Voice of a Critic

THREE ESSAYS ON AMERICA--Van Wyck Brooks--Dutton ($3).

Criticism has forms that run the gamut from a brickbat to a disapproving silence, but criticism as a profession is not crowded with leaders. Thoughtful U. S. citizens, dazed by the soundless flicker of statistics, deafened by the screams of professional iconoclasts, lulled by the thin whisper of unco-highbrows, should be grateful for the reassuringly human voice of Critic Van Wyck Brooks. He is known by the minority that reads him as a sound, tonic, unacademic observer whose interest in the tall trees of literary criticism has not blinded him to the more important U. S. forest. These Three Essays on America, originally published separately (1915, 1918, 1921), are as pertinent now as when they were first written.

Long consideration of the U. S. scene has not made Critic Brooks an optimist. He thinks U. S. writers tend to lose their personality. ". . . The American writer, having struck out with his new note, becomes--how often!--progressively less and less himself. The blighted career, the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule." But he has cold comfort for the pseudo-stoics: "To be, to feel oneself, a 'victim' is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation." Critic Brooks thinks that U. S. traditions have long since burned themselves out, that U. S. modern life, as opposed to Europe's, is rootless. "Old American things are old as nothing else anywhere in the world is old, old without majesty, old without mellowness, old without pathos, just shabby and bloodless and worn out. . . . Something infinitely old and disillusioned peers out between the rays of George Ade's wit, and Mrs. Wharton's intellectuality positively freezes the fingers with which one turns her page. . . . Think of the arctic frigidity of Mr. Paul Elmer More's criticism!"

Though generalizations often miss the mark, most of Brooks's charge gets home on this target: "Our thinking class quickly reaches middle age, and, after a somewhat prolonged period during which it seems to be incapable of assimilating any fresh experiences, it begins to decay. The rest of our people meanwhile never even grow up. For if our old men of thought come to a standstill at middle age, our old men of action, as one sees them in offices, in the streets, in public positions, everywhere! are typically not old men at all but old boys. . . . In short, I think we are driven to the conclusion that our life is, on all its levels, in a state of arrested development, that it has lost, if indeed it has ever possessed, the principle of growth. . . .

"The religious energy of the race, instead of being distilled and quintessentialized into the finer inspirations of human conduct, has escaped in a vast vapour that is known under a hundred names. . . . Think of the cranks we have produced!--not the mere anonymous cranks one meets, six to a block, in every American village, but the eminent cranks, and even the preeminent cranks, men who might so immensely more have enriched our heritage if we had been able to assimilate their minds, nurturing and disciplining them out of their aberrant individualism. For every member of the vast army of American cranks has been the graveyard of some 'happy thought,' some thought, happier than his neighbors have had, which has turned sour in his brain because the only world he has known has had no use for it."

Brooks does not blame U. S. writers for being what they are. "Is it remarkable that they take refuge in the abstract, the nonhuman, the impersonal, in the 'bigness' of the phenomenal world, in the surface values of 'local colour,' and in the 'social conscience,' which enables them to do so much good by writing badly that they often come to think of artistic truth itself as an enemy of progress?" And the reason "our society . . . which does everything, by wholesale, is rapidly breeding a race of Hamlets . . ." is that in more than an economic sense, many a U. S. youth finds himself among the "men who are not being employed by civilization."

Looking at the future rouses Critic Brooks to what might be despair if it were not indignation. "How can one speak of progress in a people like our own that so sends up to heaven the stench of atrophied personality? How ean one speak of progress in a people whose main object is to climb, peg by peg, up a ladder which leads to the impersonal ideal of private wealth? How can the workingman have any reality or honesty of outlook when he regards his class merely as an accidental, temporary group of potential capitalists? And the university man ... the man who has within him a world of ineffectual dreams and impotent ideals--what has he to actuate him but a confused and moralized instinct that somehow he must make a lot of money?"

The Author. In the headless college of U. S. critics, Van Wyck Brooks ranks high. Jerseyman (born in Plainfield), Harvard man (1907), he did not let his career be diverted into academic cloisters. Instead he worked in publishing houses (Doubleday, Page; Century Co.), as an editor (of the late Freeman, the first American Caravan), and early & often as a critic of U. S. letters. In 1923 the late famed Dial awarded him its $2,000 prize for having created a new critical point of view in the U. S. Failing health has driven him into retirement at Westport, Conn., where he lives with his wife, two sons. Reticent, urbane, persuasive, he talks as he writes. Says he: "A style that is not entirely lucid seems to me an insult to one's readers." Few of his readers have had cause to feel insulted.

Other books: The Ordeal of Mark Twain, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, The Life of Emerson, Sketches in Criticism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.