404
PARTISAN REVIEW
impressionistic narration, is the only discussion of Howells in existence
that conveys not only the exact quality of his mind but dramatizes the
amenity, the scrupulousness, the genteel attractions of that mind in terms
superior to formal critical statement, and incomparably richer in sugges–
tion.
The technique of Brooks's New England books, as everybody knows,
is the technique of the novelist, just as only a novelist's intention would
allow Brooks to call
Indian Summer
a "sequel'' to the
Flowering
or to
admit, as he does in his preface, that he has emphasized Boston through·
out to furnish "a unity of place." Brooks has finally released the artist
manq'll.i
in him that led to his obsession over so many years with the
artist
manq'll.i,
and it is as a chronicler in the best tradition that he has
invoked with exciting craftsmanship the quality of Francis James Child,
Francis Parkman (Brooks the historian is always brilliant on other his–
torians), Henry James the Elder, Tom Hazard, and the eccentrics "down
east." Describing the drowsy moribund seaports north of Boston in the
dead air of the late seventies, Child tending his roses, editing Chaucer,
collecting his ballads, Andover as the last stronghold of orthodoxy, Sarah
Helen Whitman, William James and Agassiz in the Gulf Stream, Henry
James and Howells at Cambridge, Brooks is simply and superbly the his·
torian of manners; but there is a shrewdness in him, a recognition of the
tones and gradations that melt into character, that suggests not merely the
historian as artist, but the artist of the modern era, Zola with his ubiquitous
notebook, devouring Fact. And it is a genius for the remote, bony fact that
one recognizes in the passage where Brooks tells us that during the Civil
War Brook Farm was used as a training-ground for soldiers.
When Brooks is lame, as on Aldrich; or syrupy, as on Emily Dickin·
son; one feels defects in him that spring from a fundamental neutrality, a
lack of interest in the conventionality of the first and an incomplete com–
prehension of the obliqueness of the other. When he is cursory, as on
T. S. Eliot; or suspicious and uncomfortable, as on Henry Adams; or
sentimental, as on Robert Frost, one can see that he has not drawn, as a
writer of his type 'must always, a vital and stimulating relationship be–
tween them. But on little things-and, if one may so, little people-he
can be magnificent. On Henry James he says nothing that he did not say
in
the
Pilgrimage of Henry James,
hut he says it better and more directly,
and there is a weight of evidence to support his deprecation of James "the
old pretender" that cannot be dismissed. What is traditional in Brooks–
the excessive sympathy, the protective coloration, the Amiel-like attempt
to burrow under the skin-is here in full force, too; and as ever it
is
hypnotic, occasionally perplexing, soft, and
if
seen abstractly-but some·
how only abstractly !-dubious in the extreme. But what he displays at
great moments in this book as he has never displayed them before is a
grace, a quality of imagination, a patient quiet knowingness, that belong to
a time, so remote from our own, when querulousness was not acuteness,
rigidity not austerity, scholarship not empty display; when the salt of
criticism in a Hazlitt and a Sainte-Beuve-and Brooks is a younger,
weaker brother-was its humanity, its curiosity, and its wit.
