PARTISAN REVIEW
Foster, whom all the writers might have known, was picked up dying in the
slums where he had been living. While Henry Clapp and Ada Clare held their
Bohemian court at Pfaff's, Foster had slept in Bowery lodging-houses....
And indeed it does not much matter who is who. In the compost–
democracy of the great American family, discrimination is not in place.
The world holds Uncle Walt and Uncle Herman in special esteem and
so they are talked about at greater length, yet within the judgment of
the family it is not perfectly established that they are really more valuable
than Cousin Bret-of the California branch, but originally he came
from New York-or any of the many score of the connection. Uncle
Walt had a very warm family feeling, much to his credit; as for Herman,
was it quite kind of him to keep so much to himself in his later years and
to take so gloomy a view of things?
It is impossible to take seriously Mr. Brooks's effort to show how
very real and nice and established the family has always been, how
many people of charm and sensibility it has numbered. Yet it would not
be fair to dismiss his enterprise as being wholly without point. For Mr.
Brooks responds to a real fact. To most Americans, even literate and
literary Americans, the American past is very little inhabited. Nothing
in the world is sadder than the statue of an American hero, standing
naked of memory or interest. The greatest of our literary figures have
the greatness of isolation or distance rather than of community and
intimacy: we make our voyages to them and are much refreshed,
but they are likely to remain the object of our intelligent tourist's curi–
osity. When it comes to the easily usable social tradition of literature,
it sometimes seems that a foreigner, Tocqueville, speaks more imme–
diately than any American across the American decades. And quite apart
from literature and greatness, the ordinary day-to-day human past seems
to exist in the American mind as attenuated, alien, even hostile in its
discontinuousness with the present.
If
this is true, it is not new-Henry Adams remarked the Civil
War generals, the men who had saved the Union, walking empty and
bewildered, their deed having no significance to the people among
whom they walked and scarcely to themselves. And if it is true, it is
not a sentimentality to regret it, for a nation without a living sense of
its past is as deficient as a person in the same deprived case. But Mr.
Brooks's enterprise is to be harshly judged precisely because it sets out
to fill so genuine a lack but fills it so badly, for with a high devotion
and a really grandiose ideal of scholarship it supplies America with a
literary past of the blandest and most genteel ·sort, calculated to give
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