MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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ous poetic flow of the sentence itself, appraIsing an entire culture in a
single interrogative nod; the emphasis on spiritual history rather than
material life since he, far from rejecting the past, insists on its quickening
influence - the "usable past" that he would spend his life trying to re–
cover.
America's Comillg-ofAge
is best known for its attack on the oppo–
sition between highbrow and lowbrow in America, but where these
terms have come down to us as aspects of an entertainment culture, a
putative hierarchy within the arts, for Brooks they stood for a grievous
split in the American mind, in the culture as a whole. Though Brooks
lends one the name of Jonathan Edwards (and calls it Puritan) and gives
the other the name of Benjamin Franklin (and calls it practical), his real
subject is the business civilization of post-Civil War America, with its di–
vision between a brash entrepreneurial culture resourcefully bent on ac–
quisition and a rarefied intellectual culture devolved from puritanism and
transcendentalism to a thin-blooded gentility.
Brooks took his main argument and even some of his examples from
George Santayana's seminal 1911 lecture, "The Genteel Tradition in
American Philosophy." (Other notable sources include Carlyle's exhorta–
tions
to
Emerson to be less abstract and more worldly; Henry James's
1879 study of Hawthorne, with its stress on the thinness of American life;
and Matthew Arnold's contrast between the practical, activist spirit he
calls Hebraism and the more reflective, aesthetic mode he labels Hel–
lenism.) In his lecture Santayana found America "a country with two
mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the
other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the
younger generations ." He suggested that "one half of the American
mind, that not intensely occupied in practical affairs ... has floated gen–
tly in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and so–
cial organization, the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of
Niagara Rapids." While the American mind looked back toward Europe
and to the secular remnants of its own Calvinist past, American energy
was hurtling forward into the modern world.
As Brooks develops this argument, he comes close to the spirit of
Max Weber's and R. H. Tawney's work on the Protestant ethic and the
spirit of capitalism. (Weber, of course, also uses Benjamin Franklin as his
prime exhibit.) Brooks writes that "the immense, vague cloud-canopy of
idealism which hung over the American people during the nineteenth
century was never permitted, in fact, to interfere with the practical con–
duct of life." But it's not enough for him to invoke the split between
culture and society, mind and practical life. To him, as
to
any nine–
teenth-century historicist, a great writer is not simply an individual but a
crystallization of his time and place. Brooks is concerned, for example,
with the relation between Emersonian individualism and America's eco-
