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Van Wyck Brooks in Transition?

Emerson and Others by Van Wyck Brooks. E. P. Dutton and Company

The Dial, January 1928, 56–59

Mr. Brooks’s recent volume comprises eight essays, six monographs on Emerson, John Butler Yeats, Randolph Bourne, Bierce, Melville, and Upton Sinclair, and two general essays on the “soil” of art. All of them bear more or less directly on a matter which has always been a primary concern with this author: the causal relationship between artist and environment. The issue, when one attempts to schematize Mr. Brooks’s exhortations and conclusions, appears to have been variously met. At times he would seem to be asking that artists be accorded greater categorical respect than they now receive; but again, as in his Amor Fati, he suggests that too much opportunity to improve one’s standard of living may be disastrous to art, that the artist should in his devotion to art become somewhat of a pariah, “that the ancient tag about ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot’ really states the first principle of the conservation of energy in the literary life.” Or again, he seems on some occasions to be employing the psychoanalytic technique to account for failure and at others to disclose failure where we had assumed success.

On the whole, I doubt whether Mr. Brooks ever found for his key problem any consistent solution, though in the course of his preoccupation with it he has put forth many very suggestive alternatives. The core of this attitude seems to have centered in the concept of the artist’s “muse.” If the inspirational aspect of art is stressed in an irreligious era—as it was in the “Seven Arts tradition”—the afflatus which was once infused into the artist from on high must now be derived from a secular source, in this case the environment. Whereupon, a good line redounds to the credit of the nation and a bad line is the fault of one’s neighbors—and since the lines are preponderantly bad, the critic has much cause to accuse his countrymen. But strangely enough, in stressing the intimate connection between the artist and the race, the tendency to brand the race as unworthy coexists with the vox populi vox dei attitude, so that the artist seems at times to be judged a victim through expressing his environment, and at others through failing to do so. The whole antinomy being investigated along psychoanalytic lines.

In the “Emerson: Six Episodes” which opens the present work, and which was obviously the last written of all the essays published here, Mr. Brooks has advanced into a less doctrinaire territory. Indeed, the author has, to my knowledge, here given us the first “stream-of-consciousness” biography. By skilfully culling and arranging the entries in Emerson’s journals, he has produced a subjective record corresponding to those workings of the busy tentative brain which we find exemplified in such writers as Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, where the intelligence is brought to bear upon the processes of perception rather than upon those of ratiocination. Here we see not the transcendentalist (an aspect of Emerson which concerns us little at the present time) but the experimental mind, reasoning on a basis of bodily sensation, and respectful of its excursions. Emerson certainly does not gain in dignity by such treatment, but he is made familiar, and thus contemporary. To the “sensitive plant,” which is at once the symbol and reduction to absurdity of nineteenth-century romanticism, there is here added a prompt matching of sensation with ideation. With each veering of mood, another code struggles to develop. It is a mode of thinking implicit in the change from the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum to the post-Kantian volo, ergo sum as a proof of existence.

In the “Notes on Herman Melville,” though they deal with a case which Mr. Brooks defines as “the suffocation of a mighty genius in a social vacuum,” we frequently and gratifyingly lose track of this theme through the obtrusion of another: the spirited admiration which the author feels for Moby Dick. In this essay Mr. Brooks is at his best in depicting the “trials” of the artist. And we feel for once, though perhaps the author may not have expressly wished it, that the artist’s work can claim a certain priority over his environmental difficulties, that his art is the reflection of the temper by which his practical problems will be determined and met. One feels, that is, not that Moby Dick was written by Melville’s contemporaries, but that the man who could (a) write Moby Dick would (b) conduct his life as he did. Such an attitude would be “non-psychoanalytic.” At least, it would cancel psychoanalytic causality by stressing the consistency between character, art, and practical activities, so that both art and “life” are seen as parallel modes (each within its own terms) of the same mentality. In any case, Moby Dick is certainly not explained here as a “social result,” but seems rather to be admired as the adequate and uncompromising expression of Melville’s faculties.

In a brief prefatory note, Mr. Brooks says of The Literary Life in America that it contains “many statements that are certainly less true now than they were when they were written.” But on the whole, the contention of the chapter (that American society is more bent upon the development of practical utility than of aesthetic receptivity) seems to be as “true” now as it ever was. At least, we fervently hope so.

The only reason I could imagine for failing to choose utility at the expense of aesthetic receptivity would be the belief that they need not be opposed to each other. When even our most responsible and capable artists chose to consider aesthetic refinement in terms of sickliness, one could hardly resent the rather Spartan distrust of art which the bourgeois adopted as a consequence. The aesthetic attitude, it seems to me, is defensible only if it can be advocated as a more complex form of utility. (Religion, for instance, insofar as it assists in the forming of a set of moral imperatives, is useful. “Religiosity,” an attitude without theological dogma, is “aesthetic.” It would be as useful a social force as religion, but religion in the past has proved simpler and more practical as a method of procuring the required minimum of order. But the value of the practical religion is limited, and the whole conditioning is so unpliant that, when established on this plane, it can like patriotism be easily converted to anti-social ends. The aesthetic “religiosity” at such times proves more practical, because more complex and thus more pliant. The “aesthetic” might thus be defined as an attempt—in terms of play, as in the “preparations” of childhood—to extend the biological adequacy of both the individual and the group.)

We suspect that the almost mechanical antinomy between “business” and “art,” so pronounced a few years ago, was at bottom an economic matter, involving a political opposition which has been allowed temporarily to languish under the comparative quiescence of labor disturbances and jingoism. The “intellectual,” perhaps as a Tolstoyan importation, had assumed a fraternity with the American “worker and peasant” which existed only insofar as they might have certain enmities in common. Once this negative bond had weakened, the many divergencies between the two groups were quick to assert themselves. Meanwhile the bourgeois, being rich, and generally virtuous, finds it impossible to occupy his time between the hours of five and twelve with anything but art, so that “expression” becomes a major industry. (Which it always was; but now, in the general prosperity, there are crumbs even for the most “select” artists—the whole scale being raised—and the élite are content to let Harold Bell Wright banquet if only the same conditions permit them to lunch. And thus, in Europe, we find art distrusted on the grounds that art and bourgeoisie are synonymous!) Further, the class which voiced such strong objections against the bourgeoisie were pledged by the very framing of these objections to avoid all standardized motions, and would thus have to deny themselves the right of repeating over a protracted period any slogan, even if it embodied their profoundest convictions, so that the attitude of “protest” could subside without necessarily indicating that the situation had altered correspondingly. And “less true” may only mean “less in demand.”

Nor does the other aspect of his “indictment” (“the blighted career, the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule”) seem any less “true.” Did not the editors of this very magazine, but a few months back, editorially look in vain not for the important writers which Mr. Brooks had hoped for, but merely for “interesting” writers? Yet somehow the morale behind it all has changed—and hope and hopelessness as to the future seem to have vanished together. Artists are now well documented in their predicaments which, like prolonged plagues, though they may continue to destroy, finally cease to dismay. Whereas an editor, through a sense of justice, may deplore the circumambient mediocrity, a writer, through a sense of embarrassment, must refrain from doing so. In such plaints, for him, there is no longer catharsis. The problem has been reduced to doggedly simple terms: to write as best he may, not as the result of an ancestral hunger after izzat, nor as the expression of any driving need for vicarious existences, but because, under a continued failure to be coherent, he becomes uneasy.