Critic's Garland

THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND-- Van Wyck Brooks--Button ($4).

In the 27 years since Van Wyck Brooks published his first book (The Wine of the Puritans) he has risen to a commanding height as a U. S. critic. Beginning in that work to examine "our inherited cultural resources," he has occupied himself ever since with his penetrating analyses of the dilemmas of creative genius in U. S. society, establishing a critical landmark when he wrote America's Coming of Age in 1915 and producing a native classic with The Ordeal of Mark Twain five years later. Last week Van Wyck Brooks offered the first volume of a literary history of the U. S. that surpassed all his previous books and that, as the first unified modern appraisal of the giants of native culture, seemed bound to deepen the influence he has exerted ever since he began to write.

The Flowering of New England is an inclusive, authoritative, inspiring book, at once a lucid narrative of ideas, a brilliant account of the lives of some 50 writers and painters, a poetic evocation of post- Revolutionary Boston, an almost reverential tribute to the genius of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau. It begins in 1815, when U. S. writers were largely dominated by European standards of taste and when there was virtually no U. S. art; it ends in 1865 when the Civil War had already put an end to the quiet way of life that gave rise to New England culture. In these 50 years the greatest literature that the U. S. can claim was produced. The purpose of Critic Brooks's history is not only to re-examine the productions themselves, but to visualize the social conditions that nourished them, to study the men who created them, to summon up what was good in that society for its measure of guidance for the present. Van Wyck Brooks sees art as a normal function of men and communities. If men of genius are frustrated in their struggles to release their creative faculties, their tragedies are reproduced in the lives of anonymous thousands for whom no records are kept, and, in the words of one of his followers, "the condition of the arts ... is intimately related to the lives and to the welfare and happiness of the whole people."

Dramatizing this point of view in The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks has unobtrusively created a new type of critical literature that meets Thoreau's exacting standard of excellence. Thoreau said that at first reading a book should be impressive for its common sense; at the second, for its truth; at the third, for its beauty. Into a crowded and shifting background, made up of hundreds of minor, typical, New England figures, Mr. Brooks has woven the lives of his heroes, picturing them in the cities, the country, the seaport towns, studying the books they read, the letters they wrote, their changing opinions as they and the times changed. He has paraphrased their own writings in building up his pictures of them, so that the book is not "original" in the usual sense of the term so much as it is a beautifully-conceived mosaic for which the art of an entire period has contributed the material. That it is written in as graceful prose as any U. S. writer can claim is a tribute to Mr. Brooks's taste. That he can quote the source, in some novel, diary, letter or essay, "for every phrase" in its 537 pages, is testimony of his creative scholarship.

The good life of old New England that was expressed in a good literature was brisk, independent, self-confident, self-sacrificing. After the War of 1812 New Englanders were feeling the first consciousness of victory and stability, and more & more citizens were becoming aware of the great gap between the European literature they absorbed and the peaceful, industrious, spirited lives they led. Men of affairs were also men of letters, but were like ordinary citizens in their manner of life, living simply, getting up early, working hard. One such was John Quincy Adams who felt that he could not have endured existence had it not been for Homer. Venerated by the country at large, hated by his own party, he fought the aristocrats of Boston when their selfish claims ran counter to the national welfare, was one of the greatest of living statesmen who was content to be known as one of the most modest poets the country had produced. An actor's letter asking his advice on Othello gave him more pleasure than all his political honors. And Harvard was educating such youngsters as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Oliver Holmes, John Motley, Francis Parkman, Richard Henry Dana.

Meanwhile, in Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a grave, introspective, mysterious, sea captain's son, was growing up in a town that had passed its prime and was already peopled with eccentric oldsters, leftovers of Puritan days. He was also growing up in an eccentric household: his mother went to her room when she heard of her husband's death, and stayed there for 40 years; his sister left the house only at nightfall; the family meals were left outside the door of each member's room. There Hawthorne was writing stories that grew "as mushrooms grow in a meadow, where the roots of some old tree are buried under the earth." When they won him the attention of the wealthy Peabody family, he was so unused to human companionship that he entered their drawing room "pale and stricken," picked up a knickknack from the table to soothe his agitation but found that his hand was trembling so, he almost dropped it.

Emerson, after drifting in & out of misfortune, losing his first wife and two of his brothers, drifting into & out of tuberculosis, into & out of the ministry, was finding contentment in Concord, where he conversed with simple neighbors, read Oriental literature, wrote his poems of "polar splendor, as of an aurora borealis," found honor in scamps, justice in thieves, energy in beggars, elegance in peasants, even benevolence in misers and grandeur in porters and sweeps. In Newport, traditional home of Tories, toasts were still drunk to the King and culture was crippled by an affected admiration for English writing. In Connecticut the dry, energetic, cranky old genius, Noah Webster, was working out his dictionary that would establish a national language as a bond of national unity. New England life might be hard and strenuous, but when intellectuals looked toward Europe they saw a continent that was exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars. At the sight of such overseas confusion, despair and "moral degradation," they grew strong with confidence in their own simpler environment and in their moral serenity and self-reliance.

