New England Aftermath

No one who has read and even slightly pondered The Flowering of New England needs to be told that Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, of all historians of our literature, comes the nearest to plying his profession by the canons of the serious novelist. In his glowing chapters he is concerned first, last, and throughout with the telling of a magnificent story —the story of one phase of a complex and inexhaustible character, New England, of whom his many lesser personæ embody the characteristics. As much as any realist in fiction he gives himself to the evocation of mood and movement, growth, contrast, suspense, the feeling of inevitability, of fate. No less truly than the most thoughtful of workers in imagined data he makes his chronicle of verities interpret and foreshorten itself through representative values deliberately extricated and consciously arranged; and, like the best historical novelists, he takes it as his task to re-create, not the whole, absolute, self-contained past as it was in itself, but the past in such forms and aspects as the present can receive as usable. In what has been he shows us what is; in our forerunners, ourselvesto-be.

What was true of The Flowering of New England is now, if possible, even more luminously true of its sequel, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915. This word ‘sequel,’ by the way, — in association a novelist’s word, — is Mr. Brooks’s own. His, likewise, is a novelist’s explanation of why he has chosen to keep the dominant emphasis on Boston throughout his chronicle of fifty years — an emphasis that serves to give the book, he points out, a ‘unity of place,’ which he regards as ‘indispensable in any attempt to picture a phase of literary history so confused and complex and marked by such multifarious comings and goings.’ These are small circumstances that happen to be mentioned in his Preface. In little need of mention, because absolutely central to his whole subject, is the great circumstance that identifies this new volume, even more than its predecessor, with the main stream of fiction as our generation knows it: that is, its steady preoccupation with the frustrated and the mutilated, with failure and decay and the shadow of death. New England in its flowering cycle was his former theme; his present one is New England going, and presently gone, to seed. What he gives us is an amplification, in better than half a thousand close-packed pages, of the melancholy in Longfellow’s ‘Aftermath’: —

A painful subject, the fifty years’ decadence? A forbidding accumulation of the funereal? So it may sound in summary, but it is not so in actual effect upon the reader; even upon that tenderminded reader for whom the conquest of gloomy truth is ordinarily no pleasure that can offset the gloom. What, then, over and above the truth of history, makes these twenty-five chapters on a dying culture so full of reward, so vastly more than endurable? Just the unfailing brilliance of a fine novelist’s arts of selection, representation, and enrichment. We have a close parallel in that superb book of the decadence itself, The Education of Henry Adams. Its subject was the waste of talent and the death of the spirit, but its description of moribundity was everywhere more vital than half the world’s descriptions of life abounding. The same principle applies to Mr. Brooks’s superb book about the decadence. Its subject is a gathering darkness, but its method illuminates every darkest recess with a lightning flash. It is jeweled with great, accounts of little things, memorable descriptions of persons unremembered, brilliantly successful characterizations of failure, indelible etchings of transience. Upon literature in its narrower definitions a many-faceted light is thrown from the related adventures of the historians, the educators and philosophers, the great divines, the painters and architects and archæologists, the geologists, engineers, and men of action. In the end we have, not a mere chronicle of writers and writing, but a tapestry of the whole confused civilization that literature fragmentarily expressed.

The men whose working lives nearly spanned the period of the book are given no rounded, once-for-all treatment and dismissal, as in the textbooks. Rather, they live throughout as the major figures of a novel do, growing, changing, and radiating themselves. Three of them, Howells, Henry Adams, and Henry James, actually figure in three chapter titles apiece, besides being present in almost every chapter. In short, here are all the fictional resources of striking juxtaposition and significant form, used to the end of bringing dead things to sustained life before our eyes as a topical treatment never does. We can sort out the facts and digest them as history; we can use text and footnotes as a guide to all the byways of reading that we once meant to follow and the other byways that we hardly knew existed; but, doing either, or both, or neither, we receive as a minimum, and in one of its more elevated forms, the gift that the novelist must always give us in order to have given anything at all— that is, sheer entertainment.

And the range of this entertainment is hardly less than its intensity. Consider, out of eligible examples by the score, three only.

