement of
Indian Summer,
the rehabil·
itation of Howells. The long passage, 36/J., for example, dealing with
Howells's absorption in the conventional, summer-boarder, cheerful,
jeune
fille
life of the American middle class in the eighties, a passage of pure
