Books: The Decline of the East

NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER—Van Wyck Brooks—Dutton ($3.75).

During the ’20s and ’30s, Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler’s theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside among “a homogeneous people, living close to the soil, intensely religious. . . . There is a springtime feeling in the air . . . a mo ment of equipoise, a widespread flowering of the imagination. . . .” This moment in New England’s culture Van Wyck Brooks fixed superbly in The Flowering of New England (1936).

This week Van Wyck Brooks made U. S literary history again by publishing his New England: Indian Summer. One thing was clear about the book at first reading: it is itself a great work of literature. With The Flowering of New England it formed a living body of cultural tradition. Georg Brandes and Benedetto Croce had tried to do a similar critical work for European culture. But Brooks’s re-creation of the human side of New England, of the lives, characters, appearance, crotchets of his heroes, and of the landscape through which they moved, is dramatically crowd ed with people and characterization, incident and humor as are only a few great novels.

New England: Indian Summer opens sombrely with America’s Tragic Era, 1865. The Civil War — “Mrs. Stowe’s war,” Lincoln liked to call it — was won. The great and near-great figures of New England’s flowering had been up to their transcendental ears in Abolitionism and underground railroading. But with the thrill of victory came a chill realization that it was not the same country. It was not even quite the same New England. The slave power was gone, but the bankers remained. Most of the young men were dead or gone West. The New England mind recoiled from the consequences of victory with the same instinctive consternation that made Henry Adams recoil from U. S. Grant. Wrote Henry Adams, describing his and his father’s return after a decade in England: “Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1,000, landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world so changed.”

So New England withdrew into itself. Sometimes brilliantly, sometimes querulously, then more & more complacently, it spent the next half century dying. The flowering was over: chill autumn had set in.

Heirs of Revolution. The great men of The Flowering of New England had been Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes. In a prose stanza with the roll of an epic, Critic Brooks described their significance: “As heirs of the Revolution, they spoke for the liberal world-community. As men who loved the land and rural customs, they shared the popular life in its roots, at its source. As readers and students of the classics, they followed great patterns of behavior, those that Europeans followed also. In short, as magnanimous men, well seasoned, they wrote with a certain authority and not as the scribes. If they believed in progress and felt that America led the way, they professed their faith in a fashion that commanded respect, for they had known doubts and struggles, wars and vigils, and they made their profession of faith as men who had won it, not without years in the wilderness and days of blindness. They had cultivated their gardens, they knew the country, the sea-coast and the homestead, the lakes and the mountains, where they had wandered as boys and lived as weather-wise men, familiar with plants and animals, the ways of nature, the trades and occupations of the people. . . . Their books were full of all these human interests, this deep sense of the local earth. . . .”

Because in speaking for themselves they spoke for most Americans, their countrymen revered the New England giants, even when age had left them like a range of extinct peaks on a receding horizon. Critic William Winter walked in the moonlight to touch the latch of Longfellow’s gate. Others traveled to Concord to gaze at Emerson’s woodpile. Young William Dean Howells walked up Lowell’s path with palpitating heart.

Light Without Heat. The chill autumn of New England was mellowed by the light of great minds too. But it was a light without much warmth. Heroes of New England: Indian Summer are Henry & William James, Henry Adams, Howells, Francis Parkman. “They knew they were doomed to fight their fights alone, in a world that was more than likely to divide and destroy them. Some, like Henry Adams, were all but born discouraged. Others, like Henry James, were to spend ten years trying to solve the question where to live. . . . William James and Howells, who had come from the West, retained the buoyant mood of the early republic; but most of the others were cautious and conservative, cool and dis illusioned on the surface, with the know ing air of men who expect to be swindled, who cannot trust the society in which they live.”

New England: Indian Summer is thronged with other New Englanders. There was the aging Whittier at his Amesbury cottage with the harebells in the garden room. “Sometimes, recalling his hairbreadth escapes in the anti-slavery days . . . the old man would leap from his seat. . . .” There was Julia Ward Howe. In the electric days of 1861, she had written The Battle Hymn of the Republic in one half-hour of genius that never returned again. Now she “rumble-tumbled” through the Newport season, communing with Kant and Spinoza, organizing her “picnics with a purpose”—”an hour or two of botany, or an astronomical evening, if the stars were out.”

There was John Fiske, who knew all the sciences and half-a-dozen languages before he entered Harvard where he added Hebrew, Sanskrit, Gothic, Icelandic, Rumanian, Dutch. “His methodical, orderly mind moved like a stone-crusher, reducing the boulders of thought to a flow of gravel that anyone could build a mental road with.” Evolution was his religion. There was Francis Parkman, who had been over the Oregon Trail. Life in the West had destroyed his digestion and given him chronic insomnia. Arthritis crippled him. A nervous disorder “engulfed his mind.” He had published The Conspiracy of Pontiac. It was 14 years before he could publish the next volume of his “history of the American forest.”

And there was Emily Dickinson, hidden away in a big house at Amherst where few people ever saw her. She used to send her friends cryptic little notes, often only a single line: “Do you look out tonight?”; “Mrs. S. gets bigger and rolls down the lane to church like a reverend marble”; “Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky.” She seldom addressed the notes herself. Usually the names and addresses were clipped out of a newspaper and pasted on the envelopes.

All these people moved through landscapes that Critic Brooks sees empathically as if through their eyes. “The wild flowers set the note of Whittier’s country. . . . The pastoral stretches along the rivers, with their long lines of barns and sheds, blossomed with shadbush, the ‘shad-blow,’ for April in these valleys was the time of shadding, and the fish gave its name to flower and bird. . . .”

With such pictures of the countryside Critic Brooks heightens the dismal drama of New England’s slow decline to which the book always returns. Bit by bit the great tradition ran down like the clocks that “had gone dead in many hamlets that had hummed with life.” In the ’80s “society had lost its vital interests. . . . In the absence of motives its mind was becalmed.” The ‘gos were “a day of little faith, the day of the epigoni, the successors, in whom the nineteenth century went to seed.” Soon it was time for Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “dark tideless floods of nothingness.” Soon Poet T. S. Eliot would find Boston “the wasteland of all the modern cities where the dry stone gave no sound of water” while Boston’s “learned religiosity evoked in him a singular mode of Christianity—small faith, less hope, and no charity at all.”

In his final chapter, Second March, Critic Brooks forecasts a second flowering of New England. He sees its seeds in the life and works of late great Poetess Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and especially Robert Frost, whose function, thinks Critic Brooks, is “to mediate between New England and the mind of the rest of the nation.” This chapter reads like an afterthought. Critic Brooks’s task was finished before he wrote it. His task was to create an intellectual tradition that could feed the newly emerging U. S. cultural nationalism.

Older cultures had their feeder roots deep in the soil. This meant more than the tactile love that can tell the soil’s fertility and tilth from a little dirt crumbled be tween two fingers. It meant the abiding shadowy love of the soil because of the generations who have gone into it and populate it. For culture of this kind U. S. history was too short.

Critic Brooks’s problem was to put in place of this traditional culture of the soil, mortuary and ancestral, the only thing that could take its place — the legend of an outburst of native thought, fertile, intense, creative, a mythology of minds. He found it in the flowering of New England.

But the decline of New England was just as essential to the completeness of this legend. The twilight of authentic gods is grand rather than gloomy. The greatness of the New England mind was authentic and the best guarantee of its later revival. Wrote Critic Brooks: “The goldenrod rises again in its season, and the folk poem recovers its meaning when the heart of a nation, grown old, returns to its youth.”