(1) It is pointed out — and this is one of Mr. Brooks’s lightning flashes — that, whereas after the war of 1812 the American artists came flocking home from abroad in a full and enthusiastic sense of identification with their native country, after the war of 1861 their successors began flocking abroad again, generally as the victims of a sterile cosmopolitanism. ‘The old culture had broken down, the old causes were dead and forgotten, and no new ideal had arisen to rally the minds of the younger men. . . . For most of them . . . the question of facing the new America, with its worship of “bigness” and numbers, seemed overwhelming.’

(2) The great lesson of the Civil War, as Henry Adams read it from London, was that henceforth the dominant forces would be science and mechanics. For instance, he saw the British navy rendered obsolete overnight by the success of the American ironclads, and in a letter he wrote: ‘Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.’ And almost at once the new elective system at Harvard, though it ‘opened a great new epoch in science, medicine, engineering,’ was preparing the younger generation to follow stars ‘largely materialistic and often mean,’ and ‘as the other universities followed Harvard and lost sight of human ends in means’ it ‘became apparent that civilization was losing its soul, as education had lost its soul already.’

(3) That ‘born promoter,’ Amy Lowell, setting out to put poetry on the map as if it were ‘another form of Standard Oil,’ is thus depicted: —

She ran ocean liners and terrorized their orchestras by telling them to stop their outrageous noise; and she whizzed over the face of the earth in her claret-colored motor, reorganizing hotels where she spent the night. Like Eliot’s Cousin Nancy, she ‘strode across the hills and broke them down’; and, if she was not bearded, she was full of oaths; and her bed had eighteen pillows, and she had ten thousand black cigars and seven megatherian sheep-dogs that mauled and all but murdered her visitors.

. . . She was the prime minister of the republic of poets; and under her control this republic rose from the status of Haiti and became an imperial republic of the calibre of France. The poets had reason to thank their stars that they had a Lowell behind them, for whom editors and publishers were factoryhands and office-boys. Her telephone had the force of a dozen Big Berthas; and God might have picked up the fragments of those who opposed her, — there was little left of them for men to bury. One could hear the guns go off at the other end of Texas. . . . There was no still, small voice in Amy Lowell. Her bombs exploded with a bang and came down in a shower of stars; and she whizzed and she whirred, and she rustled and rumbled, and she glistened and sparkled and blazed and blared.

Are other readers, I wonder, going to share this reader’s impression that the very long story told ought to have been either a little shorter or somewhat longer still? For my part, I have to confess myself baffled by the note of cheer on which the sad chronicle ends, in the chapter ‘Second March.’ This final chapter, opening with Robert Frost’s arrival in New York from London in the spring of 1915, — a deliberate echo and counterpart of Howells’s arrival in Boston from Ohio in the spring of 1866, with which the first chapter opens, — is to the effect that in 1915 America, New England included, was on the eve of a literary and artistic rebirth. The story is given, in short, a happy ending for which nothing in it has quite prepared us; and, being there at all, it will need ultimately the most that Mr. Brooks can give it by way of amplification and clarification.

Does he by any chance really see in Mourning Becomes Electra the predestined return through the doorway of the classics that the new Harvard of 1870 was already throwing out of the window? Does he truly believe that the sudden peppering of the New England countryside and foreshore with summer art colonies was a social and cultural equivalent of the former ‘deep sense of the local earth ‘ possessed by Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau? Can he mean that we have the happiness to be at this moment in the April, the May, of his Second March? What Robert Frost came home to spend his days telling us, that ‘Yankees are what they always were’ — that is true, and Yankees like to believe that it is important; but is it true that the undying Yankee is finding in this half-century’s fine arts a true, balanced, universal, or even a very characteristic, expression of himself? Is imaginative literature any longer his idiomatic outlet, or is it likely to be within a time that we can now descry?

We need, then, a sequel to the sequel. And perhaps that is to come. For Mr. Brooks, who means next to precede his Flowering of New England with a volume on the age of Irving, speaks also of having ‘left out certain figures who might have been included here, feeling that in some future volume they could be treated to better advantage. ‘