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But some pleasures are suspect. And other pleasures need not be
suspected since we know that they are wrong, at least in the sense that
they destroy the possibility of other and more wholesome pleasures. As
soon as one comes upon a reference to a book or episode of which one
has some real knowledge, pleasure ,is succeeded by irritation and the
unpleasant realization that a prose style of unusual aptness has had the
effect attributed to certain drugs, that of lulling to sleep the power to
discriminate and making every perception delightful. It is by no means
an accident that in
The Flowering of New England
some authors are
often praised because they are
unconscious,
a word used so vaguely that
it may have some psychoanalytic connotation, while it certainly is con–
fused with the words
intuitive
and
spontaneous.
It is not necessary to
overrate consciousness or the intellect in order to be distressed by the
praise of being unconscious. When a critic begins to praise authors for
such reasons, of which this is but one example, a true decadence has
occurred. The fact that the critic hurls the accusation of decadence at
many other authors does not alter or modify the literal fact: there is
in Brooks a yearning for a more primitive state of being and of letters–
a yearning characteristic of every decadent author.
In
The World of Washington Irving,
as in the previous volumes of
Brooks' literary history, the euphoria induced by the prose style, the use
of images of nature, the pleasant anecdotes and charming epigrams, is
from time to time arrested by the intrusion of reality. Poe suffered from
a profound neurosis, John Randolph was impotent, Irving suffered from
abysmal nervous depression: the mellifluous style cannot wholly prevent
Brooks' passing allusions to these difficulties from waking the reader to ·
a sense of reality. So, too, in coming upon a discussion of Jefferson or
Aaron Burr, the poor charmed half-ignorant reader may remember that
Burr was probably the consummate example of
a:
lack of scruples in the
history of America, and that one of his victims was Jefferson, who be–
came President only over the dead body of whatever was left to Burr's
pretensions to minimal honesty; as well as what was soon to be Hamil–
ton's dead body.
But it is pointless to invoke questions of fact, since an uninformed
reader, a man from China or from Mars, might very well read this new
book without knowing anything or finding out anything about the War
of 1812, the struggle which culminated in the Civil War, the conflict
between colonialism and nationalism, or, to return to individuals, the
degradation of Poe ending in a drunken death. To bring up such matters
is perhaps to commit the sin of muckrakers, a sin which resembles
Brooks' only in inaccuracy. And, in any case, it should be confessed that
such references are called forth by Brooks' recent attacks on Joyce and
Eliot, who seemed to him to be muckrakers and "sick Jesuits." But to
an admirer of Joyce and Eliot, Brooks' point of view is that of a Polly–
anna with a talent for style.
