418
PARTISAN REVIEW
what VanWyck Brooks meant when, long before prostrating
him–
self at his shrine, he Wrote that Emerson was habitually abstract
where he should be concrete, and vice versa.) On a purely theor·
etical plane, in ways curiously inverted and idealistic, the cult
of
experience is patently prefigured in Emerson's doctrine of the
uniqueness and infinitude, as well as in Thoreau's equally steep
estimate, of the private man. American culture was then
unpr~
pared for anything more drastic than an affirmation of experiet1ce
in
theory alone, and even the theory was
mod~lated
in a semi·
clerical fashion so as not to set it in too open an opposition to
the
dogmatic faith that, despite the decay of its theology, still prevailed
in
the ethical sphere. No wonder, then, that Transcendentalism
declared itself most clearly and dramatically in the form of the
essay-a form in which one can preach without practicing.
Isolation was the price Whitman and James were compelled
to pay for their break with the tradition of inexperience. James
was protected somewhat by his social tone and expatriate interests,
but Whitman suffered the full penalty of his iconoclasm.
W. D.
Howells survived by assuming the role of mediator between the
old and the new. But it was not until the twentieth century that
the
urge to experience at last overwhelmed and decisively transformed
literary art.
3.
Personal liberation from social taboos and conventions was
the war-cry of the group of writers that came to the fore in the
sec–
ond decade of the century. They employed a variety of means
to
formulate and press home this program. Dreiser's tough-minded
though somewhat arid naturalism, Anderson's softer and spottier
method articulating the protest of shut-in people, Lewis's satires of
Main Street, Cabell's florid celebrations of pleasure, Edna Millay's
emotional expansiveness, Mencken's worldly wisdom and assaults
on the provincial pieties, the early VanWyck Brooks's high-minded
though bitter evocations of the inhibited past, his ideal of creative
self-fulfilment-all these were weapons brought to bear by the
party of rebellion in the struggle to gain free access to experience.
And the secret of energy in that struggle seems to have been the
longing for what was then called "sexual freedom"; for at the time
Americans seeking emancipation were engaged in a truly elemental
discovery of sex whose literary expression on some levels, as
fum.
