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the writer and the intellectual today, he really can't see why they should
be
problems, because he has no first-hand experience of them. More–
over, it is clear that Brooks doesn't like to read modem literature, and
takes little pleasure-and learns even less-from the important writers
since 1914. The novelists he approves of-Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis–
are those who differ least from what came before them. And the recent
figures he most admires-Albert Schweitzer, Thoreau-like in Mrica,
and Gandhi, saving sick silkworms-are the most old-fashioned he can
find. Even Lewis Mumford, his "prophet of our clay," is prized for his
discoveries of past American achievements, and because he exemplifies
the antique virtues, "the keeping of family journals," the "faith in human
potential which has marked all the major American leaders and
thinkers."
In
The Writer in America
Brooks appears at his least attractive.
The bulk of the book is a polemical attack on contemporary literature;
and one senses that Brooks is not happy at this job, that he does it out
of duty rather than desire. Unlike most of us who come to an interest
in the past by way of modem literature, Brooks arrives at modem liter–
ature through his involvement with the American cultural past. And
that T. S. Eliot and Henry James are "native" to us and help us un–
derstand America and its history is a proposition Brooks cannot accept,
since they have never taught
him
anything; in rushing to history for
guidance he has managed to side-step the twentieth century altogether.
It is still necessary to define more precisely what Brooks's reality
is,
and to suggest why we find it so antipathetic to our own. Brooks is a
liberal of the oldest American variety, and in a peculiar way, he is to
criticism what Lafollette's Progressive Party is to politics. Like the
Wisconsin Progressives, Brooks is nationalist and isolationist; he is
frightened by bigness and disquieted by complexity-by "corporate cri–
ticism"
and difficult poetry; he believes that all the old ideals will
work
if
only they are given a chance. For him modem culture is sick
because it has no faith in "Americanism," and it has reached out in
its
sickness to destroy the one thing that could cure it-the great ab–
stractions which gave life and meaning to the American past.
The essence of nineteenth-century American liberalism--of which
Brooks is the last representative-was its confidence in the efficacy of
the
Good
Heart. In reaction to the superficialities of this optimistic creed
with its emphasis on intention rather than deed, affirmation rather than
criticism, ideal rather than action, modem liberals have been led to
worship at the shrine of the Good Head, exaggerating the potency of
thinking just as their forebears exaggerated the potency of feeling. The
consequence of this overemphasis has been to increase the power of
