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PARTISAN REVIEW
middle tradition, a tradition that effectively combines theory and
action, a tradition just as fundamentally American as either flag–
waving or money-grabbing, one that is visibly growing but which has
already been grossly abused; and this is the tradition that begins
with Walt Whitman. The real significance of Whitman is that he,
for the first time, gave us the sense of something organic in American
life." Brooks goes on to describe Whitman as "a great vegetable of a
man, all of a piece in roots, flavor, substantiality and succulence, well
ripened in the common sunshine. In him the hitherto incompatible
extremes of the American temperament were fused. The refinement
of the Puritan tradition, summed up as an original type in Jonathan
Edwards, able to make nothing of a life so rude in its actuality,
turned for its outlet to a disembodied world, the shadow world of
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe, a world fastidiously intellectual in
which only two colors exist, white and black. Whitman was the
Antaeus of this tradition who touched earth with it and gave it hands
and feet. For having all the ideas of New England, being himself sat–
urated with Emersonianism, he came up from the other
sid~
with
everything New England did not possess: quantities of rude feeling
and a faculty of gathering humane experience almost as great as
that of the hero of the Odyssey." "Whitman," says Brooks, "precip–
itated the American character." He became for us the "focal center"
which "is the first requisite of a great people." Yet, Brooks adds,
Whitman tended to be beyond his depth "on the plane of ideas"
and his "social ideal" remains "essentially a collection of raw materi–
als molten and malleable, which take shape only in an emotional
form." Consequently it is the duty of the new intelligentsia, for which
Brooks calls, to articulate and explain Whitman's "middle tradition."
This is Brooks's main mistake.
Whitman is not a enormous middlebrow cabbage. He does
not dissolve and reconcile in his succulent emotional juices the
contradictions of his culture. When he makes sense as a poet or a
social critic he does so exactly by his ability to objectify and illustrate
those very contradictions. It is no longer possible to suppose that
Whitman is the "focal center" of our civilization. What Brooks had
in mind is shown by his linking, in this respect, Virgil, Mazzini, and
Bjornson with Whitman. He had in mind, that is, small relatively
homogeneous countries and the cultural situation that arises in such