Intelligent New Engenders were esteemed in Europe as citizens of a young republic who represented a kind of life Europe had never known. When wellborn, serious, intelligent George Ticknor traveled there in 1815 he met Byron, who was pleased with him; Goethe, who was also pleased with him. Ticknor was typical of the travelers who found intellectual stimulation abroad, brought back food for speculation that quickened the minds of a generation, yet did not lose his sense of allegiance and duty to his own country as did the later expatriates. At the end he is seen as a dry, superior old aristocrat who still bemoaned the lack of a U. S. literature when Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau were at the peaks of performance.

Towering over New England's minor characters are Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Longfellow Mr. Brooks finds a charming, almost saintly spirit, a great figure, if not always a great poet. Never roused to malice even after his fame had become worldwide, he befriended cranks and freaks, longed wearily for a snowstorm that would keep celebrity-hunters away from his door. "A fathomless calm of innocent goodness brooded in the air that spread with Longfellow's poems over the world." Ten thousand copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish were sold in London in a single day, and 24 English publishers brought out Longfellow's work in competition. Simple, sweet, one of the most learned men of his time. Longfellow welcomed callers who ranged from English tourists who intruded "because there were no American ruins to visit" to such strangers as Bakunin. the Russian an archist who, invited to lunch, invited himself to dinner as well.

In Lowell's writing and life Mr. Brooks finds the beginnings of the self-conscious cleverness that was foreign to the old New England tradition and that was soon to reach its highest expression in the work of Henry James. He sees Lowell as lacking the calm integrity of his great predecessors as well as their depth of feeling, makes a better case against him. and indirectly against Henry James, than he made in The Pilgrimage of Henry James.

Holmes's importance was of a different order. A wise, worldly, witty old doctor ie preached the art of living, attacking in his satires and essays the New England vices of glumness, morbid introspection, self-righteousness, false modesty, urging his readers to unlock their hearts to trust their wits, to let their faculties flower, to banish the residue of ugly superstition that still weighed upon New England society. He always kept a little gold in his house, so that by running his fingers through it he would know how a miser feels. He carried a tape measure with him to measure trees, always trying to find the biggest in New England. He said that some of those trees that looked as self-important as politicians began to shrink down and look small when they saw him coming with his tape measure. He loved horse racing and argued with Emerson about the fastest time on U. S. tracks. A good, long-winded, lovable man, he started New England discussing problems that were important to it but which were seldom mentioned aloud hysteria in a young girl, misogyny in a young man, morbid religious excitement and its effects, class-distinctions that were unconfessed, scruples of conscience, secrets that ought to be exposed to the light of common sense, "forms of speech and phrases, ugly and distorted, the outward and visible signs of the twisted life within."

Brilliant and full of meaning as these portraits are, the great achievement of The Flowering of New England lies in the beautiful discussions of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau. There is a sunlit, morning mood in all Van Wyck Brooks's writing on Emerson, but he has never equaled his new picture of the unself-conscious Sage of Concord who, with his inexhaustible buoyancy and courage, found in the simple life, in disregard for riches, the secret that unlocked his creative genius Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brooks draws a bolder and darker portrait, seeing him as the link between New England and the Middle Ages. A great writer whose thoughts were always turning on tales of witchcraft and madness, Hawthorne had a genius which was always threatened by the quicksand of melancholy. He enchanted children with stories that could make adults shiver and his writing "clung to the mind like music." Cut off from the sources of his inspiration in old age, after his travels abroad, Hawthorne's genius disintegrated where Emerson's grew more powerful. At last he could not write at all, getting into that frantic state of inability to concentrate that later cursed Mark Twain. "Hard as he tried to write, pulling down the blinds and locking his door, he could not bring his mind into focus. The novel became two novels, and the two became four He could not fix upon a single setting...even his theme eluded him...He made four beginnings, constantly changing his perspective, until he could scarcely bear to touch his blurred and meaningless manuscripts. A few of the scenes took form with all his old perfection...but life shook before his eves, like the picture on the surface of a pond when a stone has disturbed its tranquil mirror." Readers who can appreciate such portaits will recognize that Van Wyck Brooks has succeeded as has no other U. S. critic in interpreting the masters of naitive art and, without reducing their stature in the slightest, made them simple and understandable in their greatness.

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