PARTISAN REVIEW
have been wrong for two reasons:
l.)
That Brooks did not understand
in
any way what it was that James was driving at 2.) That Brooks under;
stood, but was warping the facts to fit his theory of James.
Since Brooks' metamorphosis into an official critic functioning on
the behalf of an official literature, I have come to believe that both explana–
tions fit his case. These explanations overlap and interact. Brooks does
not deeply, wholly, intuitively understand what the artist is, or is trying to
do; and
Brook~,
because of this deficiency can readily switch on and off
the reasons of the artist to suit his arguments. Brooks is at bottom a
moralist, looking for literature to back him up. He is a
m~n
seeking a
religion desperately, who will catch at any straw to give him a sense of
security. He is, as well, a person who has no idea what the aesthetic
emotion is, or can be. For this last reason alone he can be forgiven a few
of his worst blunders. He is not always telling lies. He simply, utterly
and completely, does not understand.
This basic lack of understanding makes him the perfect propagandist,
his conscience does not check him in his career because it sees nothing to
check. This lack also accounts for the spotty character of his work: his
reliance on
pastiche;
his fondness (which he shares with Mrs. Humphrey
Ward) for Arnie!; his abortive enthusiasms for both psycho-analysis and
socialism. The early books, re-read in the light of modern insights, are
uncommonly uneven and, often, childish. Brooks has always wanted
"constructors" and "a focal center." He has always set up "the will"
against "mysticism."
"I know of no considerable artist whose work does not viv–
idly represent some trait of the race it sprang from."
"An
American artist can have no sane originality
deeper
than
that
of technique
(its. mine) which does not spring from
American life."
This is Brooks speaking, in 1908. He is saying the same things now. He
has found his center; and, finding it must, as the Philistine militant,
denigrate all which does not fit into his ultimately moral pattern. "Few
writers, I think, at present are
living up to these expectations.
What then,
is literature
doing for us
in these perplexing times?"-It might be Samuel
Smiles.
Perhaps it is dangerous and futile to compare the literary develop·
ment of one century with another. The 19th century opened with dark
psychic turmoil and romantic extravagance everywhere present in Euro·
pean literature. In France the
roman noir
held the field; and Hugo had
triumphed over Vigny. Beranger was the most popular French poet; and
there were bad nationalist political French painters to equal him. Out of
this welter came quite different things. Baudelaire and Flaubert were both
born in 1821. Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were both pub·
lished in 1857; and this was the year of Beranger's death. The Bourgeois
revolution, in spite of 1848, had triumphed, but so had the beginning of
mod~rn
consciousness, as expressed in the art of literature. Art, and ita
