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PARTISAN REVIEW
to is more important than discarding him out of hand; such an under–
standing may show that he is not exhaustively defined by his mistakes.
The first thing to remember is how long ago Brooks started writing;
his first book was published before the First World War. His earliest
efforts were reactions against his teachers and the leading academic
critics of the first decade of this century-Barret Wendell, Woodberry,
W. C. Brownell-who considered America a "literary dependency of
England," and who were not particularly interested in the American
past. Brooks plunged into American history and writing, and for forty
years has been reading and organizing them, attempting to discover
what kind of tradition existed, to restate this tradition, and to show
"how densely integrated the literary experience and tradition of Amer–
icans had been, how closely linked the writers were and even the re–
gions in a literary way, how independent of the writers of any other
country." The kind of intense nationalism he is committed to was pro–
voked by the rather shallow cosmopolitanism of American literary cul–
ture around the turn of the century; his rural bias is opposed to its
upper-class urbanity, his advocacy of the basic American abstractions
to its suspicion of them. And as he amassed his vast knowledge of
American literary and sub-literary activity in the nineteenth century,
his reality increasingly became that reality too, or what at any rate
he conceived that reality to be.
For Brooks, America is a large, uneven landscape, peopled by the
ideals and abstractions that Americans profess-"the open society," "the
grandeur of humanity," "honor and good faith," "the wish to trans–
form the world," "happiness, hope, and trust." Writers who question
or deviate from this simple faith come in for his censure, and thus he
cannot approve of Henry James or T. S. Eliot or modern literature in
general. Indeed one feels that Brooks doesn't believe that what has hap–
pened since 1914 is significant or even quite real; for him the entire
contemporary world has a kind of shadow existence, and he is uneasy
and incredulous in its presence. When he speaks of concentration camps
or the Second World War, or even of the radicalism of the '30s, he is
noticeably uncomfortable; they are so foreign to the reality of nine–
teenth-century America that he has great difficulty in confronting them.
This uneasiness about what the modern world is shows up clearly in
Brooks's style; when he deals with the present his prose becomes jerky
and unsure, and is almost entirely composed of quotations, most of
them abstract. In contrast with the feeling conveyed by his writing about
the past, where the style is firm and assured, the prose in this book
suggests that practically everything Brooks knows of the modern world
comes from his reading. Although he can discuss the problems that beset
