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ARTISAN REVIEW
academic, conversational rather than technical, historically oriented yet
strongly contemporary in its concerns, accessible to any intelligent reader.
If the prevailing criticism influenced by Eliot was interpretive and ana
lytic, these public critics, like their great Victorian predecessors, empha–
sized the social, moral, and historical. Their criticism was directed against
the materialism and philistinism of American culture in the Gilded Age,
the complacency and conformity of the genteel tradition.
Joel Spingarn (in his once-famous lecture, "The New Criticism") and
Randolph Bourne (in essays like "The History of a Literary Radical)
represented two versions of the young radical intellectual of 1910.
Though Spingarn attacked literary scholarship, he himself was a superb
scholar of Renaissance criticism. Though he appeared to renounce poli
tics and society for aesthetics, he was a founder and for three decades a
leading figure in the NAACP. Bourne, who seemed during World War
One to leave literature behind for political controversy, was the kind o
cultural radical who brought aesthetic concerns into politics itself
Pro
gressivism, notes Christopher Lasch, "was for the most part a purely po–
litical movement, whereas the new radicals were more interested in the
reform of education, culture, and sexual relations than they were in po–
litical issues in the strict sense." Bourne was the forerunner of the adver
sary intellectual alienated from the temper and values of American cul–
ture, determined to put it on a wholly new footing.
Neither Spingarn nor Bourne made their mark strictly as critics; nei–
ther pursued much extended commentary on contemporary writers. For
members of this generation, the line between literary criticism and social
or cultural criticism was very hard
to
draw. They saw writers and artists
as exemplary figures: allies or enemies in their struggle for cultural re–
newal, representing either the wave of the future or the dead hand of the
past.
The two men who eventually had much greater impact as socially–
oriented critics were Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks, Mencken as edi–
tor of
The Smart Set
from 1914 to 1923 and the more widely read
American Mercury
from 1924 to 1933, Brooks for a decade after the pub–
lication of
America's Coming-oj-Age
in 1915, perhaps the single most
influential diatribe against the culture of the Gilded Age. The following
year in one of a series of essays in
The Se
IJeI I
Arts,
Brooks sounded the
keynote of a generation and an entire era: "How does it happen that
we, whose minds are gradually opening to so many living influences of
the past, feel as it were the chill of the grave as we look back over
the
spiritual history of the last fifty years?"
Everything about this passage is typical of the early Brooks: the
doleful prophetic note sounded more in sorrow than in anger; the sinu-
