360
PARTISAN
REVIEW
ideas and ideologies over our lives, and to strengthen the tendency
to
confuse intellectual rightness with moral rightness, until being wrong
has
become for many of us practically indistinguishable from being wicked.
If
anything, it seems to me, the opposite is likely to be true: a moral
wickedness probably contaminates the intellect, makes even the most
luminous brilliance suspect. Yet the thaumaturgic influence of ideas
is
so great that the status-hungry often need only make the proper affinna–
tions in support of the winning ideological team, and they are forthwith
accepted as intelligent and virtuous to boot. It seems to me clear and
deplorable that ideas are more and more being used as hooks to snatch
at status; and it is demonstrable that the independent life-span of any
idea, before it gets annexed and warped by one or all of our current
ideologies, is on the wane. Ideas, properly employed, are instruments of
discrimination which prevent the division of the intellectual world into
comprehensive camps, completely hostile to one another-a division
which the ideologically minded really would like to foist upon the
world. The English, although they are scarcely less victimized by ideas
than we, nevertheless find it still possible to speak kindly of a man like
Arthur QuiIler-Couch whose fine qualities of spirit and character,
be–
cause they are worth preserving in a critic, can and should be con–
sidered apart from his intellectual weaknesses.
The same generosity ought to be extended to Brooks. There
is
much in him that is unbearably naive, just as there was in the Progres–
sive Party; but there is something good too, and it is good enough
to preserve Brooks's place in American letters as someone who had an
individual vision of America and its culture, which despite its falsifica–
tions and severe limits, permitted him to realize that it was not
the
place or the culture he was told it was, that it was larger, fuller, and
better. And if his bias prevents
him
from appreciating the best con–
temporary writers for their virtues, it does not deceive him into admiring
the worst for their vices. The portenders of doom, death, and decay,
the false prophets of apocalypse in our culture, for all their awareness
of how difficult and complex our situation is, still have something
to
learn from a secular and optimistic critic like Brooks. It is true that
American ideals have enjoyed a more ambiguous success than Brooks
realizes, but it is no less true that they have had a better career than
our propagandists for original sin admit. With all his blunders, crudities,
and imperfections on his head, Brooks remains essentially a nineteenth–
century liberal, a type, as George Orwell has said, "hated with equal
hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending
for our souls."
Steven Marcus
