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troIs." But he believes something else with equal fervor. Having defined
the mass and the aristocrat as Ortega does, he says, "In this very ex–
ceptional, very American context, there is only one cure for the quan–
titative, antiqualitative vulgarism that endangers all democracy. The
cure is not to retreat into un-American class lines in order to make
some
men aristocrats. The cure is to subordinate economics to cultural
values and to subordinate external coercion to internal self-discipline, in
order to make all men aristocrats." This is the pure milk of the doctrine
of progress and the perfectibility of man.
If
Mr. Viereck believes that
all men anywhere could "subordinate external coercion to internal self–
discipline," then he should, by his own account, become one of "the
left-liberals and democratic socialists" whom he spends so much time
denouncing. Of course, liberals don't believe that man is naturally good
and, if removed from the crippling restraints of tradition and authority,
would become as the angels. This early Rousseauistic faith is what one
finds in the Kropotkin anarchists and in Ashley Montagu. And there,
with half of his mind, Mr. Viereck belongs.
Ralph Gilbert Ross
THE LIBERALISM OF VAN WYCK BROOKS
THE WRITER IN AMERIQA.. By Yen Wyck Brooks. Dutton. $3.00.
The Writer in America
is Van Wyck Brooks's apologia, his
literary credo, as well as a general introduction and guide to his criti–
cism. It was originally planned "to explain my reasons for writing
Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915.
But undertaking this, I soon found that my theme required the state–
ment of a certain philosophy of both life and letters." The intention of
Makers and Finders
was to connect "the literary present with the past,
reviewing the special kind of memory that fertilizes the living mind,"
so that "living writers ... could never quite feel as they had felt before,
that they were working alone and working in the dark." In order,
then, to "re-create the atmosphere in which the greater writers arose
and flourished," Brooks tried to do nothing less than rewrite the history
of American culture, exhuming on the way minor figures who could
not
be
revived, always seeking for the main lines in the American past.
That he has failed in this gigantic enterprise is plain enough, so plain
that continual insistence upon the
fact
of the failure is almost brutal.
Nevertheless, it is also true that his work is a considerable personal
achievement of a kind too easily denigrated today. To understand the
reasons for Brooks's failure by analyzing the kind of errors he falls prey
