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nomic individualism. For him, Emerson's thought reflected the spirit of
the pioneers. It went back to a period of genuine mobility in American
life : "It corresponded to a real freedom of movement and opportunity;
pioneers, inventors, men of business, engineers, seekers of adventure found
themselves expressed and justified in it."
Though Emerson himself eventually traveled West on the new
transcontinental railroad, to Brooks he presides over this new world like
a rarefied spirit, hovering above it but scarcely part of it. Here Brooks
follows Santayana, who had found "a certain starved and abstract qual–
ity" in Poe and Hawthorne as well as Emerson. ("Life offered them very
little digestible material," said Santayana, "nor were they naturally vora–
cious. They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were
starved.") Brooks too insists on the abstractness of Poe and Hawthorne,
which flies in the face of Hawthorne's abundant historical detail and
Poe's richly embroidered Gothic fantasies. Brooks may also have been
influenced by John Jay Chapman's brilliant account of the "anaemic in–
completeness of Emerson's character," with its astonishing peroration: "If
an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive,
on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera
than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the
Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the
fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin."
Brooks himself was a man whose inhibitions, grounded in his own
genteel upbringing, drove him to identify with Emerson as well as to
criticize him. (According to Brooks, a typical American grows up "in a
sort of orgy of lofty examples, moralized poems, national anthems, and
baccalaureate sermons; until he is charged with all manner of ideal puri–
ties, ideal honorabilities, ideal femininities.") Chapman, a severe, idiosyn–
cratic moralist as well as a cultural critic of great distinction, thought
Emerson dangerous reading for the impressionable young, for "his phi–
losophy, which finds no room for the emotions, is a faithful exponent of
his own and of the New England temperament, which distrusts and
dreads the emotions. Regarded as a sole guide to life for a young person
of strong conscience and undeveloped affections, his works might con–
ceivably be even harmful because of their unexampled power of purely
intellectual stimulation." Like Brooks's treatment, this attack is also a
rare tribute, and undoubtedly an autobiographical one.
Edmund Wilson, a literary heir to both Chapman and Brooks,
wrote a striking study of Chapman's personality in
The Triple Thinkers
as
well as several shrewdly balanced reviews of Brooks's later work. Brooks
himself was subject to recurring bouts of depression, which no doubt
impelled him towards the psychological approach of one of his best
books,
The Ordeal oj Mark Twa
i
1'1
(1921). But the position of the alien-
